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Privacy @lemmy.ml

Rustmilian @lemmy.world

1y ago

How do you feel about age verification on Porn sites?

Pornhub, XVideos, and Stripchat hit with tough new EU safety regulations - Lemmings.world

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?

85 comments

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.
  
  +1 here, friend. Spread the word.
  
  Perhaps, but too many parents are terrible at their jobs.
  Would you argue the same thing with other age restrictions, such as buying alcohol/drugs, driver's licenses, or child labour?
- Yep. I spent a couple years as a child in a country with country-wide blocks on some internet content. However, google images wasn’t blocked (duh.) Reddit wasn’t blocked (not that I knew the site at the time).
  Only thing it changed from a user-perspective was using either shitty and seedy VPN’s or simply going to more questionable sites the authority blocklist didn’t know of yet. And I’ll be honest, I doubt that sites like xnxx (back then) are much better for a developing child than the somewhat controlled sites. There’s so many niche porn sites out there that they can’t all be blocked. You only end up blocking access to sites that are the flattest for access by minors, ironically. (To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s great that minors access that content, either)

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.
- Funny how the venn diagram of "it's the govts job to protect my kids at all costs" and "the govt shouldn't come near my children with a 10 foot pole because they're brainwashers" is a perfect circle.
  
  👍 Yep, it's sad. I can protect them along with the help of my family, friends and community. If not, I will admit failure and live with the consequences. But it's up to me to grow up and build skills and learn patience and responsibility, not the job of others.
  Parents need to get back to parenting instead of absolving themselves of what they see as a pesky responsibility of raising the children they produce and putting their lives and impressionable minds in the hands of others, then wondering what went wrong 20-some years on and blaming everyone but themselves.

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"

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 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.

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.
- Exactly - it's the parents' responsibility.
  Imagine any government telling car manufacturers that they have to verify that everyone who starts their vehicles has a valid drivers license.
  
  Don’t give them ideas, this is exactly the type of shit they want to enact
  
  give it time. the government (us) wants to put interlock gadgets into every new car to prevent drunks from driving. driving under the influence is illegal and those that do are more likely to kill someone. so is driving without a license, and so are those drivers.
- 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.
- isn't the id unique? which means that sites can trace every visit you make and what videos you watch every time?
  
  No. Thanks to cryptography it is possible. The Cincept is called Zero-knowledge proof. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof
  Here is a quick write up: https://www.identity.com/zero-knowledge-proofs/
- 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).

I think we should stop, as a society, to try (and fail) to handle problems by imposing limits and obligation and start doing it with some fuckin large-scale massive education planning.
In this context: a smart boy/girl, with sexual/emotional education and good critical thinking can have access to all the porn in the world from teenage and be fine 99% of the time
- Prohibition leads to black and grey markets, where what is produced and consumed is frequently even more corrupted and dangerous/risky in its acquisition and delivery than whatever you think of the corollaries in the lit markets. It may also drive more deviant and destructive behavior where they may hide their actions and produce more shame and be labeled criminals.
  My only divergence would be that the education planning starts at each individual family level rather than large-scale massive education buracracy, which is what we have now and is failing badly to produce good results.
  Maybe once that first order family circle is built strongly, you can begin to expand the circle of influence to extended family, neighbors, friends and community.
  
  I disagree. Family education is very important, but it's not something you can rely on. Just to point out some major problem:
  you leave behind everyone that have a problematic family
  even the most intelligent and benevolent parents will be just limited to their core value and experience, and education needs more
  education is a very complex process that needs professionals, especially considering a rapidly evolving context like today. You can't ask a parent to be ALSO a professional educator. You need skills, training, experience.
- And if they aren't smart enough, they'll get a shit ton super sexualised stuff from the day they see a screen anyways.
  It's just a power game, or the old "vote for me, those things are evil". I say that as no one seems to blend in sex ed. Like at all.

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.
- Your question is not stupid, but comparing porn to casual nudity is.
- Probably not, its just religious pearl clutching for the most part that has been passed down unnecessarily
  Free the bodies, let everyone be naked and we will all stop giving a shit
- 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

Let's be real, teens, especially males, will actively search for porn. Blocklists can be pointless, because even if you can blacklist 160k pornhub clones, they can just join a discord or telegram server instead.
Frankly, I think parents should just make them aware that just like cinema, those videos are for show, not for "trying at home". Parents should tell them that if they ever expect sex to be like in the porn they consume, they'll be sorely disappointed. Most of it is faker than reality tv. Oh, it can also make boys get really fucking insecure, especially about their own size.
- That's not a problem in my opinion. Obviously teens are a big demographic for big sites like pornhub. And they will consume porn in one way or another. I would love it if they used more ethical porn platforms, but whatever it is it is.
  The issue with these sites has always been that they will blast videos into your face as soon as you open the website, without the usual barrier to register first. And that makes it a problem for any child between 5 and 11 years old who might stumble onto that page because someone is pulling a prank or whatever. The un-natural, violent kind of porn promoted by sites like Pornhub should not be broadcasted into the minds of actually small children.

But I also feel that any random kid shouldn’t be able to just go to these sites and see porn freely.
At some point, you have to ask - why?
If that's the alternative to spying on everyone, I'm still opposed to spying on everyone. Unsupervised internet access leading kids to pornography certainly would not be new. It's not the end of the world.
Just throw your warnings and have a click-through. It'll be just as effective, much cheaper, and not leave bastard politicians salivating about their social control fetish.
- Raise thoughtful, moral children. They are going to see porn in our modern society. How they process it has to do a lot with the tools they have to do that. That's the parents job. Not to pretend a 100% prohibition or firewall can be erected, but to raise resilient children who can thrive and not become irreparably damaged by the things they are exposed to in the world they grow into.
  Recognition that they will come into contact with it also does not mean you have to endorse it or present them with it. It's not a binary thing. Choose how you want to parent and observe the results of different approaches. YMMV.
- We have 3rd party verification services already, just use those. 🤷 They're pretty good at verifying I'm a vet, I'm sure they can confirm that you definitely exist.
  I agree with you, gimme back my checkbox, but it'd be better than "give the porn site your ID."

Kids are smart. Horny teenagers even more so. They will find loopholes or ways to circumvent these kind of things - speaking from experience. At age 13 I installed a keylogger on my PC to get the password for a parental control software my parents installed. Roughly one year later I also exploited a vulnerability in iOS 4 that allowed me to see the parental controls password in plaintext so I could re-enable Safari.
- Mr.hacker man? Lol Yeah adding restrictions is like the alchol prohibition in the US. Restricing it is going to make it more prevlent and easily acessible. There may be more sites that pop up that boot leg it. Kinda like schools with cool math games being blocked so you have unblocked games websites.

My first exposure to porn was through sprays in TF2. Kids are gonna see this shit regardless of how much you invade everyone else's privacy
- I'm getting flashbacks to Counter Strike. It's been a long time since I've thought of sprays in games.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.
- 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
  
  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.

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

Just open another site.

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.

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.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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.

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

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.

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.

85 comments