[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?

Gutless2615,

Any so called privacy law that enriches and ensures that age verification data brokers make bank is fundamentally and irrevocably broken.

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.

Hillock,

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.

PhobosAnomaly,

I see your view and appreciate the time you’ve taken to articulate it well.

My view takes another level of abstraction from it, and ignoring the implementation detail for the moment - the question for me is “what are we trying to protect underage/vulnerable persons from?”

Sex is a natural thing and I’m not arsed either way - and some of the more extreme content (within the legal sense, non-consent and animal porn etc are another ball game) such as exploitative content or covertlyy recorded stuff really need to be addressed as society issues so that the ensuing pornography isn’t such an issue.

That said, the line defining the three (or more) groups is arbritary and different for everyone I guess.

Hillock,

Kids being able to openly participate on porn sites would be a feast for pedophiles and groomers. We already have enough trouble with that on social media and dating sites/apps. And while in an ideal situation there just wouldn't be bad people, sometimes we need to protect people from themselves because of others.

So while I am open for a discussion about lowering the age requirement, I still firmly believe a minimum age is required. But whether that's 14, 16, or 18 I don't know.

PhobosAnomaly,

That’s a fair comment, and represents the core tradeoff of balancing protecting vulnerable members of society against privacy or liberty concerns.

My preference would be to - in a massively reductive statement - teach the paedos that their urges are less-than-healthy and treat them as medical cases, in order to reduce the need for such content.

The other element is that it’s rarely a great idea to make sweeping reforms of a system that is failing because silly cunts are doing illegal things. I’m pulling a stat out of my arse here but why are we implementing legal interventions to prevent 5-10% of the population from downloading or producing illegal content, when surely it would be more effective to target those involved in the criminal practise rather than the other 90-95% of happy carefree legal chuggers?

I do see your point though, and it’s refreshing to see you’ve not gone straight for the “much chuldrun” trope.

n1ckn4m3,
@n1ckn4m3@kbin.social avatar

Very much this. A great many of us in our early 40s had access to pornography from BBSes or early internet and it didn't seem to fuck us up. Why are we trying to solve a problem that doesn't actually exist?

Legal sexual gratification between two consenting adults (even if some may find the way they achieve gratification taboo), so long as it's not illegal, should not be shamed or denied.

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.

fruitycoder,

Sites should empower parents to control that. Have a sign in by default and an option to ask the site to block ips associated with you to be able to sign up for more accounts.

Are there ways around it? Sure. It’s a just a lock to keep honest kids out. If your kid doesn’t feel comfortable about asking about stuff like this or feel like they have to around you, you aren’t going to win, they’ll find it, and it’ll be a blast for them. If you talk about it, at least acknowledge the issues with it, say when it is and isn’t appropriate, etc it’ll do leagues better then all bans and censorship attempts in the world.

ridethisbike,

The IP thing backfires when you inevitably get assigned a new IP and the guy down the street now can’t look at his porn anymore because the website blocked the IP

fruitycoder,

True it requires more coordination to be helpful. And tbh I think every household network should be going through and host a Tor relay so shrug but something to the effect of some minimal form of authentication that the person is a consenting adult that is given out at the discretion of the person would be useful for this case.

Not totally sure what the best way to do that is. Keys, cookies, OIDC from trusted party, block chain, DIDs (Decentralized Identifiers), or heuristics like IPs, or digital finger prints.

ridethisbike,

Oooorrr we could not do all that and let parents do their jobs. How about we empower them to learn how to setup parental controls on their routers and on the kids devices?

fruitycoder,

It’s not enough in my experience shrug but I agree it should on parents to support it

Squid, (edited )

Another reason to pirate

Also if the government do feel the need to “help” parents and the larger social fabric then why not put money into civil dutys classes in schools. Teach kid how to grow into normal adults, the trickle down would be much greater than these half baked ducktape tactics

InEnduringGrowStrong,
@InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works avatar

Yea but a lot might see a boobie, can you image the horror.
Content filtering solutions are imperfect but it’s good enough and easy enough to use at home if you need to.
Worst case, your kid learns to bypass content filtering and sparks a career in IT or something.

Rustmilian, (edited )
@Rustmilian@lemmy.world avatar

You literally walk a block in NYC and see titties.
There’s a lot more extreme content out there.

InEnduringGrowStrong,
@InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works avatar

Then just use one of the existing content filtering/ parental control tools for your home network?

I don’t see the benefit of another privacy invasion when there’s already solutions for this exact problem.

Rustmilian,
@Rustmilian@lemmy.world avatar

I already mentioned that in my post.

InEnduringGrowStrong,
@InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works avatar

Then have a nice day, I guess

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.

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.

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.

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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