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As I mentioned, the UK manages porn sites perfectly well without mandatory ID verification. It may not be completely impenetrable, but that's fine. Surely you would be happy about this fact, rather than demanding something that you say is bad? You seem to be arguing that a) the current system is insufficiently robust and must be reformed and b) a more robust system would be bad. Why not be happy with our imperfect system?
That is a very naive position. It's technically correct, in the same way that I can technically go and live in the woods. In practice, peer pressure is immensely powerful, and parents find it extremely difficult to tell their kids 'every child in your class has a smartphone, but you can't have one'. Even if successful, it still causes parents a huge amount of stress having to constantly re-fight the battle every day. That is why we have rules around kids smoking and drinking. Technically, we could abolish age restrictions and just say to parents 'it's up to you'. In reality, humans are a social species that work around norms. The free for all status quo simply allows those norms to be set by tech companies, rather than by parents.
And why exactly does Pornhub or AgeGo want a grainy, 3 second video of my face at 2am? Leaving aside the fact that big companies do, in fact, obey the law as a rule, because breaking it is bad for business, you seem to imply that these companies are holding on to data that they have explicitly promised to (and are legally obliged to) delete for the sake of being evil and creepy, in spite of no actual benefit to them.
Oh please I visited the UK three months ago and stayed there for a few weeks, it was a trivial matter to find sites that didn't demand some form of proof. I live in NC where we have similar laws, it is also very easy to get past because I'm not giving my ID to porn sites.
And if I find it really easy, I assume any teenager with decent motivation and a lack of retardation can also do it.
Because it's not a fact, it's a failure. When I say effective I mean effective, not theater. They are easy af to bypass.
Will kids never ask their parents for a smartphone or social media in a world where it takes a facial scan? Seems like a pretty wild claim to me.
Parents who are cool with their kids smoking and drinking let them! They'll buy cigarettes and alcohol for them. It's just not many parents are cool with it.
Then why did the discord leak happen? You could just as easily say the same thing about them, and yet tons of people got their identification revealed anyway. Leaks like this happen constantly with people's data. Your argument is refuted by the real world happenings.
I agree, but the system is new and there's obviously going to be a degree of cat and mouse. If we required perfection for every system we wouldn't have any systems at all.
I'm less concerned about teenagers and more concerned about very small children. 40% of six year olds own a tablet in the UK, and another 40% have access to one. Before the current rules were in place, most of them had access to the infinity of online porn. My eight year old neice doesn't have a smartphone, but kids at her school do and have shown her videos of ISIS beheadings. This concerns me (and approximately every parent). I suspect you don't have kids. I assure you, internet libertarianism becomes much less appealing once you do.
Because Discord used a different third party verification company with a different process.
Ah, older siblings. Where would we be without them? (A better place, perhaps?) Perhaps more interesting is the apparent fact they're able to correctly spell 'beheading', given their typical performance on the more pedestrian spelling tests and the lack of auto-complete.
Kids have been grossing each other out and watching absurd nonsense since forever. Porn is kind of like that [for them] too, for that matter, though I get that women (and their simps) complain about normalizing the concept that women have sex, occasionally on camera- which is naturally/by instinct what they're trying to stamp out. Of course, these women will then turn around and assert that a 7 year old boy willing to play with the dollies is trans and needs immediate medical treatment.
I believe you are incapable of telling the difference between the two. That property affects young adults (and by extension, older adults) more negatively than it does small children, for obvious reasons, but it's fun to do that to them so people see that as a value-add. It's neutral at worst; it's not like they vote.
Or rather, currently the norms are set by reality, not parents. Naturally, parents are very angry and Stressed(tm) out about this.
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"Not perfect" is overselling it too, not even close to effective is the more likely truth. Even if it's already at China levels (doubtful given it's way less strict), then 80% of children still have a means of access without issue.
"Access" sure that is technically true, but how many six year olds care to sit around and watch porn anyway? Tons of them will just be grossed out as little kids tend to do with sexual things. Maybe like 10+ or something will have a meaningful cohort seeking out porn but that's already in the age that just clicking on sites until something works or taking their parents ID from their wallet should be simple and obvious.
I do have a three year old so I don't have much experience with Internet access, but at home I do know there's a very simple fix. Don't let my kid have a phone. The same way I wouldn't let them drink or party. Out of the house I can't control, but if it was say, the early 2000s I also wouldn't be able to stop my kid and his friends going on the computer during a sleepover at a friend's house If they wanted to look up ISIS videos either.
I agree with phones out of school. In fact the mechanism for banning phones is simple, the adult in charge of monitoring them doesn't allow phone use. Simple and easy and any parent can employ it right now if they choose. If they're too weak willed to say no, then they're gonna be too weak willed when they say "mommy can I scan your face for Instagram pweaseeee, all my friends parents do it!"
It's perfectly safe until it's not, in which case it becomes "uh it was just that one". But how do you know in advance which one will be saved and leaked?
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I for one wouldn't be concerned about a six-year-old finding porn because they aren't going to watch infinity of it (unlike twelve-year-olds). My guess is that on opening such a website on accident they're going to think it's weird and gross and close it immediately and maybe, maybe ask their parents a few questions that the parents would prefer not to answer but should be equipped to anyway.
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And there are further ways to avoid giving away your Valid Personal Nomenclature....
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Yeah, I’m not a big fan of the UK system (from my understanding, users have to buy a card from a retailer that validates age, typically in person?), and it has some obvious and well-documented faults. But it’s still not quite as stupid as asking people to upload their photo ID.
That’s presuming you can get the system without getting OFCOM and that whole related mess — the ease of the system for normies may well have made that more palatable politically! — but my guess is that they’re separate results of different political drives.
I haven't heard of that one. Ofcom lists a bunch of acceptable methods here, but none of them involve buying a card from a shop.
Let's go over the acceptable method
Requires your face, thereby identifying you.
Requires banking details, thereby identifying you.
Vague enough that maybe it doesn't require it somehow for the "digital identity wallets" but questionable as to how the digital identity wallets verify it then without identifying you.
Requires your credit card details, thereby identifying you.
requires your email for the purpose of linking it to other things you use your email for like banks and utility, thereby identifying you.
Requires you to have your mobile network confirm you, thereby identifying you.
This is obviously identifying you.
You claimed "without mandatory ID verification", meanwhile every single one includes a form of mandatory identification. And despite that, it still fails as I've outlined in another comment.
Not only is it easy to bypass through the many many many sites that don't bother because they aren't big/based in the UK, but they also have obvious weak points for any non retard child to do.
Stuff like facial age estimation has been bypassed by video game characters and YouTube videos (and perhaps AI videos too), credit card/ID can be bypassed by just grabbing your parents wallet, mobile network operator age just use your parents or a friend's number.
It leaves the "in China 80% of kids are still gaming" problem left unsolved.
That isn't what I said. My exact words were '90% of them use third parties like AgeGo which don't require you to upload ID'. That obviously means uploading e.g. a driving licence, not age estimation through the camera.
Because yes, in order to use age estimation, AgeGo will need a short video clip of my face, which will then be deleted once the verification is complete. If this counts as 'identifying me' then fine, I don't care. It's worth it if it makes it harder for children to watch porn.
The particulars of identification don't really matter. If it's your face analyzed by AI or an ID card, you still have to connect your identity to your accounts (and the actions you take on an account). There's no way to get around that in order to truly know you are an adult, they have to have a general understanding of who you are.
If my face is an identifying piece of information, then my privacy is already being violated every time I walk outside or go in a city and get captured by 3000 CCTV cameras. AgeGo doesn't know my name, my date of birth, my address, my employer or any of my login details for any of my accounts. Given that there are already photos of me on my Facebook profile with my actual name and date of birth, worrying about AgeGo 'violating my privacy' by attaching a token to my Pornhub account that says I'm 18+ seems misguided.
This reminds me of my grandparents telling me not to buy things online with a credit card because 'hackers could steal my information'. Like technically yes, there is always a risk doing anything, but baseless paranoia is counterproductive.
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Buying a tag from Tesco’s with cash like you’d buy a beer is the closest you can get I think.
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Sure it will.
I will quote my earlier response here.
So what reason does AgeGo have to keep a grainy, 3 second video of my face at 2am?
Because there are many parties who wish to know for savoury or unsavoury reasons what embarrassing things people are doing when they think they’re alone - the security services among them - and consequently that information is very valuable.
I’m not saying that the ID company is saving face-key dicts, but I wouldn’t be very surprised if they were. And if this became rolled out all over the country and users got used to the system it would be very easy for the government to quietly or publicly justify getting the company to cough up ids. Especially when losing government accredition would immediately torpedo their business.
You may consider this excessively paranoid and you might even be right but the insistence on ID at a time when the government has been very clear that what you do alone in your room puts you as a thought criminal or potential rapist doesn’t inspire confidence in me.
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I think that meant a government issued ID document, not the act of identifying.
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Huh. I guess I was thinking of the older MindGeek AgeID system, which seems to have been sunsetted before being broadly implemented. The OfCom list there looks nearly identical to the proposals most American social conservatives (or anti-social-media people) have proposed, when they've considered any detail, with the sole exception of 'phone-based filtering'.
All of them seem to have similar privacy concerns: there's still a single point of data ownership that connects a user's meatspace name to their account(s). The ICO double-pinky-swearing people to safety doesn't really seem that persuasive from a security perspective.
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