A House of Commons committee is set to study legislation proposed by Independent Sen. Julie Miville-Dechêne that would require Canadians to verify their age to access porn online.
At this point there are people in their forties who had access to online porn as minors. Have any actual studies been done to show that a significant portion of the many, many people who’ve grown up in the last 20-30 years have been harmed by having access to online porn while they were younger, or are these laws just something that’s trendy at the moment?
I’m in my 50’s and never had issues finding porn/alcohol/drugs when I was under 18, even though I was in a religious area for part of it.
These people are sniffing glue if they actually think this bill will do anything other than erode privacy.
At best all it will do is lead kids away from normal sites and towards the sketchy parts of the web where things get even weirder.
The goal is to erode privacy, and the pearl clutching about children is always the excuse. There are a lot of groups who want to eliminate privacy online: cops, copyright holders, and religious nuts to make a few. They’re the ones driving this stuff.
I’m kind of disappointed that the Ndp voted in favor of this bullshit plan.
Ugh. I hadn’t heard. I expected better, but the NDP have been a terrible disappointment in the last decade or so.
Ya, it seems every time they take a step or two forward they somehow end up taking a step back again.
There’s a HUGE lobbying effort to convince the people in power that this is a good idea. Lots of tech-surveillance companies bidding for this to go through, so everyone is forced to use their services. You think identity theft is bad now? Wait until you need to put your ID on the internet and that gets leaked.
If age verification is really the intent then it ought to be possible to develop a service these websites can call into that gives some kind of zero-knowledge age check. The age check service doesn’t need to know the identity of the service that’s asking, and the requesting service doesn’t need to know the identity of the person whose age they’re checking. You’d authenticate on a site that only knows someone’s doing an age check, and the verifying site would just get a token indicating that the age check was successful.
Am I missing some reason why this wouldn’t be possible? It seems to be a problem ripe for zero-knowledge solutions.
If it is possible, there’s really no need for an age check requirement to involve disclosing your identity to the site you’re visiting, or to disclose your viewing habits to anyone. And if governments or lobbyists are pushing for everyone to upload their full identity to web sites, it suggests either they’re ignorant or their motives aren’t what they claim.
This bill is a government login that sends an authentication string to the requesting website
Equivalent of CRA now or as an implementation that you’re familiar with “sign in with google”
The worry security wise is less about it getting leaked as it is opening a new string of fake websites (because the government data getting leaked/attacked is already an issue)
“Sex harms the youth” has been established lore since the Victorian age, when hiding it in the first place was a new project driven by religious concerns. Nobody questions it because nobody wants to look like a pedophile (which, for the record, are bad).
Harms the youth isn’t even the best anti-pornography argument. Sexual exploitation and sex trafficking are concerns. But that’s more of an issue with unethical porn (always watch ethically sourced porn folks!)
On the other hand, since the age of internet porn, sexual irresponsibility, teen sex, rape, and divorce have all declined. (Correlation)
Shhh! Don’t mention the actual numbers! The old days were better, and the kids are rotten! /s
It’s not the best argument, but it’s the main one that you can’t directly undercut at this point. If you say it’s exploitative, well, it doesn’t have to be, and many people know it. If you admit it’s about your religion/culture, well, maybe it’s not mine, and I’ll even say maybe it’s not good, and that’s also a position people appreciate.
as a teen my buddy bought a penthouse collection off of two old ladies at a yardsale. Blocking Pornhub will do nothing unless they also block VPN and TOR use
Remember your high school friend that had porn mags in their locker?
In my fifties, saw porn as a minor. Paper was a thing for the last century, at least!
There are many studies that indicate porn use can negatively affect your brain, sexual performance, and pro-social behaviour.
Porn linked to decreased grey matter
Porn addiction linked to lower executive functioning
Porn linked to negative social behaviour
Meta analysis on research into adolescents porn use discusses a range of negative outcomes such as anxiety, suicidal ideation, social isolation, and academic disengagement
I’m not really sure this law will “solve” the problem, or if it’s a good solution to the problem. But there are real, negative outcomes of internet porn
There seems to be a lot of issues with the methodology used in those studies.
For example, “…reported hours of pornography consumption per week…”. Hours seems excessive. What’s the average duration for all visitors?
And, “Women were excluded from the research, because men more easily encounter such problems due to their frequent contact with pornographic materials.”. That’s an assumption. Women can also have "frequent contact " with porn, so they should have included women.
And one of them seemed to suggest that men who watched more porn had ED. But maybe men with ED first, have had to use porn to help? Chicken and egg situation.
I’m not defending porn, and I tend to make data driven choices.
But I’m acutely aware that methodology can have averse effects on the conclusion, and I tend to be highly skeptical of studies that appear to manipulate the outcome with their selection bias.
I agree some are problematic. The first one is based on brain scans, which is hard to refute. And there are many more like it
The porn industry has a vested interest in suppressing this, and billions of dollars to spend muddying the waters.
The first one is based on brain scans, which is hard to refute.
Yes, but the participant selection was dubious.
Also, while brain scans are used, it’s impossible to form a conclusion based on it.
For instance, do men with less grey matter watch more porn? Or does watching more porn cause men to have less grey matter?
A similar study was done on vegetarians. I don’t recall the details, but it went somewhere along the lines of “vegetarians have more brain activity associated with empathy”. Does that mean vegetarianism improves empathy? Or do empathetic people naturally gravitate towards vegetarianism?
Behavioral studies are so much harder to do compared to health studies. I don’t envy the study coordinators!
But more data can always bring us closer to answers, so I’m glad that at least some informational gaps are being filled.
There’s also a huge spectrum of consumption between porn addiction and adolescant curiosity. These studies seem to reference several consumption quantities which go beyond the scope of the original question.
Check the financing on those.
It seems to me much more likely that the porn industry is financing studies that say there is nothing wrong with porn use. The means and motive make a lot more sense going in that direction, as they don’t want to be seen as the new cigarettes
Funny how people just down vote when someone actually provide sources
I suspect some of the negativity comes from porn users who are in denial
And big net neutrality advocates who believe that if it’s online it shouldn’t be subject to laws for some reason…
Same with Alcohol for those points you listed.
And the alcohol providers are legally responsible for checking the age of the people they sell it to and can face fines if they don’t.
That’s the crux of the issue, if you provide age restricted material anywhere outside the internet you can lose your right to sell it if you don’t make sure people aren’t underage and now there’s Canadian companies that face no consequences for doing so because they operate on the web.
Fake IDs though, have always been a thing. Banning / Age restriction does not work with the Internet.
Ah yes, the ol’ “we shouldn’t try to control access to something because there’s illegal methods to avoid it.” Why even bother requiring ID for gun/alcohol/tobacco sales when you can just get someone else to buy them for you?
What a silly argument.
Because fake ID for booze ( at least in BC ) is hard to fake and not downloadable to your phone. Somebody coyld buy you a bottpe, the same with a using anothers internet ID. i’m not saying don’t try something, I’m saying don’t expect a result from age block, because a teen can download VPN/Tor in 30 seconds amd bypass it all. The lawmakers may not understand that
I’m sure they do, they may not understand the technical details, but I’m not sure why you think people who make rules or pass laws would think the rules or laws won’t be broken or circumvented. It’s a law, not some magical contract. If your parents say “no Xbox until you’ve finished your homework”, they’re not amazed when they find you on the Xbox 20 minutes later, homework unfinished.
It’s been illegal to sell alcohol and porn to minors for decades now, do you think before the internet and VHS it was impossible for kids to find? Do you think the lawmakers back then were somehow baffled that the law they put in place, didn’t 100% prevent children from drinking and stiffening their socks?
So we should do nothing and let people in their early teens see women choke on a dick while getting one up the ass and just say “What can we do? Some of them will get a fake ID! We can’t make the providers take responsibility can we?”
We.can teach our youth the dangers of objectification. blocking one site out of millions doesn’t stop access to porn. And if it is not age restricted in another country our youth are tech savvy enough to connect to a vpn or tor with an exit node in the countries that don’t care. Prohibition does nothing other than making the item get pushed underground. They might even go back to peer to peer sharing like early computer days
You take control of what you can take control of. Fake IDs aren’t new, bars still need to ask for one. Canadian porn sites need to obey Canadian laws.
Also, our youth is so bad with tech that it doesn’t know how to use a computer when it reaches university, the tech genius generation was the late X and the millennials and they’re all over 18.
I fear internet ID is coming whether we like it or not. AI powered bots will pass all captchas and be indistinguishable from humans. The open, pseudonymous internet cannot survive under those conditions. You could spend all day without seeing a comment by a real human.
You could spend all day without seeing a comment by a real human.
Have you been playing on Reddit again?
But even that will be spoofed. its going to be a shitshow of garbage
Governments already have systems to handle citizen IDs. They’re not perfect, and fake ones do get created, but they’re good enough. All that is needed is to connect that system to a UBI key or other device. Then websites could use cryptographic tools (signatures, ZK-SNARKS, etc) to verify that someone is over 18 without revealing their identity
It’s the year 2024 and legislators STILL don’t understand that the internet doesn’t have borders. They can regulate PH because its a Canadian company, but good luck getting every other porn site on the internet to comply
Any law is only as effective as its level of enforcement. I have a hard time understanding how they think they can regulate access to porn on the Internet. If anything, if legitimate, more mainstream sites get more difficult to access, will our youngsters really stop their Google search there, or will they just click on the next link that just won’t have age verification, with potentially much “worse” porn than what they’d have watched initially lol? Did any of the countries that implemented age verification already really see any significant impact?
Students figure out how to dodge any website blocking schools put into place. It just takes one kid to figure it out, then it spreads through the whole school, and pretty soon everyone is using a sketchy free VPN that might be doing man-in-the-middle attacks or running a crypto miner or whatever.
The only real solution is parental (and teacher, in the context of schools) training and supervision. Anything else and students will figure out Tor, or VPNs, or private trackers, or pirate streaming sites, or random sketchy websites (depending on what they’re trying to block). It’s futile, and encourages students to do unsafe things to get around the blocks.
This will be no different. There are hundreds of ways to avoid this. For a high-profile example, see “VPN” search trends in Utah after porn sites geoblocked the state of Utah.
At the same time determining how to regulate goods on a digital marketplace is important to figure out.
Your points are all valid but eventually we’ll need to figure out proper age verification and identification for some things.
Idk if porn is where it needs to start but just because it’s hard and not easy doesn’t mean it will stop.
Regulation invariably always brings “black markets” but it doesn’t mean it’s bad on that alone.
eventually we’ll need to figure out proper age verification and identification for some things
Don’t we already have identity verification for many sites where our personal identity matters - banking, government stuff, etc? For the rest, it’s like trying to change the color of the sky cause we don’t like blue. Short of a fundamental protocol-level change of how the internet works (won’t happen any time soon), or adding a centralized level of control like China’s Great Firewall and/or forcing ISP-level censorship on top of outlawing VPNs (you’ll probably be hard-pressed to make a good argument for this), controlling what one can access on the internet just won’t happen.
Also not sure why anyone would think it’s a good idea to hand over our personal information to random websites, even if just for “age verification”. I can’t even trust my bank with my data, giving it to random commercial sites that have all the incentives in the world to track my consumption habits and link them to my personal identity would be utterly idiotic, porn or not. Hell, we’re already doing it with Facebook or Google tracking us across the web, now we want to be required by law to give them our ID as well?
It’s a typical reactionary play to attack the surface of an issue without addressing the root problem. For this particular issue, blocking porn access on sites that will comply will just make it that they’ll find their porn elsewhere, that’s all, while ignoring the underlying education issue. It’s a smoke show that literally doesn’t address anything.
@folkrav is right here
And I’ll posit that you likely wouldn’t like this ability to exist in the first place.
Let me walk you through a thought experiment. Any system that requires a verification step is likely tied to identity and putting up a gate to get in based on the identity or using it to get a token to access it ties you to that activity. Ok great let’s not let the kids see porn, but the exact same approach can be used to prevent or put a chilling effect on people seeking lgbt content, anti Vax content, unionization information,church gatherings, crypto schemes,academic research, Israel, Palestine, or anything really.
The internet was never intended to be a secure place it was intended to survive a devastating nuclear attack and keep information flowing. Tacking on arbitrary mortality gates is Orwellian and not how the internet was designed to function. Maybe these guys need to a seperate network (without blackjack and hookers) just for the content you want kids to see and not tell them about the internet till later because these proposed measures are like outlawing the letter q because you don’t like that it leads to the word question.
And all of these laws are disingenuous, wrapped in classic “won’t someone please think of the children”
What I am saying is eventually we’ll need to have a better age verification process than that.
I don’t want to provide my full identity, it would be cool for a zero trust information exchange. This sort of thing is being worked out already with OIDC. Allow the site access to ONLY the information it needs, in that instance age.
I am saying eventually we will have to get there, I don’t have to agree with it and neither do you. But it’s happening.
I don’t mean to argue in favor of what is being done here, I’m saying at some point we will need a better system and these things will have to happen and fighting AGAINST them is probably less beneficial than fighting for the system to be done properly.
These current events are a good place for us to highlight how dumb it’s being done.
“Better” than what, and how, exactly?
OIDC still needs you to trust one of the parties. Who should I both trust with my age online, and would be fine with letting know where and when I’m trying to jerk off?
There’s no doing this kind of thing “properly”. One absolutely should fight against idiotic laws.
There absolutely IS a way to do secure sharing of necessary credentials on demand with the user controlling the data.
It’s possible. Maybe we ought to make good systems instead of just fight bad ones?
Those systems are getting worked on regardless. It’s not either/or. Fight the bad ones regardless.
[…] eventually we’ll need to figure out proper age verification and identification for some things.
I don’t mean to be a “specifics sam” but why? In nearly every case I can think of legitimately dangerous activities (like buying radium or a gun) already necessarily require the user to have access to a credit card or PayPal. Porn is weird specifically because the vast vast majority of porn is just advertising to find the few whales that spend massive amounts of money on it.
So, like, what’s an example of some other kind of content that’s free that we don’t want children to look at but we’re okay with adults looking at?
Key point in my opinion is the definition of « what things » should be so tightly regulated wrt to age for one thing. I doubt access to porn by minors is a proven societal problem and even more so that the proposal to solve via the verification mechanism is proportionate.
This reeks of puritan religious bullshit.
Anecdotally I didn’t turn out to be a psycho as much as my relatives that piously shy away from porn.
So who will be held accountable when fake ID verification pages start coming up everywhere and identity theft becomes even worse?
There’s already a website selling Al generated fake IDs for digital age/kyc verification.
Is that not free yet? Huh
It’s YOUR FAULT for being an immoral person and trying to access pornography when you should be working and paying taxes. This message brought to you by the federal government of Canada
There is Very Probably No way to get around this kind of thing. You know until GovCan allows Bell and Rogers to filter “hackers” traffic to protect Canadians.
And then you just upgrade your VPN software, and look for sketchier providers. We could switch to an intranet like Cuba, but then our economy might end up like Cuba because it will suck. And I would switch to pirate radio bursts to move content around, so I’m still going to be able to get my scientific papers without buying them. Or porn.
If there were a standardized large scale mesh network I would be all over that. Like if everyone agreed (before governments get too handsy) on a TCP/IP over HAM setup, a ‘free’ internet could be built and ready to go when the corporate owned networks go 1984.
So on a second read, I think you might be talking about a situation where the government still allows an alternate system to operate, at least if it’s established. I already wrote this up from the same worst-case perspective as in OP.
For daily driving, the trick with that would be offering something commercial providers can’t, other than an abstract long-term argument. Without that, you’re basically just trying to start your own ISP, but without any investors. For enthusiast use, see APRS below, which is a thing.
APRS is kind of the relevant current standard. The trick is that being carried by radios that are unpredictable, it has no upper bound on latency (I think). If you want the same browsing experience (TCP especially needs a lot of back and forth) that’s really hard, because presumably big brother isn’t going to let you have a mesh station online for very long.
The burst thing I was talking about is genuinely how spies do it in locked-down places like Eritrea or Turkmenistan - you go to a busy public place and absolutely hog bandwidth for just one second, using a disguised radio, and then wander out with your groceries before the radio detectors can catch up. I suppose open-source resources for that would be good, if they don’t already exist.
I’d love to look at the transport layer of NATO’s system. It’s designed for both wartime (so arbitrary failure rate, type and pattern) and extensibility, and I’d be fascinated to know how they did it. Unfortunately, it’s also a big damn secret, to the point it’s the main thing they bring up when the media asks about China getting their hands on a working F-35. I’d also anticipate that it relies on every user registered as friendly acting friendly, at least over the long term.
One of the things that’s on my future project list is over-the-air crypto, so you can pay someone to transmit your 50 meg thoughtcrime video slowly but persistently. As far as I know there’s no prohibition on digital sigs (like there is on encryption), so it should be doable somehow.
And theyre calling it ArriveCam
They should talk to YouTube to find out how successful their months long efforts to block at blockers have been. This is an effort by pearl clutchers to do the impossible in a domain that they know absolutely nothing about.
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People will just use XVideos though.
There is better porn than porn hub on almost every site that offers it. Unless you are a shareholder in porn hub this is a non issue.
Whoosh .
