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?
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
