I’m old enough to remember when age verification bills were pitched as a way to ‘save the kids from porn’ and shield them from other vague dangers lurking in the digital world (like…“the transgender”). We have long cautioned about the dangers of these laws, and pointed out why they are likely to...
It is pointless, it was always pointless and always will be. That’s the point. Before the internet kids were stealing their dad’s or brother’s Hustlers and Playboys. For most of the internet’s time so far you just click a button that says “yes I’m over 18 I pinky promise”. In the future of the internet any effort to seriously implement age verification short of submitting a DNA sample is going to be bypassed. Trying to find porn is one of only like four things that teenage boys think about, you’re not going to stop that signal. Ask anyone born before 2000 about forest porn and they’ll probably have a story about finding a couple magazines or a VHS stashed in the woods somewhere near where they lived as a kid.
Best case, you just drive them off the mainstream sites that verify age and onto shadier websites that don’t. Or the kid that steals his dad’s ID to watch porn starts downloading and distributing them on USBs to everyone in his school, makes like $800, and then gets arrested, now this kid has an unnecessary sex crime on his record because the government really wants to know when you’re jerking off. It’s all just pointless performatism that causes more problems than it solves. And that’s not even getting into the fact that a nefarious government, which we definitely have here in America, can use that information to pinpoint especially LGBT folks via their porn viewing habits.
So at best it’s stupid and useless and at worst it’s going to get people killed.
That’s the bit about this I hate, I do think porn can be dangerous especially for people who aren’t emotionally and intellectually ready for it but these systems do the opposite of help.
Teens are curious, letting them sneak a peek at pornhub doesn’t have much risk but forcing them to learn how to accesses backroom porng
R
** from seedy discord groups or similar puts them in actual genuine danger from preditors and exposes them to far more intense and possibly illegal porn.
In my friends kids school there was a situation with a girl that had an iPhone she’d been sent by some guy on roblox, rumor was she’d ‘earned it’ when playing at a friend’s house with less strict parental supervision. It’s already hard to stop teens putting themselves in danger, especially with so many bad people out there preying on them.
If I were building the feature, I’d put the “adult” header behind a password.
But that’s a solution only for the one browser. You’d need to forbid the OS account in use from installing new apps so the kid can’t get a different browser. And now it’s starting to be inconvenient for the parent.
And lock down the computer so it can’t use a bootdisk, lock out programs that can be used to circumvent locks like steam, browser plug-ins, and other VM stuff…
I think that’s up to device vendors giving parents decent controls and parents monitoring their kids devices. Which is admittedly not great, but still better than the honor system and more reasonable than submitting your license.
The idea isn’t to let sites restrict adults, just let them restrict kids. So there wouldn’t be a child internet.
Then what’s to stop a kid from spoofing the adult headers? Wouldn’t that make the whole thing needlessly complicated?
Of they’re old enough to figure that out then who cares?
watching a tiktok video on it means nothing about maturity
😂 if my son gets how to spoof headers, he can watch all the porn he wants
if he can do that it won’t tell anything about his intelligence, just that he has seen a video on tiktok about how to do it
But then what’s the point of age verification, it’s pointless.
It is pointless, it was always pointless and always will be. That’s the point. Before the internet kids were stealing their dad’s or brother’s Hustlers and Playboys. For most of the internet’s time so far you just click a button that says “yes I’m over 18 I pinky promise”. In the future of the internet any effort to seriously implement age verification short of submitting a DNA sample is going to be bypassed. Trying to find porn is one of only like four things that teenage boys think about, you’re not going to stop that signal. Ask anyone born before 2000 about forest porn and they’ll probably have a story about finding a couple magazines or a VHS stashed in the woods somewhere near where they lived as a kid.
Best case, you just drive them off the mainstream sites that verify age and onto shadier websites that don’t. Or the kid that steals his dad’s ID to watch porn starts downloading and distributing them on USBs to everyone in his school, makes like $800, and then gets arrested, now this kid has an unnecessary sex crime on his record because the government really wants to know when you’re jerking off. It’s all just pointless performatism that causes more problems than it solves. And that’s not even getting into the fact that a nefarious government, which we definitely have here in America, can use that information to pinpoint especially LGBT folks via their porn viewing habits.
So at best it’s stupid and useless and at worst it’s going to get people killed.
That’s the bit about this I hate, I do think porn can be dangerous especially for people who aren’t emotionally and intellectually ready for it but these systems do the opposite of help.
Teens are curious, letting them sneak a peek at pornhub doesn’t have much risk but forcing them to learn how to accesses backroom porng R ** from seedy discord groups or similar puts them in actual genuine danger from preditors and exposes them to far more intense and possibly illegal porn.
In my friends kids school there was a situation with a girl that had an iPhone she’d been sent by some guy on roblox, rumor was she’d ‘earned it’ when playing at a friend’s house with less strict parental supervision. It’s already hard to stop teens putting themselves in danger, especially with so many bad people out there preying on them.
That’s what I’m trying to get at!
Couldn’t a kid “borrow” their parent’s ID for the age verification? Isn’t it just as pointless today?
If I were building the feature, I’d put the “adult” header behind a password.
But that’s a solution only for the one browser. You’d need to forbid the OS account in use from installing new apps so the kid can’t get a different browser. And now it’s starting to be inconvenient for the parent.
And lock down the computer so it can’t use a bootdisk, lock out programs that can be used to circumvent locks like steam, browser plug-ins, and other VM stuff…
I think that’s up to device vendors giving parents decent controls and parents monitoring their kids devices. Which is admittedly not great, but still better than the honor system and more reasonable than submitting your license.
You seem really up in arms about this.