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.
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).
This is why we need decentralized, open source porn websites.
So, head on over to LemmyNSFW.com and upload a pic of your junk.
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.
uses vpn, lies about age and manages to access porn site, despite claims otherwise
Mission failed successfully
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.
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.
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.
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”.
I agree, the country is delving deeper into authoritarianism by each second. The children and minors is just another exploitable class to them.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
should it be left wholly on parents to police the whole internet
Nope. Just their kids.
Like always.
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.
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 my 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.
Looks like I picked the right time to get a girlfriend
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.
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.”
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yay, more invasion of privacy and censorship
Remember to apply this to 4chan, UK.
*chan, Facebook, Reddit, imgur, xitter, Lemmy, Mastodon…
well…maybe Australia had a good idea…
Does this mean Brits need to through their bank to get a wank?
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.
