The pornography industry did not show up to testify against a Wyoming bill that would require pornographic websites to verify their users’ ages before allowing access.
Wyoming’s legislative Senate Judiciary Committee advanced House Bill 43 by a 5-0 vote during its Thursday committee meeting, sending it to the Senate floor for debate and three readings.
If the Senate passes the bill without any changes to which the House of Representatives objects, it will head next to Gov. Mark Gordon’s desk.
The bill goes far beyond just asking people to check a box saying their 18 or older. It calls for "reasonable age verification measures" like an ID card, a credit or debit card from a company that only serves adults, or "any other means or method that reliably and accurately can determine whether a user of a covered platform is a minor."
The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Martha Lawley, R-Worland, said HB 43 is modeled around a recent federal appeals court’s decision upholding a Texas age verification law.
The U.S. Supreme Court is now reviewing that same decision and law.
Lawley touted her bill as legally defensible and necessary to protect children from material correlated with sex trafficking, violence and addiction.
“I’ve long been concerned about the safety of children online (due to) the growth — explosion, really — of devices that connect to the internet and to a world unknown,” Lawley told the committee.
Reading unspecified studies, Lawley said most kids who encounter pornography for the first time do so unintentionally. The claim aligns with a 2023 survey by Commonsense Media in which 58% of surveyed teens reported they’d encountered online pornography unintentionally.
“The pornography industry employs sophisticated tactics to target children, such as pop-up ads, misleading links and enticing visuals,” Lawley said.
Airing Dirty Laundry
HB 43 doesn’t call on Wyoming prosecutors to charge pornography website publishers. It would let parents whose kids access pornography platforms sue those platforms for damages and other costs.
It covers platforms that publish obscene material or child pornography "as a regular course of business."
The bill would also let people sue the porn sites if those sites, or their third-party age-verification services, retained people’s personal data after verifying their ages.
Privacy concerns were a crux of the debate around HB 43 while it was still pending in the House of Representatives last month.
In a Jan. 28 House debate, Rep. Mike Yin, D-Jackson, said even facial recognition technology at airports makes him uneasy, “because I don’t trust the federal government to not keep track of me when I do that.”
Letting private companies take people’s pictures seems even more invasive, he said.
“Companies are selling our data,” said Yin. “I am worried about the privacy protections.”
Yin acknowledged that people can sue for privacy breaches under the bill’s language, but he worried that wouldn’t be enough.
Lawley cast his concern as disproportionate to the bill’s benefits.
“To say because of that fear you don’t think we should basically protect children from online pornography doesn’t quite balance out for me,” said Lawley.
At this, Rep. Karlee Provenza, D-Laramie, bristled. She’d also raised several questions about the bill’s potential invasiveness.
“I take some offense, quite frankly, to saying we don’t want to protect children because he wave legitimate concerns about privacy and data,” said Provenza. “Having questions is not an indicator that I don’t care about children’s safety.”
Provenza also acknowledged the civil lawsuit mechanism for breach of privacy, but questioned whether anyone would be willing to use it by airing their “dirty laundry” publicly in a court of law.
Tendons
Iain Corby, executive director for the Age Verification Providers Association, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday that one tactic certified age verification sites will use is to take someone’s photo and compare it with their own provided photograph of their ID card.
He listed other tactics, like having someone wiggle his forefinger and thumb to denote the ratio of the tendon between them compared with other parts of the hand — an age indicator accurate to within a year.
Companies may also investigate whether someone has used his email address for tasks a child wouldn’t undertake, like signing up for utilities or comparing mortgage interest rates, said Corby.
Sen. Gary Crum, R-Laramie, asked how courts can be sure age verification providers are being faithful with age verification if they’re discarding people’s data.
Corby said age verification providers are vetted and certified, a status pornography sites can use as a defense in court.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
