That would seem to be least intrusive option.
Using the internet in the UK/EU is such a horrible experience, every cookie pop-up is a reminder how badly thought out these rules are.
Technical cookies don't require any consent so every time you see a cookie banner the website owner wants to gather more data about you than necessary. Furthermore, these rules don't require cookie banners, it's what the industry has chosen as the way to get consent to track their users.
Check the banner next time, you'll see how many “partners” they do sell your data to.
Until then I will shed no tears about your slightly lowered effectiveness at manipulating people into acting against their own best interests.
This policy was pushed by David Cameron, who was the prime minister at the time:
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-internet-and-porn...
When purchasing an internet-enabled device the UK could regulate that large retailers must ask if the device is to be used by an under 18 year old. If they say yes, then they could ship with filters enabled. They could also regulate that all internet-enabled devices which could be sold to children should support child filters.
If we did this then whether or not a child views NSFW material it will be on the parent, instead of the current situation where whether a child can view NSFW material online depends on the age verification techniques of Chinese companies like TikTok or American companies like 4chan.
All mobile network connections already come with content filters enabled in the UK, adult or not, and has to be explicitly disabled.
When you buy wifi, they already make sure you're an adult. They ask for proof of residence, you sign a contract. Children cannot buy wifi. Go ahead and try - no ISP is going to write a contract with a child.
Wifi, like tobacco and alcohol, is already age restricted.
The problem is the adults buying it then turn around and just... Hand it to children. That's not the fault of the law or society.
Like, okay the store clerk might make sure when I buy a pack of menthols I'm of age. But if I just go home and hand my kid the pack of menthols, all bets are off. That's not the store clerks problem, he can't and won't get in trouble for that.
Parents and establishments are being stupid here. Same applies for public wifi. Don't want kids to use it? Okay, give it a password, only tell the password to adults. Easy peasy.
The law can't stop parents from being stupid.
But it is society's problem, and within society's capacity to attempt to manage.
https://www.childline.org.uk/info-advice/you-your-body/drugs... says it's illegal to give a child cigarettes, and the cops can confiscate them if you're 16 or below.
> The law can't stop parents from being stupid.
Sure, but reality also often means smart, caring parents still can't stop kids from... being kids. I've lived in places where half a dozen public wifi hotspots were available; even if I didn't, chances are I'd have to let my kids on wifi for homework, on computers I don't have admin rights to because they come from the school.
They can't go sign up for a new internet plan, but that's hardly required.
Sure, to an extent, but not really: we give parents a lot of freedom here.
> Sure, but reality also often means smart, caring parents still can't stop kids from... being kids. I've lived in places where half a dozen public wifi hotspots were available; even if I didn't, chances are I'd have to let my kids on wifi for homework, on computers I don't have admin rights to because they come from the school.
Okay, then lock down those networks. We don't need to lockdown the Internet as a whole.
In reality, most of those networks already are locked down.
Try searching up porn on, say, hotel wifi, it won't work.
We already have the solution.
I… very much doubt that.
I can't even search for porn on cellular networks and I'm in the US.
Hotels, Starbucks, my job, the library - they all block porn. The idea that kids just have free access to a wild internet is legitimately made up. Schools block that stuff too - universities, even.
As I've said, this solution is not solving this problem because this problem legitimately does not exist. It's solving a different problem. What that problem is, is for you to find out.
I have high-school aged kids; they all trade techniques for getting precisely that "free access to a wild internet". It's a game of whack a mole, and school IT administrators are on the losing side.
The reality is that it is YOUR responsibility to control what your kids see. If you fail, I do not care. They are not my kids. Not only do I not care, nobody cares.
You can absolutely lock your kids down and make sure they get no internet access. I know because I grew up without internet. Everything is very much in reach. Do that, or don't, again I don't care.
My mobile carrier blocks porn. I know because I'm an adult and sometimes I want to watch porn, and I have to use a VPN.
What you should do is call up whoever you are giving money to for internet and ask them about blocking. If they tell you they don't offer that product, then you, as a consumer, should cancel your subscription and go to another carrier.
Both require being an adult.
And, "free wifi", like you're talking about, already blocks porn. So problem solved, right?
What's actually the issue here? Because nobody seems to be able to articulate it. What problem are we solving?
But neither of those is "buying Wi-Fi" - that's why I'm confused.
Cookie regulations are perfectly Ok, businesses which want to add 429 vendors and data processors to simple internet shop or corporate blog is not.
If you use cookies only for legitimate basic local functionality (like login and shopping cart on online shop site) you SHOULD NOT have any popups, there is exemption for such use cases in the regulations. Only if you want to sell data or pass it for processing to third party you need popup. Simply don't.
White listing worked for a while (months) when they were young, but it was super-high touch and stuff just broke all the time. You try to whitelist a site, but you have to then figure out all their CDNs.
Restricting specific sites works, sort of, until they find some place that hosts that content. Blocking youtube doesn't work(*), every search engine has a watch videos feature. (Why are you spending 3 hours a day on DDG?) There's really no way to segment youtube into "videos they need to watch for school" and "viral x hour minecraft playthrough". Somehow, we've managed to combine the biggest time waste ever with a somewhat useful for education hosting service.
That's leaving out the jailbreaks that come from finding an app's unfiltered webview and getting an open web escape there.
There's basically no reliable method for filtering even on locked down platforms.
* there's probably a way to kill it at the firewall based on dns, but that's iffy for phones and it's network wide.
The regex are: (^|\.)youtubei\.googleapis\.com$ (^|\.)ytstatic\.l\.google\.com$ (^|\.)ytimg\.l\.google\.com$ (^|\.)youtube-ui\.l\.google\.com$ (^|\.)youtube\.com$ (^|\.)ytimg\.com$ (^|\.)googlevideo\.com$
You can create groups and assign devices to them, and assign the block rules only to certain groups.
The only annoyance with this is that it blocks logging into Google since they redirect to YouTube to set a login cookie as part of the Google login process. If you're already logged into Google though, everything works as normal, and you can always disable pihole for five minutes if for some reason you got logged out and need to log back in.
Neither is the tech for locking down all online identity to government-controlled access... But I have strong opinions about which one everybody should/shouldn't start creating!
All the routers also come with filtering settings as well and ISPs ship with the filtering on by default, since that is the law and has been for several decades.
my dream is when ISPs are allowed to sell this, but not allowed to call it internet access.
That's what the advertising-dependent implementers who deliberately made it shittier than necessary (stuff like "you have to decline each of our 847 ad partners individually") want you to think, at least. It's mostly malicious compliance.
But people (like my girlfriend) still click "Allow all" because they don't seem to realize that the legislation requires the website to still function if you decline unnecessary cookies!
The banner is literally an attempt to FOMO you into accepting cookies you never need to accept!
IMO the EU is somewhat in dereliction of Duty for not punishing cookie banner sites
Like you can configure your browser to do whatever you want with cookies - blocking them all, blocking only third party ones, etc. - there is no need for government regulation here.
But the legislators are completely tech illiterate and even the general public supports more interference and regulation.
The question a user should ask is why is this website collecting my data. Marketing and adtech companies are trying to shift this question to why is the EU making websites worse.
> there is no need for government regulation here
You don't need to care about this if you respect users' privacy in the same way you don't need to care about waste water regulation when you don't pump waste into rivers.
I'd welcome a ramp-up of the legislation: outlaw the kind of tracking that needs the banners currently outright. I'm sure a lot of websites would just geo-block EU as a result (like how some did because of GDPR), but I bet the EU-compliant visitor tracking solutions would suddenly skyrocket, and overall, nothing of value would be lost, neither for the users, nor for the website administrators.
It’s not possible to rely on browser controls as-is, because they do not differentiate between necessary and optional cookies.
Browser vendors could agree standards and implement them, exposing these to users and advertisers in a friendly way.
But they haven’t shown any interest in doing this.
I wonder why?
One of the hundreds of reasons do_not_track failed. You cannot do something that trusts the website operators, because they are egregiously untrustworthy.
The cookie banner everyone keeps bitching about is a direct example of this. No website is required to have a cookie banner. They choose to, because they know most users click "Yes to all", and then complain about the regulators, instead of the assholes asking you to consent to sharing your data with nearly a thousand third parties
And "browser vendors" will never do anything, because 90% of the market is a literal advertising behemoth, the rest of the market is owned by a company that makes money only when you do things not through the web browser.
My point is about UX: it could be much slicker if the browser industry standardised the consent mechanism.
You make a good point about lack of incentives.
It's much simpler than blocking, and much more effective. Most parents don't know what to block proactively, blocklists are imperfect, and the biggest threats are hiding in the most innocent looking apps (Discord, Roblox, Reddit, even just messaging with friends from school).
Also remember that the pop-up is an industry choice, the rules only mandate that a user should opt in, not how. No laws mandate the cookie banners, no regulations say they should be obnoxious.
What's to stop that same kid to buy a porno dvd? Or to download a torrent of a porno? Or a porn magazine?
There's no need, that's already the case.
All phones (the network account attached to the SIM actually, not the phone itself) comes with a content filter enabled by default in the UK, adult or not.
Neither resident nor frequent visitor to the UK, so I'm behind the times when I ask: I beg your fucking pardon?
Is there further reading on this inane nanny-state horror, ideally via a Wikipedia article on the law or gentleman's agreement amongst the carriers?
Furthermore, is this more common than I assume, and I simply don't notice because I don't stray too far from the mainstream?
Yep, my thoughts exactly when I first encountered it.
> Is there further reading on this inane nanny-state horror
I tried to look something up but it seems the articles and news about the (new) Online Safety Act has taken over all of the search results (and it's not something I want to search too hard at work). I even asked an LLM but it couldn't provide sources and simply said it was "voluntary" and "industry standard". The rest of its output was drowned in the new Online Safety Act.
I suppose thanks to the OSA the old system is now history.
Edit: also something like this needs deep OS integration.
[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
A client checking for a header is more than sufficient to block small children from seeing porn and that is 100% more than we have today. No extra memory or CPU required important on tablets or phones handed to children. No privacy invasion by daemons or other third parties.
Kid: "Mommie they said go to pornhub.com for games but it ask for password"
Mom: "Dumb trolls are picking on you, I will deal with them."
What do you mean? Parents can easily set this up before they give them to their children.