> This is arguably much worse than allowing children to watch porn online, because this will for sure effect people's whole life in a negative way.
I would like you to make that argument.
I would like you to make that argument.
Governments getting involved absolutely, unequivocally will be used to clamp down on the free exchange of ideas.
> Source: I’m a parent. My kids haven’t seen porn and can’t access the internet.
Are they above the age of 16? Because then you're either Amish or out of touch.
I hope you can see how that argument is not compelling.
Do you understand now? Or will you only understand when you get fired from your job and they won't tell you the reason?
Thank you for bringing an argument.
I want to start by tackling your argument head on. What if it's not though. What if it's implemented by attestation and signatures rooted at your local national government? Nobody will be able to tie whatever you watch or write to your identity, because they won't have it. To my understanding, that's what's proposed here, and that won't feasibly lead to any of the spooky consequences you're predicting.
There's another leg to it also. "anything you read or write or watch or say will be tied to your identity" is already true right now. Google is already, at this second, tracking my every move online and using it against me in a targeted advertisement campaign to change my spending habits, but my political affiliations too. If you're truly afraid of that outcome, I believe there are much more prescient and immediate things you should oppose than this.
Apparently you haven't figured out yet that these two are partners. The government restrictions are needed in order to allow other players to perform correlation tracking and deducing your identity.
> Nobody will be able to tie whatever you watch or write to your identity, because they won't have it.
This is untrue in the light of what I said above. The proposed scheme lacks any proof of immunity against tracking and deducing identity. I haven't seen anything like a proof being discussed, while an honestly implemented scheme would require a long and well publicized discussion of the means of protection - to make sure it cannot be abused for political reasons.
The lack of such a discussion is actually a proof that the purpose of the proposed scheme is precisely abuse.
We can oppose more than one thing at a time. All of these privacy invading measures should be opposed as strongly as possible. Companies like Google should be broken up by the government, the parts should not be allowed to collude with each other, and there should be laws preventing the kind of data collection they do without full transparency, user control, and ownership.
That's wishful thinking. The site would log that they sent you to verify your ID with your IP and a timestamp. The proxy server would get your identity with your IP and timestamp. Those two can can be linked. The government would know exactly who you are while also knowing where you came from and when.
Either the government would monitor the proxy or they'd just be running the proxy themselves or forcibly taking it over Room 641A style to log everything going in and out.
There is zero way to verify your identity to a website without trusting some third party with that information. There's no one in the US who is trustworthy enough or immune from being controlled by the US government so you'll always be vulnerable to having your identify exposed and it being used against you.
The best suggestion I've heard so far was scratch off cards that could be purchased anywhere in person, with cash, after presenting ID. The ID isn't logged or scanned, just manually checked by the wage slave at the counter. Even that isn't without challenges though since the cards would have codes that would likely be traceable to batches and where they were distributed to/purchased from which means that information can be checked against surveillance/facial ID/flock cameras to find out who bought them, and they can also be resold/shared online/exchanged/stolen/generated/given to others which means they won't be very effective at identifying individuals or keeping kids from seeing adult content.
The truth is that the entire point of these age verification laws is deanonymization, censorship, and control. Any theoretical scheme we might come up with that wouldn't allow for abuses will never be implemented for that reason.
The argument kicks in at a slightly deep level. Age verification is unrelated to allowing children to watch porn. Someone needs to make an argument showing that age verification would lead to blocking porn, and that argument seems to be impossible to make (age verification is a much lighter standard than the bans on torrent websites, for example, and torrenting is still as easy as it ever was). To block kids viewing porn there'd need to be a - probably global - system of censorship that exerts total control over what people can POST and GET on the internet. The likes of which we have not yet seen and would likely have catastrophically negative political consequences.
You sure about that? )))
Because porn is the most taboo things in public, even if a lot of people use it at home. Nobody will come and defend liberal porn access because then everyone will call you a gooner or a pedo. It'll probably be the end of your political debate.
Which means porn access can be weaponized without any political opposition. It's the perfect scapegoat to remove online anonymity disguised as "age verification".
I did catch my son watching porn when he was 13. We talked about it, I blocked some stuff at my router (hardly comprehensive, but mostly to make it easy to avoid the thing he was watching), and then stopped worrying about it. He's 17 now. I'm sure he knows how to find it if he wants it, but I also trust he's able to interpret it responsibly. He seems like a well-adjusted kid. I worry more about his gaming addiction, but it doesn't seem to be interfering with school anymore.
re: gaming addiction - my parents were obsessed with me being "addicted". Now, as an adult, I don't care about games anymore. Everything I have I owe to computer skills and English. What my parents didn't want to see (or couldn't?) was that at the time games were the only interesting thing to do. We were glued to the screens mostly because everything else sucked.
It's a cultural thing
You're the one that needs to argue the presence of harm, given you're the one arguing we need to create a surveillance dragnet to shield certain age groups of humans from witnessing how their species procreates.
The default state is that humans procreate via sexual reproduction. You need to argue why we need to take action to hide this, especially given we let children witness other far more brutal activities from the human species like violence.
If your argument in favor of that is that watching porn isn't harmful to children, then I don't understand what all that superfluous waffling about china is doing in there.
Surely someone claiming it's arguable should be willing to make that argument.
For me it's not that it's reproduction. Film that shows sex is not an issue as I see it and I don't know anyone that has developed serious addictions to sex in Hollywood film. However I know several people, family members included, that have absolutely obliterated their childhoods and early adult years by becoming addicted to porn. They were groomed by adults online from a young age and, although their parents tried to stop it, kids are sneakier and they got around it, exposing themselves to some truly dark things. It is not easy for families to recover from having dealt with a child with serious addiction issues.
I think it's pretty silly to argue that systemic protections are ineffective and overreach whereas the efforts of one or two parents should be enough and are the correct level of enforcement for the protection of children. The parents of the people I know went to extremes to protect their children and they were mostly unsuccessful.
Combination of abuse and unfettered access to drinks/drugs/Internet is way worse than either one alone. At the same time I think the issue of bad parenting is a) not one people talk about out loud because of stigma (we can attack tech CEOs all day for pushing addictive products but anyone can become a parent and none of them will stand to be called the "bad" one) and b) not amenable to much change save for a global in-house surveillance panopticon. Yes we can choose to place trust in parents to protect children from Instagram and PornHub, but consider that some parents just... won't. Neither can we force them to. What then?