This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I have to agree with PornHub's idea.
A device should be able it indicate in its browser headers whether its primary user is an adult or a minor and the service can react accordingly.
It won't protect all the children but children of parents who can't be assed to setup a device properly will have problems no matter how much we increase the surveillance state.
A device should be able it indicate in its browser headers whether its primary user is an adult or a minor and the service can react accordingly.
I can already see that being used for targeting children with specific ads on the internet.
The laws around advertising are fucked to begin with but the headers SHOULD be used in advertising 100%
The minor flag would actually remove the LARGE gray area that platforms take advantage of to push harmful ADs and content to kids (Today they just get to play dumb)
This would actually create a framework to enforce existing advertising laws as well as data collection laws with regards to minors.
Examples: Minors should not see ads for holsters, knives, ammo, ED medications, Diet drugs, muscle building drugs, Alcohol, Tobacco products, Online Gambling
These are all things I have seen advertised on YouTube to me; Granted I am not a minor but I am also just using Youtube by going to the site with no account.
If I was an advertiser for those products I'd be pissed that my ad dollars are going non targets anyway. So it would be a win win
Kids are the target of gambling ads because it conditions them into thinking it’s normal
I imagine other products see similar benefits
advertising some products to kids will probably make them future customers. tobacco/vape/gambling etc.
Kids are babied already but if 14 year olds can vote in party elections, and 16 year olds can consent to sexual intercourse with adults, then I don't think restricting porn is our problem. Either kids can make decisions, or all of these laws need to align with each other more logically.
We have taken parents rights away to allow children to make decisions on their gender and name changes, yet we expect parent to be responsible for their actions like accessing porn.
I could not care less about whatever the final say is on age restrictions, but if there are gonna be rules, at least make them make sense you know? I also do not love that I have to verify my identity to use the internet. Look at the UK and how that's working out there even without IDs. Talk about authoritarian control.
This stuff is the whole reason I switched to this platform.
I am actually in full agreement.
A header would put the setting on the device and only indicate "Minor" or "Not Minor" which would allow to restrict or allow porn without having to collect everyone's PII just so they can crank their hog.
If you read previous things though such an indicator would put a lot more responsibility onto Social Media platforms to not show harmful content to minors. Today they get away with it because "TOS says only 18 year olds are allowed to us this service"
South Park kind of nailed the attitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park_(Not_Suitable_for_Children)
These ideas are all fundamentally misguided. Let's take a step back what we are trying to do here: We want to create a system so that the government can withhold certain information from certain people. That's both difficult and dangerous.
PornHub's idea requires cooperation from the hosters. You are not likely to get global agreement on that. So you will still need to do something about those foreign sites, such as blocking them.
At that point, such a law would achieve 2 things:
Blocklists that parents can install on their devices already exist, so there would be no change in that regard.
Of course, minors have no trouble circumventing such software. They have plenty of time and they are horny. You can't win. The only faint hope might be to include such features at deeper levels, similar to existing DRM schemes. This would be ripe for abuse by bad actors or governments. It certainly would be used against the consumer by the copyright industry and tech monopolies; just like existing DRM schemes.
So we really should ask why we would want to walk further down this expensive, hostile, and dangerous path. Are we afraid that masturbation causes blindness?
This is all dumb. If you're worried about kids surfing porn sites then the legal guardian should act accordingly. There are so many methods to blocking porn sites that it's almost hilarious. Web filtering; most ISPs are able to support website filtering on their supplied gateway or DNS. Parental controls on device; most devices come with opyional locks built-in at this point especially if it's aimed towards children.
Sure, it's not perfect but it's better than removing yet another layer of web anonymity. We see how well browser fingerprinting is going, let's not make it easier to track who is browsing where than it already is. But that's the real point behind these bills, isn't it?
Edit: I guess I was ranting mainly about the porn, but honestly, these are all things that parents should be aware of their children doing. If it's an awareness issue, then that should be the next step. The government going straight from "oh there's a problem" to "let's make it illegal" without trying to raise awareness is extremely heavy handed.
I don't even have kids and I have protection in place at home to block devices from accessing sites, not exclusively porn tho, gambling and social networks.
Porn can be bad, okay, but if we taught our kids properly it's not that bad and curiosity is ok. Gambling is terrible and more and more people are getting addicted to it.
Fuck government paternalism.
Block it to the point where you are not going to accidentally stumble upon it. Once they are determined to find it then there really isn't much point.
Also, Reddit will block anything NSFW if you are under 18. Anything related to sex often gets flagged as NSFW. So I guess fuck you if you are 16 and trying to have safe sex I guess. NSFW probably shouldn't always mean 18+
Agreed, they are and will be relentless. We'll need to be comfortable 'missing out' on popular sites e.g., Lemmy instead of Reddit.
For those who want to rewind the clock to when the web was anonymous, check out how to access I2P.
And for parents, there are some good blocklists at https://oisd.nl/ including NSFW blocklists.
cosmetics that contain certain chemicals like Vitamin A or alpha hydroxy acids.
I believe I can buy a ton of these chemicals over the counter and shove them all at once down my cockhole without ID. Is dabbing a smidge on my cheeks dangerous?
I wouldn’t recommend doing that
One of the experiences I will never forget was "teaching" an ICT class about 2 decades ago (I was a TA who got left to cover a class - good times).
The older ones of you will remember the trick (many of us used it for playing flash games like adventure quest!) - have two browser windows open, minimise the one with the thing you were not supposed to be doing on it when the teacher comes around - no evidence right?
These kids were doing the same thing - I swear I've never seen so much porn in my entire life. Oh and yes, a lot of it involved Japanese animation. This was on a network with parental controls enabled by the way, because it didn't block those sites.
Here's the thing - and we all know it, no matter what measures you put in place kids will find away around it. More crudely put "If little Timmy wants titties, Timmy going to move heaven and earth to find them".
They'll sneak a parental passport at 3am when you're sleeping, or just VPN on in, or even invest in a fake ID. Nothing you do is going to stop that; you have to sleep some time, you have a lot of goals, they can stay up all night, and they only have one.
Catching your kids with porn and dealing with it is a game of whack-a-mole every parent has to play, and honestly it's one they need to play. It's about having those difficult talks and saying "it's ok to want to look as long as you realise it isn't real".
Mass surveillance isn't the way - if I were a government hostile to the USA (and soon the UK), I'd be working on making the best free porn site ever made. Think of all the free documents and credentials, think of all the blackmail material, think of all the harm that could be inflicted.
Admittedly, skin cream is likely to face less of a rabid drive from kids, and isn't something you'd blackmail over. Then again, maybe little Timmy needs some lotion, or maybe president Puta wants to use my girlfriend's skin lotion addiction to compel me to spy for Russia?
Yeah. Keep public spaces (meaning, advertising) mostly free of porn. Aside from that, children who are interested in porn and sex are ready for it, let them explore it with the neccessary knowledge and care and avoid abuse from broken grown ups. Laws should be focused on that, a sensible approach, including the parents.
Generally saying "porn only for 18+" doesn't work, since it's a primary instinct.
Even worse, we know that sexual repression just pushes people into more extreme and unusual sexual practices in adulthood. Just give children comprehensive sexual education already. It prevents unwanted pregnancies, sexual abuse and mental illness.
Like, I remember the pirate radio station making a big hubbub during that time when rock n roll was banned in the UK. I could see illegal porn sites operating on ships in international waters, outside the boundaries of US enforcement using satellite connections to get their content out there. Problem is, the US is a little more trigger happy and might just send Navy ships out to sink them. If it happens in international waters nobody has to know.
We have a lot of land in the US that is a pain in the ass to get to, would be harder to set up but I could see some spiteful folks setting up something in the remote asshole of the mountain ranges. Would also be a lot harder to follow them if they pissed off as well.
I'm sure big tech is stoked on this idea. I mean, they were always able to figure out who most people were but now people have to straight up enter their identification and positively confirm.
I'm sure no one will use that information for nefarious reasons, right?
Frankly already a moot point - your browser fingerprints are already uniquely identifying (even before IP, cookies, and backend analytics). Realistically, tho, just more info for them to sell, leak and then eventually pay $0.25 per person in Google Play credit in the class action settlement.
What? Now kids have to learn how to download a VPN before buying makeup? Should be some good pepperidge farm memes soon
VPNs don't help here, the website asks you for your driver's license. Tbf giving your credit card to them is typically enough for them (big tech + govt) to construct a full profile of who you are anyway, and that was the original "age gate" -- though there are some services that make CCs modestly privacy preserving -- not the case for IDs
Yea, age restriction like this is a nogo for me. And yess, VPN would help, since in other countries, they still allow access just by clicking “I am 18”.
Such laws are guaranteed to fail in their written objectives. The intended objective is to lead idiots to believe they help.
You don't even need to visit adult sites to find porn nowadays. Its all on social media.
Given the 3 examples given in the article, I would say that this time they are wrong. None of the items given as examples should be accessible to a minor without parents approval anyway, expecially if we are talking about medical items.
Not that I think that a law will magically change something, btw.
In the laws references in the article, the need for #1 and #3 were caused by social media. Yet we target the individual rather than the social media company for the fix. Let's don't fix the source of the problem but we can make life more difficult for many millions of people. How dumb are we in this country?
Same issue as recycling. Shift responsibility to the individual for something completely out of their control.
