US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

The movie theater doesn't keep a database of who's been watching their movies.

[edit] and that doesn't just mean “okay jimbob is a dirty dirty boy.” It’s also a handy way to create a registry of whatever the handlers think is the target perversion du jour.

[edit][edit] … and it's not even the government who's keeping that database, it's pornographers. Regardless of your political leanings or trust in the gov't, can you imagine a less trustworthy party to hand off your ID to? mein gott

Why don’t they?

By the letter of the Texas law, neither do the commercial entities that have to verify identity:

https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/billtext/pdf/HB01181F....

Edit: Key bit there, the commercial entity or third party verification “may not retain any identifying information of the individual”.

Surveillance capitalism wasn't innovated when movie theaters started checking IDs.

But since they've moved most ticket purchases online it's very likely they do maintain such a database now, and monetize an "anonymized" version of the data.

well I’m definitely sure there’s no bad actors or just plain incompetent folks who can fck that up nossir

I understand the sentiment and agree but the practicality is a different story.

Not many people pay in cash (though, for now, it's still possible). 99.9% of people carry a tracking device in their pocket, and it's a junior engineer level task to correlate transaction data to an ID via any number of methods.

So while it's not "built in" at a movie theater it's child's play to figure out who's watching what, when. Effectively, it's the same thing as requiring an ID to watch porn in that light. Similarly Google has shown (repeatedly) it's absolutely trivial to figure out who a person is via tracking. Then, it's absolutely trivial to determine a person and their porn preferences.

I can see both sides. The parents are ultimately responsible for their child's media consumption. But, a company also has a duty to ensure they're not violating any rules. The "Are you over 18" pop ups are there for legal reasons. I think that this ruling simply codifies what has already existed and provides a way to make it harder to bypass (without a VPN).

Are there business destroying fines associated with non compliance? Otherwise it becomes a, “Whoopsie fine” when companies inevitably get caught selling out its user base.

As we all know, everybody always follows the rules.

They linked the law right there. Yes.

> $10,000 per instance when the entity retains identifying information in violation of Section 129B.002(b);

$10k per instance. If you have 1M users and retain their info, you're potentially facing a $10B fine.

The sites that were protesting these laws were saying they're concerned about such retention, so no doubt they're glad to know that they and their partners are banned from retaining that info and face extreme fines for doing so.

That seems like it'd be easy to avoid if you're a small operator. Set up some embarrassing porn site, scrape user details and sell them to a separate company (likely controlled by yourself). Then close the porn business as soon as there's any chance that you'll face investigation and instead work on getting individuals to pay you for not publishing their embarrassing kinks.

I'm not sure that criminal extortion is a great strategy to avoid civil fines, but I suppose as an individual you should just avoid giving your information to any business not large enough to have a CCO.