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?
But I also feel that any random kid shouldn’t be able to just go to these sites and see porn freely.
So they will just go to another site that doesn’t have age verification and doesn’t implement any security measures instead. Big sites are required to age check people before they are allowed to upload anything, that is not the case for most of the internet.
All age verification does is aggregate personal information and make it easy target for bad actors to steal. Instead of needing to go thought 100 sites, now that information & identities will be tied to a single database.
It’s also a slippery slope, since the same adult content is available not just on dedicated adult sites, but mainstream social media. Lemmy, Mastodon, Twitter, TikTok, Twitch (just recently wanted to allow nudity). Do you really want to have your identity tied to your online activity?
Governments should not be taking on parental duties.
Yeah. If my kid is a terrorist, they shouldn’t go to prison, that’s just the government trying to dictate what you can and can’t do. If a kid wants to skip school and torture stray animals, that’s just the way it is. Damn the government; always trying to get involved and “help” my “severely deranged” child. Society deserved all the things my son did to the public soda fountain.
Watching porn … terrorism.
I think I’m missing a few steps here.I’m making the assumption that you’re not deliberately daft enough to conflate the two issues of “a cheeky tug looking at some low resolution grot” and “mass casualty attack planning”, but surely you must see the difference between harmful content and porn, and why measures should be taken (however easy to circumvent) to disrupt terrorism or other large-scale atrocities?
What? It is not illegal for children to access pornography. It is at best illegal for people to allow children access to pornography. (Outside of countries where pornography is banned outright)
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We should be charging parents if their kids are that bad.
Yep. I spent a couple years as a child in a country with country-wide blocks on some internet content. However, google images wasn’t blocked (duh.) Reddit wasn’t blocked (not that I knew the site at the time).
Only thing it changed from a user-perspective was using either shitty and seedy VPN’s or simply going to more questionable sites the authority blocklist didn’t know of yet. And I’ll be honest, I doubt that sites like xnxx (back then) are much better for a developing child than the somewhat controlled sites. There’s so many niche porn sites out there that they can’t all be blocked. You only end up blocking access to sites that are the flattest for access by minors, ironically. (To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s great that minors access that content, either)
Absolute waste of tax money and resources, anyone advocating for this policy is an idiot and psychotic control freak that should never be allowed to opine on public policy.
Outdated values are driving this country back into the stone age. The body was designed to be horny as we go through teenage years. It’s nature. Rather than guide kids on the safe path, fools would forbid, outlaw, prohibit until they can’t control them after age of 18.
Here’s how this plays out… Kids are going to masturbate, regardless. They will dive deeper into the Internet into places with no restrictions and be exposed to really messed up stuff. Hey at least the parent can pat themselves on the back, right, they were good partners that did everything right by the book, even paying the kid’s therapist.
Which country would that be? This is EU related.
I don’t disagree with you otherwise. If we had a good age verification system that didn’t involve the website, only gave a boolean age check to the website, wasn’t logged at the government or any other level, I might think this was ok. But we don’t. So as soon as this starts I’ll pirate a bunch of porn.
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”
That would probably actually be a decent age verification scheme
For 5 minutes
Nah there’s no kids on TikTok smart enough to figure it out and tell all the rest.
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.
Don’t give them ideas, this is exactly the type of shit they want to enact
give it time. the government (us) wants to put interlock gadgets into every new car to prevent drunks from driving. driving under the influence is illegal and those that do are more likely to kill someone. so is driving without a license, and so are those drivers.
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It’s still illegal - however it’s a defence to prosecution to say that there was a form of emergency or other mitigating factors.
As always, the wording and mitigations are specific to the jurisdictions.
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.
That’s still worrying: wouldn’t some central authority know that “site X requested age verification for this person”?
No. There is no 3rd party service needed. It all can happen only between the service asking and the id (smart card).
… and that’s different from the service having a record of your photo ID?
The service gets no other information other then “Is the holder of the id older then 18” => “Yes”
There is no personal data exchange.
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.
Your question is not stupid, but comparing porn to casual nudity is.
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
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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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I think we should stop, as a society, to try (and fail) to handle problems by imposing limits and obligation and start doing it with some fuckin large-scale massive education planning.
In this context: a smart boy/girl, with sexual/emotional education and good critical thinking can have access to all the porn in the world from teenage and be fine 99% of the time
Kids are smart. Horny teenagers even more so. They will find loopholes or ways to circumvent these kind of things - speaking from experience. At age 13 I installed a keylogger on my PC to get the password for a parental control software my parents installed. Roughly one year later I also exploited a vulnerability in iOS 4 that allowed me to see the parental controls password in plaintext so I could re-enable Safari.
Mr.hacker man? Lol Yeah adding restrictions is like the alchol prohibition in the US. Restricing it is going to make it more prevlent and easily acessible. There may be more sites that pop up that boot leg it. Kinda like schools with cool math games being blocked so you have unblocked games websites.
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.
Snake oil salesmen never had it so good. Without the layers of abstraction provided by computers, nobody would’ve believed their magic elixirs would protect children from getting interested in sex until their parents approved of it.
It is an absolute privacy nightmare. Nothing should be asking for your identity that doesn’t have a DAMN good reason to be asking for your identity.
Age verification is not a damn good reason. Especially since any number of free VPNs can circumventing it with just a few clicks.
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.
I am in favor of stricter age verification for certain content. Not only for porn but also dating apps, social media, online shops, etc. But the current methods of age verification are a privacy nightmare and go well beyond what is reasonable. Especially since companies can’t be trusted to not do bad stuff with that information.
What is necessary is a double anonymity age verification service. Ideally run by a company that by law is required to be very transparent. That way we don’t have to provide personal information to companies that have no actual need for it but can still reduce the amount of minors getting into places they shouldn’t be.
Yes, it won’t be perfect, yes there will always be bad actors, but it will still do more good than harm.
I personally am open for a discussion about reducing the minimum age to view porn. I don’t have strong feelings either way.
I see your view and appreciate the time you’ve taken to articulate it well.
My view takes another level of abstraction from it, and ignoring the implementation detail for the moment - the question for me is “what are we trying to protect underage/vulnerable persons from?”
Sex is a natural thing and I’m not arsed either way - and some of the more extreme content (within the legal sense, non-consent and animal porn etc are another ball game) such as exploitative content or covertlyy recorded stuff really need to be addressed as society issues so that the ensuing pornography isn’t such an issue.
That said, the line defining the three (or more) groups is arbritary and different for everyone I guess.
Very much this. A great many of us in our early 40s had access to pornography from BBSes or early internet and it didn’t seem to fuck us up. Why are we trying to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist?
Legal sexual gratification between two consenting adults (even if some may find the way they achieve gratification taboo), so long as it’s not illegal, should not be shamed or denied.
Kids being able to openly participate on porn sites would be a feast for pedophiles and groomers. We already have enough trouble with that on social media and dating sites/apps. And while in an ideal situation there just wouldn’t be bad people, sometimes we need to protect people from themselves because of others.
So while I am open for a discussion about lowering the age requirement, I still firmly believe a minimum age is required. But whether that’s 14, 16, or 18 I don’t know.
That’s a fair comment, and represents the core tradeoff of balancing protecting vulnerable members of society against privacy or liberty concerns.
My preference would be to - in a massively reductive statement - teach the paedos that their urges are less-than-healthy and treat them as medical cases, in order to reduce the need for such content.
The other element is that it’s rarely a great idea to make sweeping reforms of a system that is failing because silly cunts are doing illegal things. I’m pulling a stat out of my arse here but why are we implementing legal interventions to prevent 5-10% of the population from downloading or producing illegal content, when surely it would be more effective to target those involved in the criminal practise rather than the other 90-95% of happy carefree legal chuggers?
I do see your point though, and it’s refreshing to see you’ve not gone straight for the “much chuldrun” trope.
I don’t think about it except I canmt wait till one of its non-corporate authors gets into FO(finding out) tyme ;)
I think its the regulatory body’s responsibility to provide a safe and secure service that can verify age requirements if they want to force that.
If they can’t provide that service, they shouldn’t require it, especially with such sensitive information.
