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.
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.
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.
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.
Then 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
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.
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.
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Oh well that’s even easier then. I don’t care what other people’s children do, in general.