Louisiana residents now need LA Wallet to access porn online | State policy

LA Wallet, Louisiana’s digital driver’s license app, has seen a spike in usage since the start of the new year when Pornhub, the world’s second-largest adult website, began requiring visitors to its website from Louisiana to verify they are over 18. application.

The Canadian-owned company made the change to comply with a new Louisiana law that took effect Jan. 1, drawing scrutiny across the country. Some have expressed concerns about user privacy and civil liberties, noting that tech-savvy underage Internet users are likely to find ways to circumvent the new systems, while others have praised Louisiana lawmakers for protecting youth from adult content.

Other popular pornography sites such as XVideos and XHamster had not implemented age verification processes for Louisiana users as of Friday.

About 1.6 million individual licenses have been activated through the LA Wallet, developed and operated by a Louisiana company called Envoc.

The LA Wallet — which also includes vaccination records, virtual court records, and hunting and fishing licenses — typically has about 1,200 new users per day. Since January 1st, this number has hovered around 5,300 per day.

“As more sites become compliant, we expect traffic to increase,” said Calvin Fabre, president and senior analyst at Envoc.

Privacy policy

Fabre said LA Wallet’s verification process is secure and confidential, so Fabre can’t even see which users have been verified or the demographics of users requesting age verification. LA Wallet’s system simply tells the third-party verification company whether the user is at least 18 years old.

“Hacking is always, always a possibility,” Fabre said. “And the best you can do is just take as many precautions as possible and be very careful not to cause challenges because the worst thing you want to do is say, ‘We’re unbreakable.’ That gives you the wrong kind of attention.”

Blase Ur, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, said the biggest risk for pornography sites that verify age with an app like LA Wallet is a data breach.

“While collecting and profiling people’s browsing history is itself a big privacy issue, web browsing activity is particularly sensitive in this case, even if only the name of the website visited is sensitive,” Ur said. “Even if no data is stored, an attacker can break into the system used for authentication and record who is using the site as long as they can remain undetected.”

Louisiana Rep. Laurie Schlegel, R-Metairie, said she decided to introduce the legislation — known as House Bill 142 — after Gen Z pop icon Billie Eilish told Howard Stern that watching violent pornography at age 11 affected her ability to take care. healthy sex life as an adult.

Schlegel, a licensed professional counselor and certified sex addiction therapist, received bipartisan support from Louisiana lawmakers. The bill was co-authored by 48 other lawmakers and passed unanimously in both the House and Senate. Governor John Bel Edwards signed it into law on June 15.

“Technology has kind of changed the game,” Schlegel said. “The technology is now available to protect privacy, so it’s not unreasonably laborious. If you go to the Pornhub website, you’ll see it says this will take less than a minute. So if we don’t want to take less than a minute to protect children – when one in ten visitors to these websites is under A 10-year-old — I think we’ve kind of lost our way as a society when we don’t protect the most vulnerable.”

The law provides people with the opportunity to sue companies that do not meet the age verification requirement. Websites aimed at adults are defined by law as those whose content is at least one-third pornography.

Adult websites can verify age using a digital ID card, such as LA Wallet, or “any commercially reasonable method based on public or private transaction data” to verify that a person is 18 or older.

Constitutional issues

Nathan Carrington, an assistant politics professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, admits that he, like so many in the state, didn’t know about House Bill 142 until after it became law early in the new year.

“I think this law, from what I’ve read, has a very high constitutional battle,” Carrington said. “No one wants children to have access to material that is harmful to them, but the Supreme Court and lower courts have repeatedly held that adults cannot be overburdened in trying to protect children from this material. Adults have a First Amendment right to access pornography and this Act tries to prevent children from accessing to this harmful material, really burdens adults who might want to access it.”

Pornhub’s new verification requirement for visitors to Louisiana has also caused problems for adults who don’t have a state ID, such as those attending college, vacationing or temporarily working in the state. A few people who live in neighboring states have said on online forums that they also get the Pornhub verification prompt, even though they’re not physically accessing the website from the state of Louisiana.

“The law is very broad,” Carrington said. “It violates the rights of college students and legal adults to access this material, and someone in a neighboring state could be caught in the act.” Another reason I suspect this law will easily be declared unconstitutional is that the law is inclusive, meaning it tries to protect children from accessing harmful material, but has caveats for Google – If a 14-year-old Googles information and gets If it’s exposed to it that way, it’s not breaking the law.”

Schlegel disagrees that the law is too onerous.

“When I was drafting the law, we had local and national constitutional lawyers look at this, people who specialize in the First Amendment,” Schlegel said. “And so we were very confident that the bill was drafted in a way that was very narrowly tailored, not unduly burdensome for adults to access legal pornography, so we believe it could pass the Constitution.”

Last month, U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, introduced a similar piece of legislation at the national level called the SCREEN Act, which stands for Protecting Children’s Retinas from Intrusive Online Exposure. The bill would require the Federal Communications Commission to issue a rule requiring all commercial pornographic websites to implement age verification technology.

Previous attempts by Congress to pass legislation restricting children’s access to online pornography have failed First Amendment scrutiny. Lee said in a statement that vast technological improvements have given his bill a good legal basis to accept the Supreme Court’s requirement that the government use the least restrictive means to achieve its interests.

“Every day we learn more about the negative psychological effects that pornography has on minors,” Lee said in a statement. “Because the exposure of teenagers to pornography is alarming, I believe the government needs to act quickly to put in place safeguards that have a real chance of surviving First Amendment scrutiny. We require age verification in brick-and-mortar stores. Why not online?”