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The difference is that essentially no one minds a guy glancing at their id and handing it back, and no one cares if your coworker happens to see you going into a bar.

The law is a filter because of the obvious chilling effect: do you really want to risk an inevitable leak where your co-workers will potentially look up info about your porn habits tied to your real name?




> do you really want to risk an inevitable leak where your co-workers will potentially look up info about your porn habits tied to your real name

Why would it have your 'habits' tied to it? It's meant to ensure you're over 18 or whatever age - what possible reason would it have to identify individual URLs a particular identity visited?


Without this verification you have high confidence no one can know. After this, you are suddenly trusting companies to do the right thing.

Renting a porn vhs and having the guy photocopy and file your ID is a much bigger deterrant than just having to show your ID to the clerk.


>what possible reason would it have to identify individual URLs a particular identity visited?

Money. Marketing. Targeted advertising. Etc, etc, etc. Pornhub (and others) are completely free and use more bandwidth than I can wrap my head around. How do you think they pay for that stuff?


> Pornhub (and others) are completely free and use more bandwidth than I can wrap my head around. How do you think they pay for that stuff?

Pornhub sells a subscription service with additional features / content.


The ID verification is done by trusted third parties. There will be no link to a name and any browsing activity on Pornhub.


The age verification is done by pornhubs own company, to think they won't use this information seems incredibly naive.


Incredibly naive? I work for Pornhub, the last thing we want to handle is PII, it brings no value and has security risks.




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