[Discussion] How do you feel about age verification on Porn sites?

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?

devfuuu,

Just open another site.

possiblylinux127,

Age verification is silly and can be easily bypassed. What we should do is just block adult content by default. Most content people want to see is not adult oriented anyway. If someone wants that they can do that at home by just turning off the filters.

Mango,

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.

golden_zealot,
@golden_zealot@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

Anonymouse,

Is it the responibility of any government to enforce a parental policy? What if I, as a parent, support my kid to view this stuff?

At home, I was allowed to have alcohol with supper at family meals from about 13.

I feel like the regulations should be to give parents control over their child’s activities if they so choose. While we’re at it, make it illegal to collect information about a person, parent or child, without their express concent. I don’t know how, but there are many smart people in the world that can probably figure it out.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Snake oil salesmen never had it so good. Without the layers of abstraction provided by computers, nobody would've believed their magic elixirs would protect children from getting interested in sex until their parents approved of it.

skullgiver,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

There are various ways in which age verification can be done without sacrificing privacy. Sadly, that requires standardised digital ID combined with several privacy preserving technologies that I’ve only seen used experimentally (I think Yivi comes closest, but its protocol involves sending identifiers between their servers and the consuming service, and requires services to be registered rather than arbitrarily accessible).

In its core, these protocols use digitally signed attributes (could be “SSN” or “birthday”, but more practically this could also just be “is over 18”). With this system, you can simply transmit the token that says “I’m an adult”, the website verifies this, and you’re done. To prevent abuse through infinite reuse, these apps need to be verified occasionally, and the secrets must not be stored somewhere they can be copied from easily, but phones have solved that problem ages ago.

Unfortunately, I don’t think governments who support these restrictions will also invest into these technologies. Perhaps efforts such as eIDAS will allow for some kind of non-profit to create and generate these tokens based on your standard digital government ID, but as of now, there’s nothing.

Any technology can be bypassed by kids (just steal dad’s porn pass!), so there’s a limit to how effective age gates are. On the other hand, anything that requires stealing stealing devices protected with a PIN will be sufficient in most cases.

Zorque,

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.

admiralteal,

It is an absolute privacy nightmare. Nothing should be asking for your identity that doesn't have a DAMN good reason to be asking for your identity.

Age verification is not a damn good reason. Especially since any number of free VPNs can circumventing it with just a few clicks.

tacosanonymous,

I think there are a host of problems including equity, efficacy, privacy, etc.

We don’t need morality police, we need education and better health care. If parents have an issue, they need to parent better.

cheese_greater,

I don’t think about it except I canmt wait till one of its non-corporate authors gets into FO(finding out) tyme ;)

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