All porn sites must 'robustly' verify UK user ages by July
(www.bbc.com)
from MicroWave@lemmy.world to world@lemmy.world on 16 Jan 15:06
https://lemmy.world/post/24346897
from MicroWave@lemmy.world to world@lemmy.world on 16 Jan 15:06
https://lemmy.world/post/24346897
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.
#world
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Does this mean Brits need to through their bank to get a wank?
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.
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.
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?
Yes. Parent controls have been available for this stuff for ages. It’s not a problem for the state to solve.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nope. Just their kids.
Like always.
Absolutely - this always happens with these “save the children” laws.
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.
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.
Generalities like that can be useful when applied appropriately, but counter-productive when applied blindly.
No u
Agreed. I feel we’ve been giving politicians passes on “ignorance” for far too long. First, ignorance is not a defense in any other situation. Second, these people are supposed to uphold our laws and virtues, so they should be held to a higher standard. Third, if you can find a pattern in their “ignorance” which somehow always seems to benefit them personally - they’re not ignorant, but malignant.
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.
So - the people abusing policies are often not the people writing policies. We’re both making lots of assumptions but the way I see it is that the “well meaning but stupid MP” wants to make their constituency happy by passing laws to show “I’m listening to the needs of parents!”. Later that law is then used by other agencies to do things with your data you would rather them not do. Government is “people” not a “person”.
And for that matter there are laws passed to explicitly give agencies power. Government doesn’t often need to hide it, they just say the magic words “national defense”.
If by that you mean that some out of touch MPs can be easily swindled by members of the security apparatus working together with other MPs and higher level politicians who are smart enough to know what they’re doing, I don’t disagree with that.
What is less likely is that a majority of British MPs, repeatedly and over the course of 2 decades, have been deceived like that.
Maybe I’m wrong, but most British MPs don’t come out as stupid (though some definitely do) - incompetent at anything but salesmanship and power-games, crooked, greedy, ethics-free, unprincipled salesmen types and people driven by objectives which do not at all match what they state, sure most of them come out as that, stupid, not most.
I mean, your point would make a lot of sense if this was some kind of one-off event rather than a repeating pattern of measure after measure increasing surveillance of Civil Society, for the last 2 decades, and if Civil Society (or at least the Media) had been silent about it or even supportive of it, but as things stand the theory that a majority of MPs are stupid as an explanation for this bill passing Parliament really stretches the laws of probability.
As the saying goes: “You can deceive some people all of the time or all people some of the time but you can’t deceive all people all of the time”.
PS: I accept that I might be wrong. I just don’t think that given the Historical track record the odds favor the “they’ve been swindled” (a majority of them and again on a subject that has been steadily going in just this direction and with not so long ago exposés on the press of how previous legislation has been abused for surveillance) explanation over the explanation that at least the ones in leadership positions acted with full awareness and possibly the active intention and purpose of crafting and passing a bill that expands Civil Society Surveillance in Britain.
It’s fair - we’re both coming from different starting assumptions.
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”.
Nah, you just need parents to care about what their kids get up to and to responsibly educate them without punishing them for being curious.
Bwahhahajahhahaa. Like that’s gonna happen.
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.
They’re clearly not solely my morals. Why should your morals be the basis of things being unrestricted? What privacy do you have left exactly? Who is this hurting? It’s all fun and games throwing big phrases around while we use everything tied to a name anyway.
If you’re using a VPN and are truly a person that values their internet privacy, this doesn’t effect you, does it?
And if by this we limit who porn is marketed to? Then fuck yeah. Same as gambling. There needs to be barrier of entry.
Bold of you to assume all that of my parenting habits, here lies the biggest issue with debating anything on the internet, people jump at extremes. Because the slightest bit of grey area and the ideology falls apart.
So let’s take it for a spin shall we? Why should your morals stop me from stealing or hurting you? After all, it’s just as illegal. Why should we stop kids from buying alcohol, it’s illegal for shop to do it, do you also shout at cashiers asking for your ID? What about that privacy?
It’s silly and as my original comment predicted, you’re exactly the type of person I expected to see here. Ultimately, we’re all balancing life, even wild west had rules.
No, they are the morals of all people who try to take away freedoms from others, for example parents who prefer an open discussion with their children, or people who might risk a lot by their preferences becoming public in a data leak - like the whole of the LGBT-spectrum in the USA, Russia, large areas of Africa and the UK too (since gender-affirming care is getting wrecked there too) for example. Even if it weren’t that parts of the public were endangered, the underlying tools and mechanisms are easily abused as censoring mechansisms - slap a “that’s against our morals”-sticker on it and let it disappear.
All my traffic is running over a VPN, because i don’t like getting tracked. But regulations like this go beyond what affects me (it really doesn’t - i couldn’t tell you when i last watched porn if i wanted to). A prime example would be reproductive health; sites that explain a teenager stuff that he wouldn’t ask his parents or a teacher might easily be labels as pornographic by puritans (the parents you wish that spoke up more might not, but i can guarantee you that those types will speak up first and loudest when they get the chance). You are also taking away that from every teenager in the country, especially those less privileged and with zealots as parents.
Even worse: The clearweb porn sites today are pretty sanitized, so there won’t be anything really illegal on it. If they get their fingers on the stuff on the dark web by installing TOR, then they might be exposed to far more dangerous, illegal and traumatizing content and real life dangers than the average porn clip.
The barrier for entry can also be set by parents, if they are worth a fuck. put parental locks on their devices, thats the only thing you can realistically control anyways. No need for messy databases which will leak, no need for creating a precedent for censoring the web. Limiting advertising for whatever is easy in comparison and the mechanisms are already in place (and active - i don’t think that hardcore porn gets many ad slots at prime time tv).
Stealing and hurting infringes on the freedom of others, watching porn doesn’t. My ID isn’t required for buying alcohol because i don’t get confused with a 16 year old anymore. You still get asked even being a father of a child? Must be quite the genes you have there.
Sorry for assuming your parenting habits. You spoke like one of those zealots i spoke above. If you aren’t one and you simply didn’t realize the dangers of legislation like this when enacted, i hope that you i gave you food for thought.
Yay, more invasion of privacy and censorship
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.
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.
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.
I had the same expectations about love, so maybe we should ban romantic movies for giving people a false expectation of what romantic relationships are actually like.
Dude same. I fucked up a lot of potential relationships when I was younger because I expected it to “be like the movies.”
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.
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
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.
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.
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
What is it with western countries thinking they can bureaucracy their way through any issue.
This won’t stop anything. Won’t even slow it down. Just teach people how to navigate the net better.
You mean like Eastern countries that right out ban and arrest people for making porn, like erotic fiction stories? Such freedom. Such navigation. Such teaching.
Remember to apply this to 4chan, UK.
*chan, Facebook, Reddit, imgur, xitter, Lemmy, Mastodon…
well…maybe Australia had a good idea…
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”
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.
Looks like I picked the right time to get a girlfriend
so…why the sudden pressure to track porn usage to IDs?
ohhh…the homosexuals.
this is good news. it means they don’t already have a database of all the lgbtq+ communities.
I wonder if there’s any crime committed if you sign up your local conservative politician for gay porn or monthly dildos. maybe even abortion drugs while you’re at it.
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 pornhubthbh7ap3u.onion.
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”
Every site is going to turn into a porn site, isn’t it?
Would this be an appropriate cultural moment to pimp FUTO ID or something similar for (I think?) legitimate human online verification?
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.
-6 months
eff.org/…/hack-age-verification-company-shows-pri…
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”)
Its estimated that this will stop underage people accessing porn for at least 30 seconds while they download tor browser
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.