Summary
Under the UK’s Online Safety Act, all websites hosting pornography, including social media platforms, must implement “robust” age verification methods, such as photo ID or credit card checks, for UK users by July.
Regulator Ofcom claims this is to prevent children from accessing explicit content, as research shows many are exposed as young as nine.
Critics, including privacy groups and porn sites, warn the measures could drive users to less-regulated parts of the internet, raising safety and privacy concerns.
My problem with all this nonsense is that it doesn’t actually solve the problem, while causing many more. You’d need to fundamentally rethink the basic design of the technology if you were to actually prevent children from accessing sexual material with it. That’s something they don’t want to do, however, presumably because they’re addicted to the power it offers them to spy on everyone, and exploit the population for profit.
We’re in this mess right now because the one absolute truth preempting every other decision made by those who wield power is that the solution must first increase their power. Literally everything else is an afterthought.
Well you see… Despite what people say, the reasons behind these rules has very little to do with children. So they don’t actually care if it solves the “problem”.
I agree, the country is delving deeper into authoritarianism by each second. The children and minors is just another exploitable class to them.
Nah, you just need parents to care about what their kids get up to and to responsibly educate them without punishing them for being curious.
Bwahhahajahhahaa. Like that’s gonna happen.
Absolutely - this always happens with these “save the children” laws.
Jesus Christ… You ever hear the phrase “never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance?” Politicians do this sort of “make the people feel like we’re doing something” shit all the time. They rarely consider the ramifications beside appeasing parents.
The UK has a History of intrusive civil society surveillance which the Snowden revelations showed was even worse than in the US, and whilst the US actually walked back on some of it back then, the UK Government just retroactivelly made the whole thing legal.
Also, lets not forget how the UK has the highest density of CCTV cameras per inhabitant in the World (or maybe it’s just London: it’s been a while since I read about it).
Their track record on the subject heavilly indicates that this specific measure with the characteristics it has, is extremelly likely to have been purposefully crafted to extend civil society surveillance and information access control.
So - the people abusing policies are often not the people writing policies. We’re both making lots of assumptions but the way I see it is that the “well meaning but stupid MP” wants to make their constituency happy by passing laws to show “I’m listening to the needs of parents!”. Later that law is then used by other agencies to do things with your data you would rather them not do. Government is “people” not a “person”.
And for that matter there are laws passed to explicitly give agencies power. Government doesn’t often need to hide it, they just say the magic words “national defense”.
If by that you mean that some out of touch MPs can be easily swindled by members of the security apparatus working together with other MPs and higher level politicians who are smart enough to know what they’re doing, I don’t disagree with that.
What is less likely is that a majority of British MPs, repeatedly and over the course of 2 decades, have been deceived like that.
Maybe I’m wrong, but most British MPs don’t come out as stupid (though some definitely do) - incompetent at anything but salesmanship and power-games, crooked, greedy, ethics-free, unprincipled salesmen types and people driven by objectives which do not at all match what they state, sure most of them come out as that, stupid, not most.
I mean, your point would make a lot of sense if this was some kind of one-off event rather than a repeating pattern of measure after measure increasing surveillance of Civil Society, for the last 2 decades, and if Civil Society (or at least the Media) had been silent about it or even supportive of it, but as things stand the theory that a majority of MPs are stupid as an explanation for this bill passing Parliament really stretches the laws of probability.
As the saying goes: “You can deceive some people all of the time or all people some of the time but you can’t deceive all people all of the time”.
PS: I accept that I might be wrong. I just don’t think that given the Historical track record the odds favor the “they’ve been swindled” (a majority of them and again on a subject that has been steadily going in just this direction and with not so long ago exposés on the press of how previous legislation has been abused for surveillance) explanation over the explanation that at least the ones in leadership positions acted with full awareness and possibly the active intention and purpose of crafting and passing a bill that expands Civil Society Surveillance in Britain.
It’s fair - we’re both coming from different starting assumptions.
Generalities like that can be useful when applied appropriately, but counter-productive when applied blindly. That positions of power are held primarily by those who are motivated primarily by power ought to be the most straight forward assertion possible.
Agreed. I feel we’ve been giving politicians passes on “ignorance” for far too long. First, ignorance is not a defense in any other situation. Second, these people are supposed to uphold our laws and virtues, so they should be held to a higher standard. Third, if you can find a pattern in their “ignorance” which somehow always seems to benefit them personally - they’re not ignorant, but malignant.
Generalities like that can be useful when applied appropriately, but counter-productive when applied blindly.
No u
Oh it does.
Kids have access to phones and data. No matter how good my DNS is, means fuck all if my son can use his data (if he was old enough to have phone) and browse, under UK, he can’t easily access the most common porn sites without verifying.
As open and pro porn internet social bubble might be. I’m not okay with my son gaining access to it easily and too early.
At times, I wish there were more adults and parents online to counter the sea of basically male teenagers pushing what they think isright. And I know I’ll get a “I’m a parent of 3, porn is healthy for them!” Type of response… And that’s irrelevant. We all are raising a human being and we all have different morals and ideas. There’s zero chance I’ll consciously allow a loophole before he turns 12.
Your personal morals should not be the basis of laws that invade the privacy of every last person in the country, including your sons. Don’t you think that educating your son on sex, porn and reasonable usage (depending on age) would be an approach that would foster an atmosphere of trust and responsibility in the relationship between you and your child, making a law unnecessary? The way you seem to handle it just a) makes most kids curios and b) will make kids just hide their behaviour (and they will be seeing stuff, since most kids gain access in one way or another, and they share proudly for clout). Don’t forget that the best liars come from very strict homes.
They’re clearly not solely my morals. Why should your morals be the basis of things being unrestricted? What privacy do you have left exactly? Who is this hurting? It’s all fun and games throwing big phrases around while we use everything tied to a name anyway.
If you’re using a VPN and are truly a person that values their internet privacy, this doesn’t effect you, does it?
And if by this we limit who porn is marketed to? Then fuck yeah. Same as gambling. There needs to be barrier of entry.
Bold of you to assume all that of my parenting habits, here lies the biggest issue with debating anything on the internet, people jump at extremes. Because the slightest bit of grey area and the ideology falls apart.
So let’s take it for a spin shall we? Why should your morals stop me from stealing or hurting you? After all, it’s just as illegal. Why should we stop kids from buying alcohol, it’s illegal for shop to do it, do you also shout at cashiers asking for your ID? What about that privacy?
It’s silly and as my original comment predicted, you’re exactly the type of person I expected to see here. Ultimately, we’re all balancing life, even wild west had rules.
How would you solve it then? I’m not saying Ofcom are right, but should it be left wholly on parents to police the whole internet?
They don’t have to police the whole internet, just their kids. Frankly children that age shouldn’t be on social media especially unsupervised.
Parents should be using device level controls to monitor their kids internet habits. All of this should be built into the device and browser, and parents need to take basic accountability.
It could be. Putting adult filters on your routers and devices isn’t difficult.
Whereas if this is implemented, I think it pushes the public towards the dark net…and if your intent is protecting minors, that’s absolutely not the result you want.
At least on pornhub these days I have a reasonable assurance I’m not stumbling into something I shouldn’t. In the dark corners of the internet, that illusion of protection is gone.
Nope. Just their kids.
Like always.
Parental Controls have never been easier to enact. All my.kids have tablets with 4 layers of adguards, autolocks, timers, and app restrictions. It took maybe an hour to set all of them up. Are your kids worth an hour of your time? I think so. Especially if it means we dont restrict freedoms for shitty solutions.
Yes. Parent controls have been available for this stuff for ages. It’s not a problem for the state to solve.
If the alternative is not solving the problem while making other stuff worse, yeah.
Understanding that I can’t solve the whole issue right here and now on my own, the very first thing I’d take a look at is changing from having an ‘on by default’ connection to other machines, to having an ‘off by default’ connection. I’d also worry about complicating the entire process to the point where parents can’t reasonably understand/control how their machines are used by their children (the first point assists with that).
One other thing which I believe is important to actually protect children would be to establish and maintain national borders, similar to China’s great firewall. The more automatic systems become, the more opportunity exists for bad actors to exploit them for untoward purposes. Understanding that we can’t conclusively resolve every potential issue, we ought to at least do what we can to ensure that those participating in the ecosystem share similar goals and values with each other, which is really the point of borders in the first place.