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Porn sites will be legally required to verify users' age using credit card
- kuschkufan 5y agoLet's assume porn websites implement this as required (fat chance). You'd be daft to enter your CC that associates you by name, home address, phone number and purchases to the porn videos that you'd look at. Who comes up with this stuff? Zeroknowledge proof based age verification service when?
- consumer451 5y agoI don’t know the shady data economy at all, but are there datasets out there which let you de-anonymize just via residential/mobile IP address or hostname? I just assumed there were, available to any very motivated party. And how effective and wide spread is browser fingerprinting to de-anon someone?
- kuschkufan 5y agoConsumer451 seems to be insuating that age verification by CC for porn might be okay? Since your privacy online is lost anyhow? While stating "he doesn't know ... at all".
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- consumer451 5y ago> Consumer451 seems to be insuating that age verification by CC for porn might be okay? Since your privacy online is lost anyhow? While stating "he doesn't know ... at all". How did kuschkufan manage to put those words into my mouth? Really, how did you get that from what I said? I was just pointing out that it might not take a credit card to ID you. And I really don’t know what datasets are out there, but I assume the worst.
- nybble41 5y ago> I don’t know the shady data economy at all, but are there datasets out there which let you de-anonymize just via residential/mobile IP address or hostname? Sure, and they're built using data collected from shady sites which ask for personal information such as CC details under dubious pretenses (like age verification) and associate it with the visitor's IP address. These de-anonymizing datasets exist because of poorly considered policies exactly like the one being discussed here.
- consumer451 5y agoThanks. Yeah, uploading PII to a something like a porn site seems crazy to me, but the industry seems to make a lot of money via card charges so maybe I am in the minority. I also want to make clear I was not endorsing the policy outlined in OP. Just curious.
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- claudiawerner 5y agoThe article is also light on what this actually means for sites not even hosted in the UK. I assume that eventually sites like PornHub will be blocked entirely, for everyone, unless they comply with adding these checks. Very, very few porn sites anyone actually uses are hosted in the UK and therefore very few must obey UK law on what they host and to whom they show it. But they can be pressured into it, I imagine.
- vidarh 5y agoMy guess would be that a whole lot of porn companies would love if this was required, because it'd mean conditioning people to enter card details far more places, and would potentially allow for far easier upsells if people have already accepted they have no other way in than giving a card. We've already been down this route in the past with "Adult Verification Services" after the Communications Decency Act 1996, when it quickly was turned into a monetisation mechanism for porn sites. E.g. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_Check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_Check (One might think the UK government would have someone sufficiently aware of history to realise how spectacularly that failed to stop access to porn for minors, but it seems not) EDIT: Also, last time this specific UK attempt came out, MindGeek, the company which owns Pornhub, was one of the company vying to handle the then-proposed identity checking mechanism.
- onion2k 5y agoStudies show that half of 11 to 13-year-olds have seen pornography at some point. What's missing from that stat is where they saw porn. Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Imgur, etc are full of porn but aren't technically porn sites. If that's where kids are accessing porn then blocking porn sites will not fix the problem. Unless you understand what the problem actually is there will be no way to fix it.
- IIAOPSW 5y ago>Unless you understand what the problem actually is there will be no way to fix it. Oh that's easy. The problem is with society. No one is in any way damaged or traumatized cause they saw some sex on a screen at approximately 13 years old. Its ridiculous we go through the intrusive charade of trying to stop them. The problem is there is no problem.
- nottorp 5y agoUsually when politicians ressurect "think of the children" initiatives they want to distract attention from something. What's the current UK scandal, besides the obvious ongoing BRExit consequences?
- onion2k 5y agoWhat's the current UK scandal, besides the obvious ongoing BRExit consequences? Unfortunately the maximum POST size Chrome allows limits my response to 4GB so I won't be able to cover it all.
- viraptor 5y agoTldr news UK is pretty good at matter-of-fact summaries of those: https://youtube.com/c/TLDRNews https://youtube.com/c/TLDRNews
- jamessb 5y ago> What's the current UK scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partygate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partygate
- martopix 5y agoThis had already been proposed years ago and postponed. The obvious result isn't that people will do the identification thing: instead people will use a VPN. It seems pretty clear to me.
- nly 5y agoIf you're even remotely privacy concious in the UK you use a VPN 24/7 anyway. All the major ISPs here are already logging tonnes of metadata at the TCP and DNS level
- samwillis 5y agoI think based on the number of times they have tried to legislate for this, most recently in 2019, I would put the odds of it happening (even in a hamstrung way) at less than 10%.
- rosndo 5y ago
- Havoc 5y agoAlso any viewing of porn is posted as a status update to Facebook and instagram just to be extra sure no 17 year olds slip through the net
- CTOSian 5y agoplus notify the local authorities to update the household records just in any case...
- nfriedly 5y agoWhen I was a kid, I had a joint bank account with one of my parents. When I was around 16 I was able to get a "Check card", which behaved like a debit card in that I couldn't spend more money within was in the account, but it looked like a Visa card to anyone who was processing it. I recall being pleasantly surprised when I learned that I could use that card to "prove" I was over 18.
- vidarh 5y agoMy son has a visa card tied to the app his pocket money gets paid into (Go Henry). It's available from age 6.
- tekknik 5y ago> When I was around 16 I was able to get a "Check card", which behaved like a debit card in that I couldn't spend more money within was in the account Not relevant to the conversation at hand, and perhaps this is US only, but using a debit card you can absolutely spend more than you have. Sometimes banks won’t remove the funds until the actual transaction posts. Most shops won’t post the transactions until evening. So in some cases you can double, triple, quadruple spend. Doing so of course is fraud.
- BenjiWiebe 5y agoAre you sure that's fraud? When I accidentally spent more than I had, the bank never cancelled my account / told me I'd committed fraud / sicced the cops on me. My balance went negative, and I was charged an overdraft fee. Reading the fine print on my account, it said that charges would go through on an overdrawn account until a certain dollar amount, at which point the debit card transactions would fail. Now reading what I just wrote... It does seem like it would be very much specific to each bank.
- nfriedly 5y agoOh, good point. Now that I think about it, I did overspend by a small amount once, and I remember the bank paid it but charged me a $25 fee so that my account was left at -$26 or whatever. I think my paycheck cleared the next day, and then they refunded the fee when I called and complained. (I think it's only fraud if you do it intentionally, though.)
- nly 5y ago*for UK visitors not using a VPN.
- throwawaymanbot 5y ago
- hogrider 5y agoWhy are they so against minors watching porn when it's a normal part of sexual development?
- donkarma 5y agohow is it apart of normal sexual development?
- Dma54rhs 5y agoThere's a lot of different porn out there, are rape fantasies or common mother incest fantasies really part of normal sexual development?
- AnonymousPlanet 5y agoI have the feeling it depends on how much your culture has been "graced" by puritan ideals at some point. The rest of Europe has a much more relaxed cultural stance towards nudity that can be seen by minors.
- lamp987 5y agoBecoming hardcore pornography addicts is normal sexual development?
- lariati 5y agoThis issue needs more attention but this is obviously not going to do anything. Reading about the Online Safety Bill makes me quite glad to not live in the UK.
- commandlinefan 5y ago... good thing they have such a good track record with security and all that.
- sashenka 5y agoShould be completely banned.
- justmythoughts4 5y agoOn the one hand, this sounds like a good idea. On the other hand, every kid will find a way around it easily. I would rather porn sites have to have a "responsible use" link on their sites that gives addicted users a way to find help, and a way to add themselves to a self-exclusion list. The self-exclusion list would essentially be an industry-wide temporary block, so you could say "I don't want to use porn for a month" or "I can only use for 1 session a week" This is something that gambling sites already have to do, for example here's Betfair's site: https://responsiblegambling.betfair.com/ https://responsiblegambling.betfair.com/
- gilgamesh3 5y ago>Studies show that half of 11 to 13-year-olds have seen pornography at some point. This is not porn site's fault, parents should be aware of what their children see online. >Experts who work with children say it gives them unhealthy views of sex and consent, putting them at risk from predators and possibly stopping them reporting abuse. LOL. Instead of educating children about sex and consent, they instead prefer to put the burden on the porn sites.
- inter_netuser 5y agoSoon made much more convenient by your QR passport. I, for one, welcome our new QR overlords.