There are a lot of GOP-controller legislatures in the USA pushing through so-called “child protection” laws, but there’s a toll in the form of impacting people’s rights and data privacy. Most of these bills involve requiring adults to upload a copy of their photo ID.
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Considering these are Republican states, they’re just going to define Wikipedia articles about gender dysphoria as pornographic lol
Think carefully and double check before you ever agree with a Republican about anything.
This is literally the goal. They are using porn as a trojan horse because they know nobody is going to stand up and fight them on letting children see porn
FTFY
I guess, but like, there’s only one party that wants me in a
concentrationconversion therapy camp for being trans.That doesn’t make the rest automatically trustworthy. Just not genocidal. Though I tend to agree with Progressives and Socialist Dems or Socialists more often than not. Regular, middle of the road Dems, not as much.
Not genocidal eh? Ask a Democrat how many people they think Earth can support long term, then subtract that from Earth’s current population. Your answer is how many people they, at some level, believe need to be gone.
Perhaps, but it was a bipartisan effort that led to requiring ID to buy music.
Sure, and I’m not saying both parties don’t want to surveil and control the population, but as you might be able to understand I’m a bit more focused on the Party that has all but made extermination of people like me the Party platform.
I’ve never heard anyone call for the extermination of queer communists (or whatever category you’re referring to).
I’m trans. If they simply take away my access to gender affirming care they’re as good as murdering me, because I won’t last long.
Furthermore, they believe being trans is a mental illness and that we’re all groomers and rapists. It’s not much of a logical leap for them to then declare that they’re “hospitalizing us” because we present a threat to ourselves and to public safety. They already call gender affirming care “self mutilation” and they actually believe that it’s contagious and making their children trans. You’re blind if you can’t see where that’s going.
Me being a communist just gives them a reason to shoot me when we start WW3 with China lol
Requiring ID to buy music?? What is this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_Advisory
All politiicans should be listened to with scepticism, but the Republicans have gone to full on lies, alternative truths, fraud, grifting and fascism. It’s not a both sides issue.
This attempt of bothsidesing has failed.
The government has way too much influence over children already. Governments could do so much for children that would actually benefit them (better education, free lunch at school, better public libraries, ensure no kids are starving because of poor parents, no wars in foreign countries, whatever) but instead they use children to increase their control over people.
Most of these states banning pornography and asking for ID are Republican , conservatives States. It is very ironic that the government is now doing the job of the parents. Instead the government should give parents and students advice on the harm that excess that pornography causes and tools to protect kids from this content online , now the kids will learn to circumvent it because its “prohibited” just like the apple in the tree of Adam and Eve.
As an analogy, should governments allow children access to strip clubs and have parents handle it or should that be illegal and have kids banned from those physical spaces?
It’s interesting because I think banning kids from strip clubs is pretty popular, but the digital laws are not as popular. I don’t know of a way to enforce a ban in a digital space that doesn’t infringe on individual liberties though
The reason is a technical one. At a strip club, none of your information is being transmitted; it’s just the bouncer making sure you’re of age by looking at your ID.
Per the EFF:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/03/age-verification-mandates-would-undermine-anonymity-online
Being forced to reveal identification before you’re allowed to view pornography is the equivalent of only being allowed to masturbate while your parents are in the room watching you.
I understand that completely, but if we’re saying kids shouldn’t see strippers, why should they be able to see far more graphic content?
I’m not saying I support these bills as written, basically for the reasons you’re saying. I do think watching extreme content online can damage children’s understanding of sex though. You have to go out of your way to find porn that looks like real sex.
One thing to note is that it is ALWAYS claimed that the issue is the Really Bad Stuff - the graphic content - but that it inevitably becomes anything that is socially offensive, and I’ll give you one queer guess as to what tends to get labeled “graphic content” right quick.
I actually don’t think it’s the more “extreme” content. For example, kink.com videos are pretty clear that consent has been obtained and actors are debriefed afterward.
I think the worst part of porn is the “regular” stuff that shows unrealistic expectations (grabbing a woman while she’s performing oral sex and forcing her to basically choke without consent is shockingly common, for example).
I don’t disagree that there’s a dark strain of the use and misuse of women in mainstream porn, but my point is that what is claimed as the basis for a porn ban and how far it will go and what it will target are two entirely different things.
It doesn’t really matter what the content is. Allowing the government to dictate what content can or cannot be accessed is not a good idea.
I agree with that statement for adults, but not for children. Even if you’re talking about something like drugs, protecting kids, who don’t make rational choices, is important.
This is the issue at hand: How do you prove it is an adult and not a child attempting to access the content?
Solutions exist for parents to block/allow access to content on routers, cell phone plans, and devices. The government does not need to impose here.
I see what you’re asking, and I agree if we’re going to prevent physical access to strip clubs by minors, it makes logical sense to take steps to prevent minors from accessing prurient content online as well.
The question becomes the exact methodology used to achieve that. It’s the same basic premise of making encryption illegal: Are we willing to sacrifice our privacy in the name of “protecting the children”?
Come up with another way to restrict access that doesn’t further encroach on privacy. I don’t have the answer for what that is, and it may not need to involve the government, but allowing them to put bills like this in place sets dangerous precedent. Once we relinquish power to the government, it’s damn near impossible to get it back.
If they really wanted to block access to adult only material, and not be a surveillance state in the process, the correct solution would be that every home router and every cell phone plan would have a secondary password that had to be entered in order to access that data.
Been by default only the parents and the people deemed responsible enough to have access to that password would be able to view adult only content.
That is very secure, it would sweep the floor with a huge percentage of successes with a minimum amount of intervention into people’s daily life.
Sure, some kids will get the password one way or another and view adult only content, but at least they would know they had to go through the extra steps to do something they weren’t allowed to do.
While that technically may not be a surveillance state, it would be an authoritarian state which could decide worker’s rights or the history of slavery are “adult material” because what kid needs to know about them? Kids don’t work or own slaves, so it’s not suitable for them and they can’t access it.
This idea sounds absolutely unhinged to me.
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
-Ben Franklin
I’m not of the opinion that we should just let kids see that stuff, though at the same time Im skeptical that it’s as bad as some people claim, but I just don’t see a way to actually stop them from seeing it that isn’t way worse than the status quo via restricting everyone else. If the cure is worse than the disease, then one isn’t advocating that the disease isn’t harmful by rejecting the cure, just stating that the trade-off is not worth it.
As far as giving kids a dangerously wrong idea of what sex is goes, I do think that the best solution to this is better sex-ed than trying to hide things from them though. The thing about porn is that it isn’t really possible to stop, without getting insanely draconian. You might be able to stop most kids from being able to access popular websites for it, sure, but given all the stories I’ve heard from before the internet was popular about people as kids finding relatives nsfw magazines and video tapes, that won’t stop a curious kid, just make it slightly more difficult. Consider for a second that pretty much everyone carries a device with photo and video recording capacity everywhere that could be used to make and share porn, that someone with basic art skills can draw it if you remove the camera from the equation somehow, and that if you include smut in all this that even just being literate is enough to make some. Ultimately, porn is a form of information, and in the modern age restricting information is very difficult, let alone trying to restrict information that literally anyone can independently create, from being seen by children who are naturally curious because they have been forbidden from seeing something but dont understand what or why.
which I think we all agree on. There are ways that we could enforce age verification (the best one so far is that the browser itself checks your age, then a website tells the browser that it must do an age check before loading, which then your ID is never transmitted or logged for these sites). But politicians don’t want to think about that, they love this because it plays into their surveillance state.
How? As a user I want to have total control over my browser and Internet is an open platform - any browser should be able to view any website even though google is trying to change that with their DRM.
I don’t know exactly but the two big things I’ve seen, and again I’m not the engineer of it or anything, but
Know that yes this is a limitation of a browser, and that’s why it’s viewed as a compromise, a word that a lot of people have forgotten. None of us really want to have to prove it, but if there is a need to prevent children from accessing content (and tbh there is a need), then I’d rather have it be done in a privacy focused way.
So it’s not your browser that checks your age but a third party. This raises a few questions:
Yea, no. I decide, not the browser.
Again, 2 huge points I pointed out, I am not the developer or the privacy focused engineers who are putting forward these ideas, and again, compromise. The option of “I don’t want to do it” may not be on the table anymore. If it’s going to happen, it would be better to compromise and instead push a privacy focused approach.
For this to be on the table you need to convince all the browser manufacturers to implement it and close the sources so it cannot be undone by the users or forked. And remove all the earlier copies and sources Next you need to ban tools like curl or wget because they can pretend to be browsers. If you want something that can’t be removed in reasonable time realistically you have to demand full web drm a-la Google but this means a bunch of older computers needs to be thrown away just because they can’t use newer browsers and/or newer OS.
Now that we figured out what needs to be done on the client site - let’s talk about server side. You need to convince every porn site out there to perform this check. A few more interesting things to think about - how many porn sites are out there? What to do with those that won’t follow your proposal?
In short - from technical point of view if you really want to achieve “enforced age verification” - internet must become a very different, much more closed system.
I mean they’re already doing that, there’s already a handful of states that require porn sites check a user’s ID before granting access, that’s why I keep reiterating compromise, because it’s already happening. And the version they’re pushing is we hand over our ID to ever site which then of course would be subpoenable. So, again, I don’t know why you’re thinking these solutions are the bad ones, the bad ones are already in place and being used, they’re just trying to roll it out nationwide now.
And again, I really feel like I keep repeating the same point over and over and over and over and over again, if it’s going to happen, which they’re really trying to push through and looks like they are going to, a compromise would be to at least have a privacy focused approach.
A handful of states can require that, sure, but requiring is not enough. All the browsers and all the porn sites need to follow that and this is not going to happen
If the goal is to make sure there’s age verification for users of some porn sites with some web browsers - yea, you can totally achieve that. A workaround is a) switch the website or b) switch the browser. That’s security theater though. Wastes time and money, fails to achieve the goal. If the goal is to make sure age is tested for users of all the porn sites for users of all browsers - this goal cannot be achieved without massive effort.
They have internet with porn in it in other nations :)
Banning children from strip clubs in no way impacts the rights of other adults to enjoy strip clubs.
And, again, I am against the laws as written. But I’m asking more broadly about children accessing porn. I would never support a law that requires people to upload their ID, but there has to be some safe way to pull this off.
I don’t know how technical you are but its impossible to block kids from watching pornography online without implementing a draconian system in which we all loose our privacy . First there are millions and millions of websites with different domains that have thousands of pornographic videos and photos. Plenty of companies offer adult block content but there is always a way around. If they ask for ID , then a market for fake IDs will show up. This is like scams from India , Nigeria , and all those countries that are calling to scammed you. Its impossible to stop it and the only way is to create awareness and educate people on how to prevent it. So the same with porn , block it as a parent and try to explain why you are doing it and the consequences of excessing watching it.
Oh well that’s even easier then. I don’t care what other people’s children do, in general.
If I didn’t want my kids looking at porn online, I already have plenty of things to prevent them from doing so.
Not giving them access to a device without supervision. Using firewall filters. Child-mode browser/OS settings.
We don’t need more regulation for this. Parents just need to get off their ass and do their own parenting. But these bills aren’t actually designed to protect children. They’re designed to gain access to adults’ personal info and will be used more for oppression than safety.
And from the party of “Small Government”, too!
I’m a conservative but I’d never be caught dead calling myself a Republican.
Republicans are corrupt, despicable, and stupid. Democrats are corrupt, naive, and arrogant.
I really wish we had runoff voting, so that the American ecosystem could move away from two party balanced dominance.
Ranked choice voting!! Let’s see how long the two party system lasts when it’s not “you have to vote for the lesser evil”.
Only when it’s convenient
Oh, it’s fine. They make sure it’s always convenient to rile up their base with lies, hatred, and culture-war nonsense…
Most effective way to prevent kids from looking at porn is to encase them in spray foam insulation with feeding tubes and catheters.
This also prevents that pesky physical growth which turns them into military-able adults.
You can cut down on porn and terrorism in one go!
I think it has nothing to do with children. It is about requiring ID registration for online services so that identities can be tracked. Every time authoritarians want to push another mechanism of control it’s always “about the children”.
Ultimately, I agree with you and that’s why I’m against these laws, but I really do wish there was a good way to do it anonymously. Porn is not good for kids and it’s pretty much impossible to keep them away from it without drastic measures that are more harmful than porn.
Not sure if it’s actually possible given how far outside out evolutionary context internet porn is, but the correct solution here would be to train your kids to deal with the temptation of dopaminergic reinforcement buttons.
As a population, that isn’t a realistic course of action. It won’t work for even most parents that care to try.
What if the block is more harmful than just letting curious kids sneak a peek at porn sites? If all the legitimate places to get porn block anyone without ID then a lot of those prove will seek out unregulated places - they’re going to see far worse things and be in communication with potentially very dangerous people.
And of course the next step would be to totally limit any access to the internet to stamp out any unregulated communication and file sharing thus giving the corporations a total monopoly on the internet… It’s not about protecting kids it’s about controlling all of us.
Some principles and things to note:
Given these principles and observations, I conclude that the expected effect of such regulations would be to increase sexual abuse of children, while also strongly harming the ability of a free society to discuss and educate about sexuality.
Very excellent points. While I agree kids shouldn’t be looking at porn, forcibly trying to keep all knowledge of sex and porn from them until they hit a magic age where now they can do anything they want isn’t the answer.
Children need to be educated so they can make wise decisions when the time comes. No matter how much people try to stop it, the time will often come before they reach the magic age set by laws, and unfortunately it’s sometimes through sexual assault or their naivety being taking advantage of.
This nails it right here, #1 and #2 especially.
Sex is fun, sex is awkward, sex is weird and messy and life-changing. Sex is mundane, sex is cathartic, sex is funny and sex is cardio. Also, sex makes people, oh and it feels good. All that is pretty fucking magical if you ask me.
What is done in private between consenting adults is none of your goddamn business, including porn. Don’t use kids as an excuse to control adults’ behavior.
I would combat that by saying I think most pornography is nowhere close to what sex is like. Anecdotally, I hear more stories about men who try to fuck someone like they’re in a porn film, which can result in physical pain to their partner.
I think teaching kids about sex and giving them access to porn that often displays non-consensual acts as normal are two totally different things.
But yes, I think 4 is a very strong point, which is why most of the bills that are being proposed are not being executed well.
Oh sure. Generally speaking, most porn is a terrible sex educator.
However, it’s also a wrong target for concerns about child sexual abuse.
And crackdowns on “porn” tend to end up being crackdowns on sexuality-related speech and sweep in a lot of other speech too.
Its not the governments job to make up for absent parenting.
If you dont want your kids seeing things or doing shit online, its your job to monitor them and talk to them about it.
Stop throwing your kids a tablet and expecting that to be the fuckin parent.
I like the idea of having a cleaner internet for under 12s but I hate the idea of giving the government more control of the internet. Ultimately I side with freedom. I grew up on the wildwest internet and turned out fine. These kids will also be fine.
You didn’t turn out fine! You grew into a Freedomist, which puts you at odds with our beloved Safetyism.
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Yup. If the government was concerned, they could educate and empower parents to do this kind of stuff.
I’m against heavy handed regulation because it pushes people into more dangerous spaces, if you’re a teenager or unID’d adult who can’t access real porn sites do you decide not to look at boobs or do you seek out unregulated communities on places like discord?
Would you like your kid seeing generic regulated porn or seeing the kinds of things people can’t post on regulated porn sites? Plus not only is there the fact that the content on underground sites is by their nature the stuff not allowed on regulated sites but also do you want your kid taking to the creeps that hang out in porn sharing groups on discord?
Usually when politicians says “to protect children”, it’s not about children.
When politicians talk about protecting children they’re really talking about dismantling the nuclear family.
It’s the parents job to do that, not the government’s. I have kids, when they were at the age I didn’t want them seeing porn I made sure it was blocked, and I educated them on safe internet browsing. I don’t need the government’s help with that.
None of these politcians who push for all those “protect the children” laws actually gives a shit about child safety. The only thing that such laws mange to do is restrict freedom of speech and expression for everyone including children.
If you are a careless parent, then no law is going prevent your kids from watching porn.
The GOP is also the party of the chronically ill and the criminally insane. They just don’t want to admit that they want China’s great firewall style world wide web after wasting millions of dollars going after TikTok.
There’s no way for a government to do it that wouldn’t interfere with adults’ privacy.
There technically is, but it’s going to be a while until the government is ok with it. It’s called zero knowledge cryptography, where a user could prove they have an identification that is government issued, and that they are of age, without revealing any other information.
There’s a vanishingly small chance that the government wouldn’t fuck that up. Here is what would happen:
If the government really wanted to, it could provide citizens with a portal that would do oauth (or something similar) to authorize the porn access.
They could do some crypto crap to avoid storing anything about the citizen, so, unless the system is subborned, it doesn’t store anything about users.
EDIT: the point is that this kind of system can be implemented in a privacy-preserving manner. I’m ambivalent about the idea, but it has been enacted by a democratically elected government, so they should go about it in the most responsible manner possible.
No. Absofuckinglutely not.
Your original post said the last can’t be implemented in a privacy preserving manner. It can.
It absolutely cannot.
If the service is open source, I could actually see this working.
No. Open Source does not make violations of freedom somehow okay.
I thought it was obvious, but I guess I’m gonna go step-by-step. So, what’s needed to verify if you’re 18? Exactly one thing - a flag telling the other system yes/no! Very privacy friendly, porn site doesn’t know anything else about you. And obviously the auth system shouldn’t log that you verified for a porn site. That’s why it should be open source, so you can trust it.
The auth system knows you verified for something. The only way to actually preserve privacy is total anonymity to everyone.
Nope, it doesn’t. Did you read what I wrote or did you just have a knee-jerk reaction?
Please explain it to me like I’m five. How can the authentication service not know what your authenticating against? How can it provide you a token that you can’t use over and over again, or past other people?
OAuth specifically wants to know what you’re using your tokens for.
In principle if you insert a middleman into a transaction the middleman knows about the transaction. Thus it’s violates privacy
What good is it for the system to know, if the system disregards that information right after auth? Effectively it’s like no one ever knew.
You’re confusing intents and capabilities. When we’re talking about security and privacy we have to talk about capabilities. Not intents.
Somebody could have the best intentions, but you don’t want to give them the capability to hurt you. If it’s not necessary. So does a daycare need a volunteer militia to hang out all day cleaning their weapons? Probably not, the capability even if well intended is antithetical to the security and welfare of the children.
Even if the intention is good today, putting the framework and capability in just invites future corruption.
Hence why such a system would need to be open source and publicly audited.
If the system exists it will be abused. Therefore the government should not create the system to start with
It is a basic tautological fact that you cannot verify an identity while keeping that identity private from the verifier.
Then you don’t know much about IT. Sure, the verifier must know your identity at the point of identification. Doesn’t mean it has to store any information about what you did. Unless of course you’re worried that the PC itself will magically come to life and do something with the information. In that case you need an entirely different kind of help. Source for my claims: Designing system architecture is literally my job.
If it’s private and secure and isn’t linked to your identity, we will share it and it will be useless because everyone who shares the same login is the same over-18 person.
If it is in any way linked to your identity, the data is online and a target for breach which will expose said identity.
There is no realistic way to implement this which both actually does anything at all, AND does not require adding attack surface for breaches.
Please reread what I wrote. And regarding attack surface, everything you use adds attack surface.
Please reread what I wrote. And regarding everything you use adding attack surface, that is the absolute best argument to not use an additional service such as the aforementioned 3rd party auth.
What are we doing here?
Yeah. It’s possible, but I’m guessing there isn’t a will or an understanding of available tools.
I disagree. I could literally put some porn in this very comment. So the fediverse needs a porn barrier, and every file hoster, we can’t allow TOR, there is porn, and illegal porn as well. So please show us your id before entering TOR, pls.
It is an authoritarian move. It is undermining privacy. It is censoring the web.
It is parents and maybe schools responsabilty to teach kids how to interact with media, that porn exists and is not an actual representation of sex, and to restrict their access to pornography or media in general.
Furthermore, on planet earth, there are no perfect democracies, and the democratic system of the USA is flawed to a degree where it is at least questionable if your leaders are elected democratically.
It is still very shocking to us in Europe that the United States wants to control pornography before guns. I don’t know many people who have killed themselves by masturbating.
I’ve come close.
Doesn’t parts of Europe have stricter laws against porn or is that just UK?
I believe that pornography is illegal in Bulgaria, while in other places, there are no strict laws. There’s a warning banner that you must check if you are over 18 years old. That’s it. On the other hand, we have many gun control laws. Priorities.
Even the UK isn’t this level of strict - the things that are outlawed are those involving lack of consent and those that are very likely to injure people.