Technology

Could you please put a short summary of the article in the post body?

Something like:

Porn sites that ignore age-check laws are getting a flood of traffic - The Washington Post

The age-verification laws rapidly expanding across the United States and United Kingdom are bringing with them some surprising downsides, including bursts of traffic to seedy parts of the web. August 31, 2025 at 7:05 a.m. EDT

Sothat users don't have to click the article to get a quick overview of what it's about. Saves you 5 clicks - open article, figure out it's behind a paywall, go to archive.is, paste the article link, read article.

Got you: https://archive.is/HKOfK

almost as if scan your face laws only exist to obtain massive amounts of recognition data for the surveillance state.

But tech and privacy experts have warned that the laws bring with them some unavoidable downsides, including potentially driving people to seedier corners of the web.

Hmm, if only there was something in history (cough Prohibition cough drug bans cough piracy cough) that could've predicted this. It's almost like people will do the easier thing when the legal thing is harder to do.

When the United Kingdom began requiring thousands of websites to verify their users’ ages last month, one group saw an enormous burst of traffic: pornography sites ignoring the law.

What save person would want to get photographed or provide an ID before viewing porn?

If they truly cared about kids they would introduce mechanism where sites could declare their target audience and provide a way to punish if a company does lie.

Parents could then use parental controls.

This mechanism is more about censorship. They are aware that people are trusting less and less MSM so want to make sure they control Internet too.

Totally expected but just ignored by those in power.

who could've predicted this? 🙄

that's it, the UK government needs to write more strongly worded letters to let those sites know how unacceptable it is for them not to think of the children!

https://archive.is/20250831142954/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/08/31/age-verification-uk-porn-sites/

paywalled