Why aren't there proposals for online age verification to be exactly like alcohol and tobacco?

You can show ID at a real world store and buy an age verification token. The token is good for exactly one user account on one website for one year. The website is responsible for ensuring no account sharing.

No need to store IDs online and it's still pretty hard for kids to access anything we don't want them to. Just like alcohol and tobacco there will be straw purchasers who re-sell to minors, and we accept that imperfection. We also punish people who re-sell or give alcohol to minors.

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dragonwriter 4 days ago | parent [-]

> Why aren't there proposals for online age verification to be exactly like alcohol and tobacco?

> You can show ID at a real world store and buy an age verification token. The token is good for exactly one user account on one website for one year

I don’t know if you’ve ever bought alcohol or tobacco, either in person or online, but the process in either case, in my experience, does not involve showing government ID at a private business separate from the one you are going to purchase the product from in advance to purchase a single-account, single-year token which you then use to prove age when you purchase the good in question.

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triceratops 4 days ago | parent [-]

I don't crack open the beer in front of the cashier either. That's even illegal in many jurisdictions. I go home and drink it in private, or sometimes with friends. They have literally no way to know if I give it to a minor. But that's considered good enough age verification for a substance that can be lethal if consumed to excess or before driving (which teenagers are allowed to do).

I haven't heard a good explanation for why my proposal is bad other than it's not perfect. Well teenagers sometimes get their hands on beer too and we haven't called for age verification lock technology on beer can tabs yet.

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dragonwriter 4 days ago | parent [-]

> I haven't heard a good explanation for why my proposal is bad other than it's not perfect.

It has the same flaw as the common age verification laws: it is unnecessarily intrusive; but I wasn’t, in the grandparent post, commenting on the merits, I was commenting on your description of the proposal as being both very different from what is currently being proposed and “just like buying alcohol or tobacco”, since it is nothing like buying alcohol and tobacco and shares the basic features which are different and more intrusive than buying alcohol and tobacco with the common online age verification legislative proposals.

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mos_basik 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

>it is nothing like buying alcohol and tobacco

The intent of the "I don't crack open a beer.." post was to draw a comparison between "show ID at physical store then later open and drink the beer at home" and "show ID at physical store then later submit the token and watch the porn at home".

>and shares the basic features which are different and more intrusive

How so?

Are you maybe assuming that some entity (the ID issuer? the physical store?) would track an association between the ID shown and the token purchased?

I suppose anything's possible, but that's not how the alcohol system works: when I show ID to purchase alcohol, the cashier looks at it and hands it back to me without recording anything. The same could work in this case, except the product changing hands is a scratch card carrying a number I type into a form on a website later.

(fwiw I don't particularly support age verification; I'm just thinking about how strong your criticisms of this proposal are.)

(OP described a single-site token with a 1 year lifetime, but I'm not sure what I think of the single-siteness. Seems like it means either every site prints its own cards, distinguishable from other site's cards, meaning the cashier can judge one's taste in adult entertainment (just like they can judge one's taste in alcohol I suppose) and when a site folds, its cards are landfill. Alternatively, there's a central authority printing the cards and tracking which have been consumed and for which site and when they expire. And that doesn't seem great either.)

	▲	scarface_74 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> I suppose anything's possible, but that's not how the alcohol system works: when I show ID to purchase alcohol, the cashier looks at it and hands it back to me without recording anything On the other hand, I bought Pseudoephedrine from a Publix at home when I was living in GA, left it by mistake, flew to Puerto Rico and was denied in a CVS because there is a nationwide database.
	▲	triceratops 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There's no reason for each site to roll their own card provider or for there to be a central authority. There could easily be 5 or 7 companies providing this product and sites could choose to accept any or all of them.

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triceratops 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If you pay in cash, wear a mask, and buy your token scratch card a couple counties or states over it's as close to anonymous age verification as possible.

Admittedly it's still more intrusive than the status quo (what if the cashier has a photographic memory? what if the store's surveillance cams zoom in on your ID as you hand it over?). But several orders of magnitude less intrusive and scary than uploading your driver's license to random websites to read some forum posts.

Everyone seems to be going toward the latter age verification methods right now. Assuming there's no stopping this age verification train, we can try to limit the damage.