The European Commission preliminarily found Pornhub, Stripchat, XNXX and XVideos in breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA) for failing to protect minors from being exposed to pornographic content on their services.
And what do you think happens when big platforms have to introduce age verification? People will just go to smaller unregulated sites which may inadvertently be worse because of malware risks and unregulated content. You just can’t take the porn out of the internet, people always find a way
Yep, this is already happening with Pornhub in The States.
That’s not how the internet works.
The onus is on the users. The parents are the ones who have to figure out a way to ensure what their kid’s devices can access, or that they are educated enough not to seek it.
Should kids be allowed to buy alkohol in stores?
How a brick-and-mortar store works can’t be compared to the Internet.
Until minors can buy alcohol online.
And that’s how it begins. Soon they’ll start asking everyone to provide ID to access the internet.
Won’t someone think of the children
I wonder why the EU didn’t find the parents of the kids to be in breach of whatever relevant child “protection” laws there are? I guess they are okay with the porn websites raising the kids. Maybe the EU can make PornHub to start a chain of day care centers?
I would trust porn stars more than Conservatives to raise children properly
So let me get this straight:
When I was 13, I managed to figure out the router password, disabled child protection for myself, then watched porn on my Android 2.3 phone that I had managed to put a custom ROM on because I liked the way it looked and had no idea what a “launcher” was yet.
This is not a hypothetical btw.
My parents were smart enough to enable appropriate blocking and secured access to those settings. I’m not sure something on-device was available at the time, but I included the bit about the custom rom to demonstrate that, even though I didn’t know WTF I was doing, I was more than capable of fucking around with the tech to get it to do what I wanted.
So were my parents in breach of their duties on child protection?
I don’t think they were. They actually did educate themselves (visiting a course / parent meetup to discuss and learn how to protect me from the Internet), and implemented everything they learned.
I was just a little shit and found a way around this.
And this is NOT an edgecase. Because guess what. It takes one kid in the friend group to figure out a way to circumvent parental controls, and then EVERYONE knows how to do it.
It simply does not fucking matter how well intentioned, knowledgeable, and present the parents are (mine were all of that).
Going “this would not be a problem if parents parented” is the LAZIEST fucking excuse, and I’m sick and tired of reading about it on here.
(Because I probably have to make it clear: I’m not advocating for photo/passport scanning, third party age verification,… and all that bullshit. What I think would be a FANTASTIC idea would be privacy-preserving age verification. There are two good ways to do this: 1) on a login attempt, prove that you are of age by presenting a fresh, signed token from a government service proving that you are over 18, and nothing else; site does not get any info, government does not know what you were trying to access; 2) a device-level age field. Proof here comes from the device itself, and can be 100% privacy preserving; just a “yep, is of age”. In this scenario… GUESS WHAT, PARENTS GET ENABLED TO PARENT “PROPERLY” BY PROVIDING THEM WITH A GOOD, SIMPLE, PRIVACY-PRESERVING TECHNICAL SOLUTION.)
I really should remember to put a huge “THIS IS NOT A VERY SERIOUS COMMENT” on most of my comments. I find I’m way too snarky for text based communication.
Anyways. I’m not saying parents should be punished because their kid managed to watch porn. I was just making a joke about how stupid everything is.
I didn’t grow up with routers and android phones. My equivalent of breaking into the router and changing the password was to climb into the paper recycling container to find Donald Duck comics but ending up finding porno mags.
The fact is, kids are always going to find porn. There’s just no way around it. If they put ID proof protections on the websites, they just gonna figure out torrents or some other way of downloading stuff.
In that case: sorry to blow up on you. I have seen to many comments on here claiming these things while being 100% serious. I just saw your comment and incidentally had time to write the above for once, so, here we are.
I agree that there’s no way to completely cut teens off from porn. Your torrent example is perfectly demonstrating this.
But I also do not understand the current outrage at anything trying to improve the situation, even when it’s not some stupid “scan your face” scheme.
It’s mostly just that I don’t want the government to know precisely which websites I visit. Nor do I want the the porn sites to know exactly who I am.
Let me have my privacy. I’ve been watching porn since I was 12 or 13 and absolutely would’ve figured out a way to do it even if there’d been age restrictions because I was horny af. Nothing bad has happened to me because of it. Perhaps a mild addiction to masturbation unless I’m having sex but that hurts literally nobody. Worse case scenario I last a little too long occasionally.
Block pornhub and teens will find much seedier sites.
It’s mostly just that I don’t want the government to know precisely which websites I visit. Nor do I want the the porn sites to know exactly who I am.
I understand, I want that too. It’s easily possible though (just one example for a scheme):
- you visit porn site
- porn site sends your browser a random nonce
- you/browser tell government service: sign this if I’m >18
- government signs the nonce + a timstamp to prove freshness
- your browser forwards the result to the porn site
- porn site can verify signature per standard public certificate chains
- now porn site has proof that you are >18, but knows nothing else about you; and government only knows that you wanted proof that you are an adult, but not for what site or purpose you wanted to prove that
Alternatively, if we go the “device has an age bracket field browsers access” route, it’s even simpler, and just as if not more privacy preserving.
Hey EU (and all other regulatory agencies interested in “protecting the children”), how about you provide information to parents on how they can setup their own blocking tools, like DNS. You can do this for free, today, right now and actually get the results you supposedly want.
It’s a precursor to a digital ID.
Because China and Russia will use bots.
The real crime here is while the EU is trying every angle to error your privacy, that time is not being spent on real issues. You are being sold out by the very people put into positions of power to serve you. If the data supported their goals, I would be there with them, but the data is very clear on the matter and the it indicates we are in for big issues with all these IDs being stored by centralized targets.
If kids are willfully seeking porn, then it ain’t anybody’s business to stop them. Exploring and enjoying your sexuality is part of growing up, and “moral” whackjobs shouldn’t get to decide how people grow up.
Protecting the kids should be about providing useful information, contraception, and official aid against predators.
I’m pretty liberal but nobody’s kids need to watch anyone get tied up and anally fucked while they scream.
I get your point about regular stuff, but there is a fuckton of irregular stuff
And you bring that up bcz you think that’s specifically what OP was referring to?
Minors accessing porn on their own is not a real problem, and hurts no one.
Teenagers beyng addicted to porn is a real problem.
Porn addiction is so astroturfed by evangelicals, that whatever actual addiction for porn there is have been drowned out by endless amount of “if you ever thought about wanting it then you’re an addict, please find jesus”.
Teenagers being addicted to anything is a real problem. Prohibition doesn’t work.
Is it? Is there research on it?
Actually yes. Tons of research. For both teen and adults.
But you could have googled that yourself instead of choosing to be a fucking idiot about it.
Do you imagine this is a good way of addressing any addiction issues?
That’s not how it works my man. If you’re claiming something it’s your burden to prove it. If instead you start butthurt rants, it means you know shit about shit and should be discarded.
