All porn sites must 'robustly' verify UK user ages by July
All porn sites must 'robustly' verify UK user ages by July
Ofcom is issuing industry guidance which sets out the tech adult websites must use to check ages.
Summary
Under the UK's Online Safety Act, all websites hosting pornography, including social media platforms, must implement "robust" age verification methods, such as photo ID or credit card checks, for UK users by July.
Regulator Ofcom claims this is to prevent children from accessing explicit content, as research shows many are exposed as young as nine.
Critics, including privacy groups and porn sites, warn the measures could drive users to less-regulated parts of the internet, raising safety and privacy concerns.
My problem with all this nonsense is that it doesn't actually solve the problem, while causing many more. You'd need to fundamentally rethink the basic design of the technology if you were to actually prevent children from accessing sexual material with it. That's something they don't want to do, however, presumably because they're addicted to the power it offers them to spy on everyone, and exploit the population for profit.
We're in this mess right now because the one absolute truth preempting every other decision made by those who wield power is that the solution must first increase their power. Literally everything else is an afterthought.
I agree, the country is delving deeper into authoritarianism by each second. The children and minors is just another exploitable class to them.
Well you see... Despite what people say, the reasons behind these rules has very little to do with children. So they don't actually care if it solves the "problem".
My problem with all this nonsense is that it doesn’t actually solve the problem, while causing many more. You’d need to fundamentally rethink the basic design of the technology if you were to actually prevent children from accessing sexual material with it.
Absolutely - this always happens with these "save the children" laws.
That’s something they don’t want to do, however, presumably because they’re addicted to the power it offers them to spy on everyone, and exploit the population for profit.
Jesus Christ... You ever hear the phrase "never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance?" Politicians do this sort of "make the people feel like we're doing something" shit all the time. They rarely consider the ramifications beside appeasing parents.
You ever hear the phrase “never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance?”
Generalities like that can be useful when applied appropriately, but counter-productive when applied blindly. That positions of power are held primarily by those who are motivated primarily by power ought to be the most straight forward assertion possible.
The UK has a History of intrusive civil society surveillance which the Snowden revelations showed was even worse than in the US, and whilst the US actually walked back on some of it back then, the UK Government just retroactivelly made the whole thing legal.
Also, lets not forget how the UK has the highest density of CCTV cameras per inhabitant in the World (or maybe it's just London: it's been a while since I read about it).
Their track record on the subject heavilly indicates that this specific measure with the characteristics it has, is extremelly likely to have been purposefully crafted to extend civil society surveillance and information access control.
How would you solve it then? I'm not saying Ofcom are right, but should it be left wholly on parents to police the whole internet?
They don’t have to police the whole internet, just their kids. Frankly children that age shouldn’t be on social media especially unsupervised.
Parents should be using device level controls to monitor their kids internet habits. All of this should be built into the device and browser, and parents need to take basic accountability.
It could be. Putting adult filters on your routers and devices isn't difficult.
Whereas if this is implemented, I think it pushes the public towards the dark net...and if your intent is protecting minors, that's absolutely not the result you want.
At least on pornhub these days I have a reasonable assurance I'm not stumbling into something I shouldn't. In the dark corners of the internet, that illusion of protection is gone.
Parental Controls have never been easier to enact. All my.kids have tablets with 4 layers of adguards, autolocks, timers, and app restrictions. It took maybe an hour to set all of them up. Are your kids worth an hour of your time? I think so. Especially if it means we dont restrict freedoms for shitty solutions.
Yes. Parent controls have been available for this stuff for ages. It's not a problem for the state to solve.
should it be left wholly on parents to police the whole internet
Nope. Just their kids.
Like always.
If the alternative is not solving the problem while making other stuff worse, yeah.
Understanding that I can't solve the whole issue right here and now on my own, the very first thing I'd take a look at is changing from having an 'on by default' connection to other machines, to having an 'off by default' connection. I'd also worry about complicating the entire process to the point where parents can't reasonably understand/control how their machines are used by their children (the first point assists with that).
One other thing which I believe is important to actually protect children would be to establish and maintain national borders, similar to China's great firewall. The more automatic systems become, the more opportunity exists for bad actors to exploit them for untoward purposes. Understanding that we can't conclusively resolve every potential issue, we ought to at least do what we can to ensure that those participating in the ecosystem share similar goals and values with each other, which is really the point of borders in the first place.
Oh it does.
Kids have access to phones and data. No matter how good my DNS is, means fuck all if my son can use his data (if he was old enough to have phone) and browse, under UK, he can't easily access the most common porn sites without verifying.
As open and pro porn internet social bubble might be. I'm not okay with my son gaining access to it easily and too early.
At times, I wish there were more adults and parents online to counter the sea of basically male teenagers pushing what they think isright. And I know I'll get a "I'm a parent of 3, porn is healthy for them!" Type of response... And that's irrelevant. We all are raising a human being and we all have different morals and ideas. There's zero chance I'll consciously allow a loophole before he turns 12.
Your personal morals should not be the basis of laws that invade the privacy of every last person in the country, including your sons. Don't you think that educating your son on sex, porn and reasonable usage (depending on age) would be an approach that would foster an atmosphere of trust and responsibility in the relationship between you and your child, making a law unnecessary? The way you seem to handle it just a) makes most kids curios and b) will make kids just hide their behaviour (and they will be seeing stuff, since most kids gain access in one way or another, and they share proudly for clout). Don't forget that the best liars come from very strict homes.
This is why we need decentralized, open source porn websites.
So, head on over to LemmyNSFW.com and upload a pic of your junk.
I'm shy, I'll just dm you instead.
Visit pornhub in any state or country where its banned or censored via the Tor Network, Onion URL at http://pornhubthbh7ap3u.onion/.
We're really globally going to return to the pre-WWII status quo, aren't we?
The past 50+ years were an anomaly in humanity's development, but we all collectively fell for the idea that it was, and would remain, the norm.
How wrong we were.
Honestly I never understood this. I grew up with the internet so I've always had access to porn from a young age (If anything it was even easier back than). And pretty much everyone that's 35 years or younger did as well and I'd say generally we all turned out fine. At least not any worse off than any other generation. And honestly the only negative side effect it had on me was having unrealistic expectations the first time I actually had sex.
It makes a lot more sense when you look at it in context, particularly in regards to trans and all LGBTQ+ people. These transphobic governments consider simply existing as trans to be pornographic, so they are trying to block access to educational information on us, while also compiling a list of anyone who does. It's the exact same shit America is trying to do with KOSA
And honestly the only negative side effect it had on me was having unrealistic expectations the first time I actually had sex.
And that is what we should be worrying about.
I told my kid that she can watch all the porn she wants, I don't care. Just don't expect actual sex to be like that.
Yeah, and actually I would say with confidence we are actually better off. It's true that unrealistic expectations is a big issue (well, might be more like, I think most realize that porn is not real after experiencing it so it's not a big problem really for most), but at least we do have a good understanding of the possibilities and what is safe and what is not... At the very least we have a more openminded and informed point of view on sex and relationships. Which doesn't mean either "let's show porn to the kids" of course, but it's such an overblown topic in society.
Let parents be the responsible ones of what kids watch, not the webpages...
Every once in a while I hear boomers waxing poetic about the wholesome days of old nudie mags.
Well, I happen know the boomer's own parents were plenty outraged by them, actually. And, have you ever read one of those? The copy is pretty damn disrespectful about the women appearing therein, as were the men running the show.
How long do they calculate until personal porn information is leaked?
Id give a rough estimate of > 3 years until some DB gets rocked due to infostealers or some shit.
Remember when the Snowden revelations came out?
Not only it showed that the UK was even more intrusive in their surveillance of their own citiziens than the US, but after those revelations, whilst the US walked back on some of the surveillance, the Government of the UK simply retroactivelly legalized all of it, the editor at The Guardian who published the Snowden revelations got kicked out and the entire British Press went quiet about it since then.
The chances of this being genuinelly about protecting children rather than about facilitating the identification of British internet users by the GCHQ, are pretty much zero.
Personally I lived in the UK back when the Snowden revelations came out, so switched to being behind an always on VPN and since then never lost that habit. (And yeah, it's of course not a foolproof mechanism, but it sure makes it way harder to be caught in the broad trawling done by the surveillance apparatus, plus it's also pretty useful for "sailing the high seas")
Okay chief. How bout you verify the ID'S of UK politicians who visit Asia for kids?
I guess it's harder on them as well since Epstein got killed, the royal nonce is also less dignified nowadays.
Yay, more invasion of privacy and censorship
Its estimated that this will stop underage people accessing porn for at least 30 seconds while they download tor browser
Right? You can't stop the porn and these barriers is only to create an artificial market.
But whatever. The more people become anonymous on the internet, the better.
I expect this to go just as well as for the US states that implemented similar laws. So basically anyone in the UK is blocked access and will just have to use a VPN for porn. Any kind of recording of IDs is obviously a huge security risk for everyone involved, and it doesn't really make sense for porn sites to open themselves for that.
I thought this was a USAmerican headline, but it's the UK 🤣 There will be another spike in VPN purchases, won't there? (Probably Proton VPN if people haven't read about their pro-MAGA stance).
Germany had these kinds of laws since before the internet, that is, "are you 18?" questions simply weren't judged adequate to fulfil the pre-existing requirements.
Net result is that there's no German porn sites, and the big search engines filter their results. Which doesn't mean that you can't get porn everywhere, it just means that kids are learning a particular subset of the English lexicon quite early once they seek it out which is perfectly fine under German law as with anything youth protection it's not supposed to stop determined kids, once they're determined they're individually old enough, it's supposed to limit casual exposure.
The distinction Germany makes is "targeted at a German market/audience". So if your domain isn't on .de, if your payment options aren't Germany-specific, ideally if you don't even have a German UI translation, none of that stuff applies to you. Authorities will just ignore you.
Unless the UK is going down the Saudi route of blocking foreign sites, the exact same thing will happen. There's always going to be some jurisdiction with lax youth protection laws where porn sites can set up their legal headquarters.
UK may be taking a slightly different path, but we'll both end up in the same shithole at the end. Incredible.
Back when the Snowden revelations came out the UK was worse than the US when it came to civil society surveillance and unlike the US, the Government there just retroactivelly legalized all that their NSA-equivalent (the GCHQ) did with no restrictions.
Oh, and the UK Press has a censorship mechanism called D-Notices.
In this domain the UK is already worse than the US, probably because the idea that the populus should know their place and be led by "their betters" is pretty old in Britain and, at least for the elites, the thinking about the relation between power and the people never significativelly evolved away from the original thinking in Absolute Monarchies, since the political and power structures there are still anchored on a Monarchy.
The UK trots out legislation like this every few years.
So far, it's not gone through.
However, to paraphrase a parasomething, "You have to defeat the proposal every time, we just have to make it law once"
uses vpn, lies about age and manages to access porn site, despite claims otherwise
Mission failed successfully
Majority of people are like that Hank Hill meme about jpegs, they don't know what the hell a VPN is.
I'm sure nobody will instantly search "how to bypass porn check UK"
Thinking about this recently. Kids tend to find ways to abuse the technology for "naughty" purposes whatever the era. I remember the first kid I knew with residential internet back in the early 90s, the very first thing he wanted to show off about it was that you could get on some ancient bulletin board system and if you waited like 7 minutes you could eventually see a whole picture of a topless woman.
Trying to age gate all internet smut sounds like a losing battle. I think an unintended consequence might be young people hassling their peers for nudes at a higher rate. Either that or they will find alternative modes of distribution that adults didn't even think about.
Maybe instead of trying to deanonymize internet usage for literally everybody, there is an actual social solution such as, oh, I dunno, parenting?
you're not wrong, but as the parent of a 7 year old, i find it impossible to keep them from things i didn't want them to absorb, because even one child at school can undo all the safeguards I've implemented at home. putting it all down to "parenting" is not the solution either.
I actually agree with you, in that I've been where you are and it is extremely difficult. There has been more pushback recently against the idea that very young kids are magically entitled to unfettered device access. The incentives are misaligned because big tech just wants more and more pairs of eyes. They don't really care about the underlying harms. However they have built better parental controls recently. I have to credit Apple (extremely reluctantly) because their controls and reporting seem to be better.
However you are right, there will always be some other kid at school with a completely unlocked device because his parents are idiots and pay zero attention.
Does this mean Brits need to through their bank to get a wank?
Every site is going to turn into a porn site, isn't it?
Luckily kids don't know about VPN's otherwise this entire sharade would be completely usele....
Edit: I think this isn't enough though. Politicians should be forced to have a public porn history so you can vote by their porn preference. I wouldn't trust a politician who isn't into some weird kink stuff. Vanilla people are boring and shouldn't run a country.
Looks like I picked the right time to get a girlfriend
I kinda of wonder if this is a way to try putting the sites out of business. In the US they just don't bother working in the various states with laws like this.
In the case of Texas and places like that, age verification laws are about being able to call anything they want (like LGBT+ content) “pornographic.” Texas doesn’t care if it works.
Interestingly, Pornhub actually stayed in my state, Louisiana, because — according to their Supreme Court lawyers, yesterday — we have digital IDs and it was apparently trivial to do the checks via some sort of API. Texans would have to upload a photo of their driver’s license or something and there’s major privacy issues.
Also, Louisiana’s law didn’t work. Pornhub, which wants to be mainstream, does ID checks but sketchier sites in other countries don’t. It probably just caused more teens to get malware or be exposed to truly objectionable content (like CSAM).
Good info, thanks
No, they just want to control the internet because they are afraid of it. To be honest, it's not without reason after the Arab Spring and then the current disinformation wars.
This is not the way to do it though.
Would this be an appropriate cultural moment to pimp FUTO ID or something similar for (I think?) legitimate human online verification?
Need to invest on VPNs