This has already come up before the Supreme Court, with the argument that filtering was a less invasive technique to fulfill the government’s legitimate interests back in the early 2000s.
That ship has sailed. Even the opposition admits that trying to get everyone to filter is not going to work and is functionally insignificant. The only question is whether age verification is still too onerous.
> trying to get everyone to filter
We never needed everyone to filter, just parents busy lobbying the government to impose crap onto every possible service and website across the entire world.
Instead, they should purchase devices for their kids that have a child-lock and client-side filters. All sites have to do is add an HTTP header loosely characterizing it's content.
1. Most of the dollar costs of making it all happen will be paid by the people who actually need/use the feature.
2. No toxic Orwellian panopticon.
3. Key enforcement falls into a realm non-technical parents can actually observe and act upon: What device is little Timmy holding?
4. Every site in the world will not need a monthly update to handle Elbonia's rite of manhood on the 17th lunar year to make it permitted to see bare ankles. Instead, parents of that region/religion can download their own damn plugin.
There's a peer / social issue at play as well though. If you believe that smart phones are disastrous for kids (I happen to think so), and don't allow your 13yo daughter to have one, you are pretty much forcing her to be the odd one out. Maybe that's OK for some parents, but you can't deny that this cost exists.
Preventing your son from playing certain video games that all of his friends enjoy also has a social cost.
This is why I think it's great when schools ban phones in class. When left up to the parents individually it's an absolute disaster.
These are just some specific examples of where I the nanny state can be beneficial. For most things in general though I'd also prefer people govern themselves (and their kids) whenever possible.
So does being vegetarian or vegan. So does being not the dominant culture in any aspect of life. That's a decision for parents to make and honestly "they'll be left out" is such a crap parenting take. Especially since it's a bunch of parents together who don't want their kid to have access thinking this together. If they actually talked to each each or just made a stand so people could see, we wouldn't even have this so called social cost.
I'm seeing this as a parent in real time. I'm actually changing my kid's friend's parent behaviors by simply being like, "Cool. But my kid isn't/is going to do that" I don't know when parenting happened by social committee, but I don't believe in it.
> I don't know when parenting happened by social committee, but I don't believe in it.
It's always been the case. We've just become so individualistic, at least in some western cultures, that we rail against it. There's even an old saying "It takes a village to raise a child".
Your points only make sense in the absence of bad and/neglectful parents. For many decades it was required to prove age in order to consume porn. Porn on the internet ought to have the same requirement. I don’t know the best way to implement it but since the industry isn’t trying to find a solution then government should impose one.
Then the government should come up with a good way to prove age that does not negatively impact privacy. It shouldn't be possible for "who is viewing what porn (or other thing)" to be accidentally leaked; because it should be possible to not store the "who" part.
Such a proof does not exist. It is already the case that your porn viewing habits can be leaked. It’s just that at present the one storing the information is not the government.
Then create one, or something much better than is being demanded, first; before demanding companies use it.
If a porn company has to collect all the information about me (name, address, age, etc) and keep it in their database then, if they get hacked, then all that information, connected to what I viewed, is available to the hackers.
If the porn company has an ID that it assigns each person, and it reaches out to some government agency to say "is this person of age" (without their internal ID), then stores "yes/no" with the ID; then hacking cannot (or is much less likely to be able to) connect "what account has viewed what" with "what human being is attached to the account".
Effectively, by making the porn site need to collect and maintain personal information, privacy is made less safe. If the government is going to demand proof of age, then the government is on the hook for supplying a reasonable way to check it.
Then create one, or something much better than is being demanded, first; before demanding companies use it.
Before demanding car companies build safer vehicles I first invented the seat belt.
Can they? It seems highly unlikely to me that most web site operators are colluding with my VPN provider to unmask me.
(Yes fingerprinting is a huge issue but the implications of that get fairly complicated.)
Years ago Google released anonymized browsing data to researchers. The researchers were able to determine who did the searches. I imagine a state actor can already determine almost everyone’s online activity.
There's definitely some critical information missing there. I don't think you could individually identify me if all you had to go on was the text and timestamp of the searches I made within the past 24 hours. At least yesterday I didn't even look up any local businesses on maps.
State actor and porn site operator are two very different things. Pointing to the former in this context reads like a non sequitur to me.
I believe most websites keep track of viewing history and ip addresses of where that history comes from. I believe if the government wanted to determine what your internet history is they could do so with a great deal of accuracy. As such I think the complaint that requiring proof of age would be a privacy nightmare is not relevant.
We already live in an age of relatively little privacy.
The fact that there are already many threats to our privacy is not a reason to not push back on new threats. Rather, it's a reason to push back harder, and then try to fix the existing threats, too.
A targeted investigation by the government is not the same as dragnet surveillance is not the same as sharing the equivalent of my driver's license with some random site operator who can potentially turn around and sell that data (or just inadvertently leak it). The complaint is relevant because the proposed measure would make the status quo significantly worse than it currently is. That applies regardless of how bad it already is at present.
The government could fairly easily gain access to the contents of a security deposit box. That doesn't justify a policy requiring proactively declaring their contents to the authorities.
And all of that is before we even get to the essential question - would the proposed measure actually accomplish the officially stated goal?
Since Obama’s presidency we know dragnet surveillance by the government is already the norm.
So after a protracted back and forth your reasoning comes down to the following. The government is already engaging in dragnet surveillance. Somehow this automagically unmasks VPN usage (global dragnet (as opposed to targeted) traffic correlation on that scale would be a seriously impressive feat) in addition to any other privacy measures a typical individual might take. Therefore we should be okay with a system that enables the government to see you registering with various websites, or alternatively with a system that reveals various personal information to said website operator, or alternatively both simultaneously.
Or to summarize, the situation is already organically bad so everyone should be okay if we enact laws that artificially make it even worse in new ways.
To be blunt your reasoning seems entirely specious to me.
It’s not ok to allow easy access to hardcore pornography by minors. There is already virtually no privacy in these matters in the sense that Google and others already track us so the argument against age verification on privacy grounds is weak. As with most things there are tradeoffs and there is no perfect solution. I favor age verification being the law. You don’t.
The choice between you and others keeping the belief that your porn viewing habits are completely anonymous vs. allowing minors unfettered access to hardcore pornography I choose the latter as the more important issue.
> It’s not ok to allow easy access to hardcore pornography by minors.
I don't believe anyone here suggested that it was.
> Google and others already track us
This is not related to the discussion at hand. I already explained to you. Google does not track me on non-google sites. My state government does not track my browsing history. Neither does the federal government.
> the argument against age verification on privacy grounds is weak
You are responding with nonsense and ignoring the information I provided.
> As with most things there are tradeoffs and there is no perfect solution.
An empty platitude. The thing you are arguing for fundamentally does not work to accomplish the stated goal, although it is quite likely to accomplish other unstated goals. The "tradeoff" is a systematic loss of privacy that is likely to weaken civil liberties in the long run.
> keeping the belief that your porn viewing habits are completely anonymous vs. allowing minors unfettered access
Yet another misrepresentation. At this point I have to assume that your behavior is intentional. I'm left with the impression that you are an ideologically motivated actor who is fully aware that you don't have a leg to stand on but is attempting to sway the perception of an unseen audience anyhow.
The actual choice presented here is between a "solution" that openly invites government overreach without actually solving the stated problem versus the current status quo or possibly some alternative approach. Honestly I've yet to be convinced of the issue with the current status quo. Parental controls exist. Whitelists exist. Why can't we expect parents to do their jobs by parenting?
The mainstream social networks don't permit nudity. If you really have so little faith in your own child's judgment then whitelist Facebook, Wikipedia, and a few others and call it a day. Although I do have to wonder. Assuming they're a teenager, why do you have so little faith in their cognitive abilities?
In the end I'm reasonably certain that unfettered access to social networks is far worse for development than unfettered access to hardcore pornography. C'est la vie.
That's just not possible in practice. There's lots of people who enjoy publishing their sex, not commercially. There's no place under a single jurisdiction that can be filtered or required to prove age. Any social network will contain groups of people using it to distribute porn. When common ones are closed, dedicated ones are created.
I don’t understand what you are saying. The government can force providers to make their users prove their age. And people can violate the law and try to avoid this.
> This is why I think it's great when schools ban phones in class.
Agreed on the classroom angle, there are many reasons (e.g. cheating, concentration) to treat the availability of devices in a uniform way there.
> If you believe that smart phones are disastrous for kids
A focus on the handheld device also makes it easier to handle other related concerns that can't really be solved any other way, like "no social-media after bedtime."
It's important to teach our children that different people have different restrictions. Some of my daughter's friends have no phone. One of them has no phone, but does have a tablet. To the best of my knowledge, none of them are ostracized by the group. I mean, I've seen them hanging out at our house and other places.
> To the best of my knowledge, none of them are ostracized by the group.
Yes, in my experience it isn't as severe as "Ostracized", but definitely a bit "left out" occasionally, especially when friends are all doing "snap streaks" and swap BFFs (as they do) etc.
So at least in my area, a girl at 12+ will miss out on some social peer activities if she does not have a phone. End of the world? Probably not, but I guess it depends on your community's local culture. Also, the valley probably isn't a great baseline for comparison.
I'm not recommending anything. I just think we tend to ignore the nuance.
Just curious, how old are they? I'm planning on having kids and I'm afraid of how to answer the smart phone question. I imagine that it could start to be an issue by 12 or 13
Not even close. Some peers will have effectively their phone at 6 or lower. https://www.waituntil8th.org/ tries to promote delaying till 8yo. It may start being an issue as soon as they get to primary school.
The website you linked encourages waiting until 8th grade (ie. about 14 years old), not 8 years old.
That's what I get for posting while tired...
My daughter is 13 and has a phone for a number of years, and she got it later than some friends, earlier than others. I know that's not a lot of info, but it gives you some idea of the range _I_ saw.
In other words it is a multi-agent coordination problem from game theory. You can have an outside force change the rules, or you can figure out how to collaborate/compete within the game.
> This is why I think it's great when schools ban phones in class.
This was the absolute norm in the 00s when cellphones became common and cheap enough for teens to often have one. If you were seen with a phone out it would be confiscated. At some point schools apparently just gave up and only a few are starting to rediscover the policy as though it's a novel idea.
What the fuck happened? When exactly did this transition happen?
> When exactly did this transition happen?
In the late 2000s, as a response to a parental demand for communication and safety following high-profile school emergencies, especially school shootings.
Crazy. Compromising the quality of education for everybody every school day so that on rare occasions a very small number of students might be able to call their parents (who will be powerless to help over the phone.)
Yea I’m a parent and “what if there’s an emergency” is one of the silliest excuses to allow students to have phones. If there’s an emergency, the school is already going to have called the police. What the hell am I going to do if my kid calls me? I’ll tell her to hang up the phone and follow whatever emergency procedure they have.
> just parents busy lobbying the government to impose crap onto every possible service and website across the entire world.
Its not parents, primarily.
IMO the pressure comes from a few lobby groups, media scares, companies with age verification products to sell and big tech - the last because it imposes compliance costs that removes competition, and new entrants in particular.
Ah, the old "all we have to do" solution to complex technical problems. "Just" design it this way!
> The only question is whether age verification is still too onerous.
You've skipped right past the "does it work" question. It doesn't. Porn is available on file sharing networks in far greater quantity than it is on reputable websites.
The only realistic methods I'm aware of are whitelist filtering, sufficient supervision, or sufficient interaction and education.