Porn sites Pornhub, XVideos, and Stripchat face stricter requirements to verify the ages of their users after being officially designated as “Very Large Online Platforms” (VLOPs) under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
I personally have mixed feelings, as the information collection could be used to link individuals and profile them. Possibly leading to discrimination if abused.
But I also feel that any random kid shouldn’t be able to just go to these sites and see porn freely.
Ofc, there’s always going to be those who mange to circumvent any protection put in place but it’d be much harder then just clicking a link or typing in the address.
I also feel that parents should actively monitor their kids online activities and step up a Blocklist to pro-actively prevent kids from reaching these sites to begin with.
What are your thoughts on this?
The good old “Think of the children” argument again… This is an attack on online privacy, again. I hate it.
It is the parents responsibility to keep their kids safe. We don’t ban knives either just because a child could accidentally get hurt by one. And apart from that the regulations are not even well thought out, they will not stop a determined teenager with a lot of time on their hands.
In the worst case a privacy nightmare, and in the best case useless.
“Please enter your age:”
Me, 15 years old: “Yes, I was born in 1973.”
“use this rotary phone to enter your year of birth”
I don’t want any company putting my identity into a database along with my sexual interests. Just consider what’s been done to the gay++ community.
It won’t work. Ever. VPN’s free and paid exist, File sharing exists, Torrents exist, AI pornography generators exist, freenet, tor, I2P all exist. There is no action a government could take that would have any true impact in this regard unless they made the use of the internet illegal, and even at that, it would create a black market in which such things could still be purchased as physical media.
All this does is allow government entities to infringe on privacy rights further by doing what they have always done - hiding behind children.
Electronic ids can provide the age verification without giving out any personal information. This is a solved problem at least for a lot of ids in the EU.
But no i still find it a stupid idea. It is the parents job to parent them.
Exactly - it’s the parents’ responsibility.
Imagine any government telling car manufacturers that they have to verify that everyone who starts their vehicles has a valid drivers license.
I suspect you haven’t worked with governments before.
Just because something is technically possible, it’s no guarantee that it will be the chosen mechanism for something. More likely the contract will be awarded to either the lowest possible bidder, or to a friend of a friend. Cronyism is depressingly common at all levels.
I suspect you haven’t worked with governments before.
Just because something is technically possible, it’s no guarantee that it will be the chosen mechanism for something. More likely the contract will be awarded to either the lowest possible bidder, or to a friend of a friend. Cronyism is depressingly common at all levels.
Not sure why you are under that impression. I never discussed the potential chosen mechanism.
I stated that it is possible and that it is already implemented into the id card of many eu citizens.
isn’t the id unique? which means that sites can trace every visit you make and what videos you watch every time?
No. Thanks to cryptography it is possible. The Cincept is called Zero-knowledge proof. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof
Here is a quick write up: https://www.identity.com/zero-knowledge-proofs/
thanks! if implemented correctly, this is a decent way of verifying age. Although I’d rather not have any but it’s definitely better than taking a selfie.
Might be a stupid question but is there any peer reviewed research that shows that porn is harmful to minors? Early humans didn’t have clothes so minors were seeing nudity for centuries. Of course, there’s the issue that porn gives men unrealistic expectations about women & sex, but that’s an issue regardless of age.
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I don’t understand… your first couple sentences support my argument with evidence but then you say I’m wildly ignorant? Simply saying “their brains are still developing” and nothing else is a classic “protect the children” platitude
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Probably not, its just religious pearl clutching for the most part that has been passed down unnecessarily
Free the bodies, let everyone be naked and we will all stop giving a shit
But I also feel that any random kid shouldn’t be able to just go to these sites and see porn freely.
At some point, you have to ask - why?
If that’s the alternative to spying on everyone, I’m still opposed to spying on everyone. Unsupervised internet access leading kids to pornography certainly would not be new. It’s not the end of the world.
Just throw your warnings and have a click-through. It’ll be just as effective, much cheaper, and not leave bastard politicians salivating about their social control fetish.
I think there are a host of problems including equity, efficacy, privacy, etc.
We don’t need morality police, we need education and better health care. If parents have an issue, they need to parent better.
Is it the responibility of any government to enforce a parental policy? What if I, as a parent, support my kid to view this stuff?
At home, I was allowed to have alcohol with supper at family meals from about 13.
I feel like the regulations should be to give parents control over their child’s activities if they so choose. While we’re at it, make it illegal to collect information about a person, parent or child, without their express concent. I don’t know how, but there are many smart people in the world that can probably figure it out.
Just open another site.
Sites should empower parents to control that. Have a sign in by default and an option to ask the site to block ips associated with you to be able to sign up for more accounts.
Are there ways around it? Sure. It’s a just a lock to keep honest kids out. If your kid doesn’t feel comfortable about asking about stuff like this or feel like they have to around you, you aren’t going to win, they’ll find it, and it’ll be a blast for them. If you talk about it, at least acknowledge the issues with it, say when it is and isn’t appropriate, etc it’ll do leagues better then all bans and censorship attempts in the world.
The IP thing backfires when you inevitably get assigned a new IP and the guy down the street now can’t look at his porn anymore because the website blocked the IP
True it requires more coordination to be helpful. And tbh I think every household network should be going through and host a Tor relay so shrug but something to the effect of some minimal form of authentication that the person is a consenting adult that is given out at the discretion of the person would be useful for this case.
Not totally sure what the best way to do that is. Keys, cookies, OIDC from trusted party, block chain, DIDs (Decentralized Identifiers), or heuristics like IPs, or digital finger prints.
Oooorrr we could not do all that and let parents do their jobs. How about we empower them to learn how to setup parental controls on their routers and on the kids devices?
It’s not enough in my experience shrug but I agree it should on parents to support it
I don’t think about it except I canmt wait till one of its non-corporate authors gets into FO(finding out) tyme ;)
