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Age verification mandatory for porn sites in the UK starting July

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Age verification mandatory for porn sites in the UK starting July

#31
post #6
post #4

The UK government was warned almost 10 years ago this is bad idea, a privacy disaster waiting to happen. They've decided to push it through anyway. Children accessing porn is bad, I think that can be almost universally agreed on, but the solution is not the government nannying everyone.

I’m in favor of the ban, but the 1990s privacy nerds had a good point when they said it would lead to other kinds of censorship: https://www.standingforfreedom.com/2024/08/think-before-you-... The slippery slope happened a lot faster than most people thought.

It's a country that doesn't believe in freedom of artistic expression, either.

Re: Age verification mandatory for porn sites in the UK starting July

#32
post #26
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's already illegal for minors to see pornography Really? What law makes it illegal for minors to see pornography?

https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-ceos/citizens-guid... > It is illegal for an individual to knowingly use interactive computer services to display obscenity in a manner that makes it available to a minor less than 18 years of age (See 47 U.S.C. § 223(d) –Communications Decency Act of 1996, as amended by the PROTECT Act of 2003). It is also illegal to knowingly make a commercial communication via the Internet…

That makes it illegal to display pornography to minors. It doesn’t make it illegal for minors to see pornography.

Re: Age verification mandatory for porn sites in the UK starting July

#33

Hot take: I'm in favour of this. There's actually been significant progress in developing privacy-preserving attestation technologies in the last few years, that could enable anonymous age verification for adult websites. There's an IETF protocol called Privacy Pass (see RFCs 9576-9578) that can attest facts about clients (e.g. their age) in an anonymising manner. You reveal your age by showing your ID to an age veri…

> that could enable anonymous age verification for adult websites.

Courtesy of Microsoft ? Or Google ? Norhing is anonymous on today's internet.

Re: Age verification mandatory for porn sites in the UK starting July

#34
post #32
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-ceos/citizens-guid... > It is illegal for an individual to knowingly use interactive computer services to display obscenity in a manner that makes it available to a minor less than 18 years of age (See 47 U.S.C. § 223(d) –Communications Decency Act of 1996, as amended by the PROTECT Act of 2003). It is also illegal to knowingly make a commercial communication via the Internet…

That makes it illegal to display pornography to minors. It doesn’t make it illegal for minors to see pornography.

The owners of the website are the ones doing the displaying.

Again, the "bar that refuses to card anyone" analogy happens here.

Re: Age verification mandatory for porn sites in the UK starting July

#35
post #30
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-ceos/citizens-guid... > It is illegal for an individual to knowingly use interactive computer services to display obscenity in a manner that makes it available to a minor less than 18 years of age (See 47 U.S.C. § 223(d) –Communications Decency Act of 1996, as amended by the PROTECT Act of 2003). It is also illegal to knowingly make a commercial communication via the Internet…

As someone from the UK, which is where this article is on about, it is not illegal in this country for minors to see pornography in and of itself. Selling it to, etc. obviously are.

That's effectively the same thing in the context of this law.

It's illegal to distribute to minors, but the Internet has made it extremely easy for distributors to turn a blind eye.

Again, if it were a physical store, the shopkeeper would be obligated to kick out anyone under 18.

But on websites, there's just a pinky promise button and that's it.

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