Pornhub blocks Montana and North Carolina as their age verification laws take effect | The website says the states’ ID requirement would put users’ privacy at risk::Montana and North Carolina are the latest to join the list of states with age verification laws for adult platforms.
No they’d rather people not have to upload copies of their photo ID to porn sites or participate in a system where such preferences will be easily stored in a government database. It opens the door for privacy violation, extortion, public humiliation, etc for engaging in legal but socially stigmatized behavior in the privacy of their own homes.
Even that would not be enough to protect Pornhub, too. Some kid gets on their parents’ account? Bam, lawsuit. Even the total ban is not enough. Some kid uses a VPN to access the site? Lawsuit.
It is not physically possible to comply with these laws. (The NC one at least.)
The total ban should protect from lawsuits for vpn use. It’s a case of “we deny service to anyone who logs in from your jurisdiction. This individual logged in from outside that jurisdiction and there’s no way for us to tell that they aren’t” the vpn theoretically could get in trouble though
I look forward to the courts being very normal about that argument.
The law in NC (not sure about the Utah one) doesn’t care about where the login is coming from. It only cares about where the user is located. The user concealing that information, on purpose or by accident, does not mean the website can ignore its requirements under the law.
Yeah but it’s well established that states don’t have the right to prohibit transactions outside their borders. There will be legal questions about several aspects of this, but the worst I expect federal judges to rule on this is to declare a level of effort they need to put in to verify the viewer’s location. But at the end of the day, a reasonably good faith effort to deny service to those states should be sufficient in part because those states almost certainly don’t have the right to unilaterally force every other state to not get to use VPNs for sexually graphic materials