- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
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I have to agree with PornHub’s idea.
A device should be able it indicate in its browser headers whether its primary user is an adult or a minor and the service can react accordingly.
It won’t protect all the children but children of parents who can’t be assed to setup a device properly will have problems no matter how much we increase the surveillance state.
A device should be able it indicate in its browser headers whether its primary user is an adult or a minor and the service can react accordingly.
I can already see that being used for targeting children with specific ads on the internet.
The laws around advertising are fucked to begin with but the headers SHOULD be used in advertising 100%
The minor flag would actually remove the LARGE gray area that platforms take advantage of to push harmful ADs and content to kids (Today they just get to play dumb)
This would actually create a framework to enforce existing advertising laws as well as data collection laws with regards to minors.
Examples: Minors should not see ads for holsters, knives, ammo, ED medications, Diet drugs, muscle building drugs, Alcohol, Tobacco products, Online Gambling
These are all things I have seen advertised on YouTube to me; Granted I am not a minor but I am also just using Youtube by going to the site with no account.
If I was an advertiser for those products I’d be pissed that my ad dollars are going non targets anyway. So it would be a win win
Kids are the target of gambling ads because it conditions them into thinking it’s normal
I imagine other products see similar benefits
Kids are babied already but if 14 year olds can vote in party elections, and 16 year olds can consent to sexual intercourse with adults, then I don’t think restricting porn is our problem. Either kids can make decisions, or all of these laws need to align with each other more logically.
We have taken parents rights away to allow children to make decisions on their gender and name changes, yet we expect parent to be responsible for their actions like accessing porn.
I could not care less about whatever the final say is on age restrictions, but if there are gonna be rules, at least make them make sense you know? I also do not love that I have to verify my identity to use the internet. Look at the UK and how that’s working out there even without IDs. Talk about authoritarian control.
This stuff is the whole reason I switched to this platform.
These ideas are all fundamentally misguided. Let’s take a step back what we are trying to do here: We want to create a system so that the government can withhold certain information from certain people. That’s both difficult and dangerous.
PornHub’s idea requires cooperation from the hosters. You are not likely to get global agreement on that. So you will still need to do something about those foreign sites, such as blocking them.
At that point, such a law would achieve 2 things:
- Society has decided to create a technical censorship infrastructure.
- Domestic porn providers have an incentive to support to it because it removes foreign competition.
Blocklists that parents can install on their devices already exist, so there would be no change in that regard.
Of course, minors have no trouble circumventing such software. They have plenty of time and they are horny. You can’t win. The only faint hope might be to include such features at deeper levels, similar to existing DRM schemes. This would be ripe for abuse by bad actors or governments. It certainly would be used against the consumer by the copyright industry and tech monopolies; just like existing DRM schemes.
So we really should ask why we would want to walk further down this expensive, hostile, and dangerous path. Are we afraid that masturbation causes blindness?
One of the experiences I will never forget was “teaching” an ICT class about 2 decades ago (I was a TA who got left to cover a class - good times).
The older ones of you will remember the trick (many of us used it for playing flash games like adventure quest!) - have two browser windows open, minimise the one with the thing you were not supposed to be doing on it when the teacher comes around - no evidence right?
These kids were doing the same thing - I swear I’ve never seen so much porn in my entire life. Oh and yes, a lot of it involved Japanese animation. This was on a network with parental controls enabled by the way, because it didn’t block those sites.
Here’s the thing - and we all know it, no matter what measures you put in place kids will find away around it. More crudely put “If little Timmy wants titties, Timmy going to move heaven and earth to find them”.
They’ll sneak a parental passport at 3am when you’re sleeping, or just VPN on in, or even invest in a fake ID. Nothing you do is going to stop that; you have to sleep some time, you have a lot of goals, they can stay up all night, and they only have one.
Catching your kids with porn and dealing with it is a game of whack-a-mole every parent has to play, and honestly it’s one they need to play. It’s about having those difficult talks and saying “it’s ok to want to look as long as you realise it isn’t real”.
Mass surveillance isn’t the way - if I were a government hostile to the USA (and soon the UK), I’d be working on making the best free porn site ever made. Think of all the free documents and credentials, think of all the blackmail material, think of all the harm that could be inflicted.
Admittedly, skin cream is likely to face less of a rabid drive from kids, and isn’t something you’d blackmail over. Then again, maybe little Timmy needs some lotion, or maybe president Puta wants to use my girlfriend’s skin lotion addiction to compel me to spy for Russia?
Like, I remember the pirate radio station making a big hubbub during that time when rock n roll was banned in the UK. I could see illegal porn sites operating on ships in international waters, outside the boundaries of US enforcement using satellite connections to get their content out there. Problem is, the US is a little more trigger happy and might just send Navy ships out to sink them. If it happens in international waters nobody has to know.
We have a lot of land in the US that is a pain in the ass to get to, would be harder to set up but I could see some spiteful folks setting up something in the remote asshole of the mountain ranges. Would also be a lot harder to follow them if they pissed off as well.
This is true, the US is awful big. There’s work arounds, though. Balloons aren’t hard to build and launch, but the fact that they would be sending and receiving data packets directly inside US airspace would make them ridiculously easy to track and take down.
In the laws references in the article, the need for #1 and #3 were caused by social media. Yet we target the individual rather than the social media company for the fix. Let’s don’t fix the source of the problem but we can make life more difficult for many millions of people. How dumb are we in this country?
Same issue as recycling. Shift responsibility to the individual for something completely out of their control.
This is all dumb. If you’re worried about kids surfing porn sites then the legal guardian should act accordingly. There are so many methods to blocking porn sites that it’s almost hilarious. Web filtering; most ISPs are able to support website filtering on their supplied gateway or DNS. Parental controls on device; most devices come with opyional locks built-in at this point especially if it’s aimed towards children.
Sure, it’s not perfect but it’s better than removing yet another layer of web anonymity. We see how well browser fingerprinting is going, let’s not make it easier to track who is browsing where than it already is. But that’s the real point behind these bills, isn’t it?
Edit: I guess I was ranting mainly about the porn, but honestly, these are all things that parents should be aware of their children doing. If it’s an awareness issue, then that should be the next step. The government going straight from “oh there’s a problem” to “let’s make it illegal” without trying to raise awareness is extremely heavy handed.
Such laws are guaranteed to fail in their written objectives. The intended objective is to lead idiots to believe they help.
idiots
You include the people who voted for it?
That isn’t me. You are looking in a mirror.
Again.
Oh uh.
I’ve edited my comment to make it clearer
None of this is bad. The skin cream one is dumb but the rest are def needed.
It’s all about the implementation. The Washington bill is treating diet products as similar to alcohol (check ID in-store and on delivery), which seems fine to me.
The NY law seems to be suggesting that dating app services need to collect (and possibly retain) sensitive information on people, like identification, location data. That’s troubling to me.
I understand the concern but if ot stops underage people from getting on, I think it’s a good idea. All social media needs it too. We have to protect our kids better. As someone with step kids, I hate that they use tiktok but they were already addicted to it when I entered the picture.
if you are a parent, it’s you whose responsibility is to protect your children. if you are incapable of keeping up with what they do on their devices, and incapable of educating your child on how to use the internet, maybe you shouldn’t have made one. if you don’t do these, and you want these to be “solved” with laws, you are just forcing mass surveillance on everyone out of your fucking laziness.
There’s an important distinction here: “is a good idea” is not “is the right way to do it”. You can also keep kids off of dating apps by banning dating apps, banning children from the Internet, or even just banning children. All of those are horrible solutions, but they achieve the goal.
The goal should be to balance protecting kids with minimizing collateral damage. Forcing adults to hand over significant amounts of private data to prove their identity has the same basic fault as the hyperbolic examples, that it disregards the collateral damage side of the equation.
