The European Commission preliminarily found Pornhub, Stripchat, XNXX and XVideos in breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA) for failing to protect minors from being exposed to pornographic content on their services.
That’s not how the internet works.
The onus is on the users. The parents are the ones who have to figure out a way to ensure what their kid’s devices can access, or that they are educated enough not to seek it.
I am once again asking why a non-European website (pornhub) should have to care.
If you want to censor stuff so bad, then hop to it. Why are you asking people outside your borders censor themselves?
If kids are willfully seeking porn, then it ain’t anybody’s business to stop them. Exploring and enjoying your sexuality is part of growing up, and “moral” whackjobs shouldn’t get to decide how people grow up.
Protecting the kids should be about providing useful information, contraception, and official aid against predators.
I’m pretty liberal but nobody’s kids need to watch anyone get tied up and anally fucked while they scream.
I get your point about regular stuff, but there is a fuckton of irregular stuff
And you bring that up bcz you think that’s specifically what OP was referring to?
Hey EU (and all other regulatory agencies interested in “protecting the children”), how about you provide information to parents on how they can setup their own blocking tools, like DNS. You can do this for free, today, right now and actually get the results you supposedly want.
It’s a precursor to a digital ID.
Because China and Russia will use bots.
If we don’t have to do anything about China wanting Tienanmen Square being suppressed then we don’t have to do anything about any foreign nation suppressing anything of ours. And if we do have to care about one, why do we not have to care about the others?
Back to magazines and dvds?
The real crime here is while the EU is trying every angle to error your privacy, that time is not being spent on real issues. You are being sold out by the very people put into positions of power to serve you. If the data supported their goals, I would be there with them, but the data is very clear on the matter and the it indicates we are in for big issues with all these IDs being stored by centralized targets.
Minors accessing porn on their own is not a real problem, and hurts no one.
Teenagers beyng addicted to porn is a real problem.
Teenagers being addicted to anything is a real problem. Prohibition doesn’t work.
Porn addiction is so astroturfed by evangelicals, that whatever actual addiction for porn there is have been drowned out by endless amount of “if you ever thought about wanting it then you’re an addict, please find jesus”.
All addiction is a problem. Hyper- focusing on porn addiction without any objective data on how much addiction of porn is occuring in teenagers and then trying to clumsily legislate away porn in response is bad governance.
If porn addiction is occuring at the same rate as gambling addiction, alcholoism and drug addicition then the problem is not likely to be any of those things individually but likely to be something else.
this is more of a parent involvement problem. the world will continue being scary and have millions of harmful things. it’s up to parents to prepare their children to survive and adapt to this world
So we should force companies to deal with that? Not parents?
None of this stops teens who want to find porn from finding porn.
Is it? Is there research on it?
Actually yes. Tons of research. For both teen and adults.
But you could have googled that yourself instead of choosing to be a fucking idiot about it.
Do you imagine this is a good way of addressing any addiction issues?
But not my fuckin problem!
porn should be behind age of consent not behind 18; being allowed to fuck someone but not see media of sexual things is total bullshit
and not as a law. this is not the government’s job at all. prohibition doesn’t work. the only solution is proper sex ed
just because it’s harmful to the self (according to dubious claims) doesn’t mean that people should not have this freedom. people’s freedom is more important than prevention of them harming themselves.
Whoever’s currently responsible for the kid should be responsible for watching them and keeping them out of shit they shouldn’t be getting into. Expecting everyone else to put up with this privacy invading shit is fucking stupid.
The smart people never enter politics and so rational solutions like yours never see the day of light. Plus, it is more about collecting your data and control than protecting anyone.
true
And that’s how it begins. Soon they’ll start asking everyone to provide ID to access the internet.
If they want to know who I am they can already ask my ISP, I don’t see why they need to also have a copy of my driving license.
Exactly. Chat Control being rejected is a minor victory unfortunately. There are VERY powerful actors and organizations behind the scenes for these policies.
I think they realized chat control wasn’t going to work, but do not abandon the watch post, they will be back with a different approach.
Chat control is absolutely going to work with some time, they can just propose it every week. It can afford to fail 100 times, it only needs to pass once - it’s not like these people run out of money. Depressing
There are VERY powerful actors
God, I fucking hate this timeline. You know you’re talking about Zuckerberg in that way, right? It’s disgusting that he ought fit such an eery description.
That’s why we need decentralized infrastructure like a meshnet or personal/community satellite network. Reticulum based networks are imo the best candidates for that, right now and in the foreseeable future.
I suggest that instead of age verification for kids, we do parenting verification licences for anyone wanting to have kids, before they have kids and then don’t raise them.
Some might be upvoting this in cheeky irony, but I see this as a modest proposal.
This position deserves a longer form article & widespread publication, and numerous calculations & studies detailing how much more ethically beneficial this would be for society. Would it not be more efficient to curb idiocy among the masses by regulating people’s choices in population control than conducting intimate mass government surveillance? Would it not be a higher ethical stance to give people the illusion of choice by making them work for the privilege of birthing, maintenance, and management of another human being?
Counterpoint: it is cheaper and cost-effective to dehumanize and control the masses with the technical advances we have today
, and-also, to hell with ethics. Think about it. If car manufacturers would be made responsible for designing cars to identify bad actors, we wouldn’t have to deal with the inevitable consequences of people who gain their driving licenses but bend the rules anyway. We could do with discarding licensing altogether because it’s not perfect. Only by singling out and reprimanding each person for their faults with the conviction of a Walmart micromanager and the ruthless efficiency of Palantir surveillance - can we create a more perfect bubble of safety for society.~(I don’t have time to even pretend to cough up statistics, k thx bye)~
Ah, the classic dichotomy: privacy vs eugenics
It’s not eugenics if you just confiscate them at birth. This is already being done with severely unfit parents
One: that’s not what was suggested. OP said parental verification/authorization before birth.
Two: you’re proposing something like residential schools instead. Which, even if you don’t agree constituted genocide, was still pretty bad.
I’m not advocating for our government’s insane privacy-violating measures. Just pointing out that OP’s proposal is worse. There’s got to be better ways to protect children than “police state” or “genocide.”
I cannot believe the downvoting coming your way for this.
On one - how the abuse of this cannot be foreseen by the most clueless person is beyond me.
On two - are people under the impression that the current child welfare system is adequate for the children that are currently in it? What about that system makes them think it would be suitable to increase the number of children in care.
Fucking mental.
Yeah, I almost wrote a whole counterpoint on how horrible the current child welfare system is and how nearly every trained professional agrees that breaking up families should only be the last resort in the most extreme circumstances, but I had a feeling this thread wasn’t the target audience for that particular reality.
I’m not proposing anything, I’m saying that if you’re a drug addict or a violent criminal, this already happens so it’s not that far-fetched.
Rather than going to residential schools, these children usually go to relatives who can actually take care of them, or if that’s not an option they might go to the admittedly not ideal system we already have for children whose parents are dead or just completely absent.
Didn’t know about Stripchat. Sooo … thanks, EU?
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I wonder why the EU didn’t find the parents of the kids to be in breach of whatever relevant child “protection” laws there are? I guess they are okay with the porn websites raising the kids. Maybe the EU can make PornHub to start a chain of day care centers?
I would trust porn stars more than Conservatives to raise children properly
no one should be in breach
just because a freedom enables harming of the self does not mean that it should be taken away
Agreed. I was making a tongue in cheek comment about the absurdity of this whole thing. In my opinion, the parents are more responsible than the porn sites, but no one should be punished because young Peter managed to see a boob.
So let me get this straight:
When I was 13, I managed to figure out the router password, disabled child protection for myself, then watched porn on my Android 2.3 phone that I had managed to put a custom ROM on because I liked the way it looked and had no idea what a “launcher” was yet.
This is not a hypothetical btw.
My parents were smart enough to enable appropriate blocking and secured access to those settings. I’m not sure something on-device was available at the time, but I included the bit about the custom rom to demonstrate that, even though I didn’t know WTF I was doing, I was more than capable of fucking around with the tech to get it to do what I wanted.
So were my parents in breach of their duties on child protection?
I don’t think they were. They actually did educate themselves (visiting a course / parent meetup to discuss and learn how to protect me from the Internet), and implemented everything they learned.
I was just a little shit and found a way around this.
And this is NOT an edgecase. Because guess what. It takes one kid in the friend group to figure out a way to circumvent parental controls, and then EVERYONE knows how to do it.
It simply does not fucking matter how well intentioned, knowledgeable, and present the parents are (mine were all of that).
Going “this would not be a problem if parents parented” is the LAZIEST fucking excuse, and I’m sick and tired of reading about it on here.
(Because I probably have to make it clear: I’m not advocating for photo/passport scanning, third party age verification,… and all that bullshit. What I think would be a FANTASTIC idea would be privacy-preserving age verification. There are two good ways to do this: 1) on a login attempt, prove that you are of age by presenting a fresh, signed token from a government service proving that you are over 18, and nothing else; site does not get any info, government does not know what you were trying to access; 2) a device-level age field. Proof here comes from the device itself, and can be 100% privacy preserving; just a “yep, is of age”. In this scenario… GUESS WHAT, PARENTS GET ENABLED TO PARENT “PROPERLY” BY PROVIDING THEM WITH A GOOD, SIMPLE, PRIVACY-PRESERVING TECHNICAL SOLUTION.)
While no system is perfect, technology has improved a lot since you were a kid.
For one, like it or not, many phones no longer allow custom ROMs or tampering. But even that aside, network inspection takes way less processing power now so a basic gateway can now handle dynamic block lists, DNS filtering, VPN detection, etc. If properly implemented it could ensure your parent’s use a password with good complexity and require MFA in order to turn it off.
Now, circumvention techniques have improved as well, but cheap cryptography really changes things and it can be used to make a very secure system. I think this is where our effort should be focused, on making sure ISP provided hardware has these options available to parents. It makes much more sense than trying to force this on all endpoints.
Id say your parents managed to get you to educate yourself in lots of useful skills by giving you a motivation. Good job.
I’d also like to think so. In this case though, this was clearly not what was intended, and also involved a lot of porn.
I really should remember to put a huge “THIS IS NOT A VERY SERIOUS COMMENT” on most of my comments. I find I’m way too snarky for text based communication.
Anyways. I’m not saying parents should be punished because their kid managed to watch porn. I was just making a joke about how stupid everything is.
I didn’t grow up with routers and android phones. My equivalent of breaking into the router and changing the password was to climb into the paper recycling container to find Donald Duck comics but ending up finding porno mags.
The fact is, kids are always going to find porn. There’s just no way around it. If they put ID proof protections on the websites, they just gonna figure out torrents or some other way of downloading stuff.
In that case: sorry to blow up on you. I have seen to many comments on here claiming these things while being 100% serious. I just saw your comment and incidentally had time to write the above for once, so, here we are.
I agree that there’s no way to completely cut teens off from porn. Your torrent example is perfectly demonstrating this.
But I also do not understand the current outrage at anything trying to improve the situation, even when it’s not some stupid “scan your face” scheme.
It’s mostly just that I don’t want the government to know precisely which websites I visit. Nor do I want the the porn sites to know exactly who I am.
Let me have my privacy. I’ve been watching porn since I was 12 or 13 and absolutely would’ve figured out a way to do it even if there’d been age restrictions because I was horny af. Nothing bad has happened to me because of it. Perhaps a mild addiction to masturbation unless I’m having sex but that hurts literally nobody. Worse case scenario I last a little too long occasionally.
Block pornhub and teens will find much seedier sites.
It’s mostly just that I don’t want the government to know precisely which websites I visit. Nor do I want the the porn sites to know exactly who I am.
I understand, I want that too. It’s easily possible though (just one example for a scheme):
- you visit porn site
- porn site sends your browser a random nonce
- you/browser tell government service: sign this if I’m >18
- government signs the nonce + a timstamp to prove freshness
- your browser forwards the result to the porn site
- porn site can verify signature per standard public certificate chains
- now porn site has proof that you are >18, but knows nothing else about you; and government only knows that you wanted proof that you are an adult, but not for what site or purpose you wanted to prove that
Alternatively, if we go the “device has an age bracket field browsers access” route, it’s even simpler, and just as if not more privacy preserving.
That already tells the government that I’m accessing porn because why else would I need to confirm I’m an adult online? And why would they implement it in a somewhat private manner if it could be implemented in a privacy-infringing manner?
And why would they implement it in a somewhat private manner if it could be implemented in a privacy-infringing manner?
I honestly don’t think most democratic governments have an interest in making this privacy-infringing. Lobbyists/companies on the other hand… But all the more reason to write legislation that ensures age verification must be handled like this.
That already tells the government that I’m accessing porn because why else would I need to confirm I’m an adult online?
Cinema rickets for FSK18 movie? Ordering alcohol? Gambling? Renting a car?
Basically anything you’re only allowed to do as an adult.
But that’s kind of why I mentioned, it’s just one rough draft for such a protocol.
While I agree that your situation isn’t an edge case (I found dads locked porn collection of VHS tapes and learned that that lock could be circumvented with a fridge magnet) at the age of 9?
But on the other hand, let’s say you post something to the internet that may be considered not okay for children. And let’s say that thing is about gun powder (which you absolutely can make from foraging natural ingredients). It’s your personal website, it’s labeled as not intended for children and you aren’t a big company so you don’t have the ability to just hire another company for things like age verification.
Then you get sued by a regulatory body in another country because you didn’t adhere to their laws? Does that sound reasonable to you?
If a parent or guardian is taking every precaution to keep their kid safe that is reasonable within the law and that kid still gains access to something that can harm them that’s an accident. If the parent takes no precautions and allows their child that they are legally responsible for the well being and safety of to raw dog life with no precautions whatsoever because that’s too hard, or they don’t care or whatever, then it seems reasonable to me that they be held responsible under the law.
Their right to have a third party protect their children ends at my right to privacy which to me extends to my right to anonymity specifically because it has already been shown that without anonymity privacy just doesn’t exist in this age of the internet.
What does that mean? It means that companies that collect your data but promise “privacy” cannot be trusted to uphold that promise, which means the only option left is to be as anonymous as possible.
I want you to understand that I do agree that when one kid figures out the loophole, that loophole spreads like wild fire.
But on the other hand, if a child figured out how to turn off the security system to the family car, grabbed the keys and went for a joyride with their friends, is it the fault of the parents or the fault of the car manufacturer? Because one of them is legally liable under the law.
Would it be acceptable to have to send your thumbprint to BMW every time you wanted to drive your car?
And what do you think happens when big platforms have to introduce age verification? People will just go to smaller unregulated sites which may inadvertently be worse because of malware risks and unregulated content. You just can’t take the porn out of the internet, people always find a way
Yep, this is already happening with Pornhub in The States.
