Porn sites Pornhub, XVideos, and Stripchat face stricter requirements to verify the ages of their users after being officially designated as “Very Large Online Platforms” (VLOPs) under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
I personally have mixed feelings, as the information collection could be used to link individuals and profile them. Possibly leading to discrimination if abused.
But I also feel that any random kid shouldn’t be able to just go to these sites and see porn freely.
Ofc, there’s always going to be those who mange to circumvent any protection put in place but it’d be much harder then just clicking a link or typing in the address.
I also feel that parents should actively monitor their kids online activities and step up a Blocklist to pro-actively prevent kids from reaching these sites to begin with.
What are your thoughts on this?
Absolute waste of tax money and resources, anyone advocating for this policy is an idiot and psychotic control freak that should never be allowed to opine on public policy.
Outdated values are driving this country back into the stone age. The body was designed to be horny as we go through teenage years. It’s nature. Rather than guide kids on the safe path, fools would forbid, outlaw, prohibit until they can’t control them after age of 18.
Here’s how this plays out… Kids are going to masturbate, regardless. They will dive deeper into the Internet into places with no restrictions and be exposed to really messed up stuff. Hey at least the parent can pat themselves on the back, right, they were good partners that did everything right by the book, even paying the kid’s therapist.
Which country would that be? This is EU related.
I don’t disagree with you otherwise. If we had a good age verification system that didn’t involve the website, only gave a boolean age check to the website, wasn’t logged at the government or any other level, I might think this was ok. But we don’t. So as soon as this starts I’ll pirate a bunch of porn.
I am in favor of stricter age verification for certain content. Not only for porn but also dating apps, social media, online shops, etc. But the current methods of age verification are a privacy nightmare and go well beyond what is reasonable. Especially since companies can’t be trusted to not do bad stuff with that information.
What is necessary is a double anonymity age verification service. Ideally run by a company that by law is required to be very transparent. That way we don’t have to provide personal information to companies that have no actual need for it but can still reduce the amount of minors getting into places they shouldn’t be.
Yes, it won’t be perfect, yes there will always be bad actors, but it will still do more good than harm.
I personally am open for a discussion about reducing the minimum age to view porn. I don’t have strong feelings either way.
The good old “Think of the children” argument again… This is an attack on online privacy, again. I hate it.
It is the parents responsibility to keep their kids safe. We don’t ban knives either just because a child could accidentally get hurt by one. And apart from that the regulations are not even well thought out, they will not stop a determined teenager with a lot of time on their hands.
I think its the regulatory body’s responsibility to provide a safe and secure service that can verify age requirements if they want to force that.
If they can’t provide that service, they shouldn’t require it, especially with such sensitive information.
But I also feel that any random kid shouldn’t be able to just go to these sites and see porn freely.
So they will just go to another site that doesn’t have age verification and doesn’t implement any security measures instead. Big sites are required to age check people before they are allowed to upload anything, that is not the case for most of the internet.
All age verification does is aggregate personal information and make it easy target for bad actors to steal. Instead of needing to go thought 100 sites, now that information & identities will be tied to a single database.
It’s also a slippery slope, since the same adult content is available not just on dedicated adult sites, but mainstream social media. Lemmy, Mastodon, Twitter, TikTok, Twitch (just recently wanted to allow nudity). Do you really want to have your identity tied to your online activity?
Governments should not be taking on parental duties.
Yeah. If my kid is a terrorist, they shouldn’t go to prison, that’s just the government trying to dictate what you can and can’t do. If a kid wants to skip school and torture stray animals, that’s just the way it is. Damn the government; always trying to get involved and “help” my “severely deranged” child. Society deserved all the things my son did to the public soda fountain.
Watching porn … terrorism.
I think I’m missing a few steps here.
Electronic ids can provide the age verification without giving out any personal information. This is a solved problem at least for a lot of ids in the EU.
But no i still find it a stupid idea. It is the parents job to parent them.
That’s still worrying: wouldn’t some central authority know that “site X requested age verification for this person”?
No. There is no 3rd party service needed. It all can happen only between the service asking and the id (smart card).
… and that’s different from the service having a record of your photo ID?
The service gets no other information other then “Is the holder of the id older then 18” => “Yes”
There is no personal data exchange.
I suspect you haven’t worked with governments before.
Just because something is technically possible, it’s no guarantee that it will be the chosen mechanism for something. More likely the contract will be awarded to either the lowest possible bidder, or to a friend of a friend. Cronyism is depressingly common at all levels.
I suspect you haven’t worked with governments before.
Just because something is technically possible, it’s no guarantee that it will be the chosen mechanism for something. More likely the contract will be awarded to either the lowest possible bidder, or to a friend of a friend. Cronyism is depressingly common at all levels.
Not sure why you are under that impression. I never discussed the potential chosen mechanism.
I stated that it is possible and that it is already implemented into the id card of many eu citizens.
In the worst case a privacy nightmare, and in the best case useless.
“Please enter your age:”
Me, 15 years old: “Yes, I was born in 1973.”
“use this rotary phone to enter your year of birth”
I don’t want any company putting my identity into a database along with my sexual interests. Just consider what’s been done to the gay++ community.
It won’t work. Ever. VPN’s free and paid exist, File sharing exists, Torrents exist, AI pornography generators exist, freenet, tor, I2P all exist. There is no action a government could take that would have any true impact in this regard unless they made the use of the internet illegal, and even at that, it would create a black market in which such things could still be purchased as physical media.
All this does is allow government entities to infringe on privacy rights further by doing what they have always done - hiding behind children.
Might be a stupid question but is there any peer reviewed research that shows that porn is harmful to minors? Early humans didn’t have clothes so minors were seeing nudity for centuries. Of course, there’s the issue that porn gives men unrealistic expectations about women & sex, but that’s an issue regardless of age.
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I don’t understand… your first couple sentences support my argument with evidence but then you say I’m wildly ignorant? Simply saying “their brains are still developing” and nothing else is a classic “protect the children” platitude
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