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Irish State announce plan to build a porn preference register for most of the EU

235 points by cianmm 3y ago

jimnotgym 3y ago
What if you don't have a passport?
- juahan 3y ago
  No porn for you then I guess.
- cabalamat 3y ago
  No porn for you then.
- polishdude20 3y ago
  Back to Sears catalogues for you peasant!
  - anon84873628 3y ago
    More like Nat Geo :-D
- seszett 3y ago
  The fact that this article talks about passports is a hint that it is at least partly misreporting based on assumptions from someone who didn't know much about the situation. This is within the EU, so obviously what would be asked is an EU id.
  - Macha 3y ago
    > EU id There isn't one. Ireland also doesn't have a national ID program, so effectively for most people their passport or driver's license are the only forms of government ID they _might_ have. But even then it's not mandatory to have either.
    - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
      You could use the PSC card I suppose. The union of driver license, passport and PSC probably covers most of the country.
    - seszett 3y ago
      "EU id" was a shortcut for "id documents issued by EU countries", they're valid EU-wide. It's an ID card in most EU countries and that's what would be used for the purposes of this article, except for Irish citizens I guess but they are probably a relatively small percentage of EU visitors of porn sites. Now I just noticed that although the subject is "most of the EU", this is an Irish site, so maybe they just didn't really take this into account.
- lifestyleguru 3y ago
  torrents?!
  - robocat 3y ago
    Beware: you run risk of inadvertently downloading or distributing child sexual abuse material (CSAM). A friend was talking about how their US friend got given a sex offence label due to downloading a zip of porn that unknown to them contained some CSAM. Lost their job and worse. You didn't know is no defence in some jurisdictions. You personally can't check images or image collections for legality, so the risk is real.
    - lifestyleguru 3y ago
      Well, opening a website can save in the browser cache any image which is not displayed on the website. What all these silly mobile apps and games exactly are downloading and uploading? Who knows....
      - robocat 3y ago
        Progress: jail for everyone. Certainly modern life has dangerous tripwires. I just had to google the words for the acronym CSAM - and as a non-citizen it made me double-think about surveillance. Maybe add a couple more paras to your comment? If you give me six sentences written by the most innocent of men, I will find something in them with which to hang them. - powerful political figure (1585 – 1642)
    - 127361 3y ago
      Yes, the Internet has created a real life Orwellian nightmare.
- maronato 3y ago
  No video-sharing platform for you then.
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  Just go to any of the thousands of porn websites that don’t ask for it.
- dudul 3y ago
  Just torrent your porn. Regulations like this will achieve nothing.
wkat4242 3y ago
Wow I thought Ireland was changing now, they even voted for gay marriage. But the Catholicism still reigns strong there :( A few years ago a hospital even let a woman with a miscarriage die because they didn't want to intervene.
- goodluckchuck 3y ago
  Why intervene and save one life when to could stand idly by and make a political point that saves thousands? /s
- disgruntledphd2 3y ago
  > A few years ago a hospital even let a woman with a miscarriage die because they didn't want to intervene. They were legally unable to intervene, without risking prosecution. Yes, it was entirely insane. And that case was a major reason that the constitution was changed to prevent this ever happening again. This is 100% nothing to do with Catholicism, just standard moral hand wringing around what might happen to kids.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    > They were legally unable to intervene, without risking prosecution. They should have done so anyway, obviously. There's no chance they would have been prosecuted for it. Not with all the uproar. I walked in the candlelight demonstrations too. > And that case was a major reason that the constitution was changed to prevent this ever happening again. Only after a referendum which the church opposed, and it's still one of the most restrictive countries in terms of abortion.
    - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
      > They should have done so anyway, obviously. There's no chance they would have been prosecuted for it. Not with all the uproar. I walked in the candlelight demonstrations too. Can you give me some evidence that you're willing to destroy your career in a country on a point of principle? Like, I completely agree that they should have done that, but that's pretty easy for me to say, it wouldn't be my career on the line. > Only after a referendum which the church opposed, and it's still one of the most restrictive countries in terms of abortion. Look man, my wife had a missed miscarraige under the old rules, and I completely agree, but at least that shit won't happen anymore. I did query this with our fertility consultant about what would happen if we were past 12 weeks and got a seriously bad genetic test result, and he just shrugged and said we could go to England, which was pretty disappointing, post referendum.
cabalamat 3y ago
> This is the national internet regulator proposing that it would require that everyone, adult and children alike, would upload their state ID and live selfies, to porn sites to have biometric processing of their facial images performed. Resulting, amongst other things, in an effective register of porn preferences for adults and a collection of selfies of children kept by the porn sites for six years (required to prove they have complied with the regulation, you see). I'm sure this data would never fall into the wrong hands or be misused :-)
- hatenberg 3y ago
  That’s probably the intent. create massive friction without outright forbidding it
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Lol, the fact you're downvoted shows how little critical thinking some people on this site have. The US has done things like this for generations, the 'red scare' is a perfect example of the state creating lists of people's political and personal preferences and using them against them. Knowing the list exists and you could get on it my standing too close to those thoughts not approved was used as a force to keep people only thinking 'good thoughts'.
  - patrickaljord 3y ago
    The intent is to ask for ID in order to connect to any website, the article already says that this law will apply to any video sharing site including facebook, twitter, tiktok and even mastodon...
- lifestyleguru 3y ago
  Yeah what's up with that. Already now many service providers like payment processor or online brokerage requests me to upload "a selfie" holding sheet of paper with something written on it, or holding my document. How they arrived to the conclusion that it's acceptable?!
  - 3y ago
Lapalux 3y ago
Misrepresentation of the actual intent of the Irish government, but as result they will end up creating what title says.
- disgruntledphd2 3y ago
  What's the intent here then? Like, I'm an Irish citizen (a former coworker recently took a job with the body responsible for this policy), and I have no idea what the intent is here (apart from the general think of the children stuff).
  - deleted 3y ago
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malux85 3y ago
Upload biometric data to porn sites? That seems like a phishers dream come true. Even if the big sites farm this out to third parties, unscrupulous imitators could harvest personal info on an enormous scale for sale on the dark web.
doubled112 3y ago
Wasn't there a tool/bot to confuse search engines by submitting a bunch of random terms? Time for a rewrite.
jimbob45 3y ago
The far right is going hard against porn in multiple countries right now. I don’t agree but I get where they’re coming from. However, I don’t get going after porn before going after casinos. Casinos ruin lives and wreck economies far worse than porn could ever hope to. Going after porn before casinos feels like going after kitchen knives before AR-15s.
- Abekkus 3y ago
  Same reason people complained about old ladies wearing fur coats, more than bikers who wear leather jackets; one enemy is scarier than another.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  Is this a "right-v-left" dichotomy really? secondly, different kinds of harm are not directly comparable, more so for their sources.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  > The far right is going hard against porn in multiple countries right now. I don’t agree but I get where they’re coming from. It's none of their business though. Porn doesn't harm people. And they're not getting rid of it anyway. Just like nobody's getting rid of torrents.
  - bloopernova 3y ago
    > Porn doesn't harm people. The girlsdoporn victims would disagree with you. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GirlsDoPorn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GirlsDoPorn
    - cynicalsecurity 3y ago
      Porn actually lowers the amount of sex crimes in the society. Instead of going outside and performing sex with a real person, people simply stay at home. This is by far the cheapest and easiest solution to the problem. Without porn, the amount of victims would be significantly higher and the crimes would be having a much worse outcome. Not many people remember the world before porn, but I do. I vividly remember how rape was a regular crime on the streets of my city. It almost completely disappeared after the invention of the internet and since porn become widely accessible to people.
xeckr 3y ago
This will predictably lead to coomers putting on their pirate hats en masse.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
The topic of ID verification for porn sites has gotten a lot of commentary on HN recently, e.g. North Carolina's law requiring ID recently went into effect. Slightly sidestepping the issue of needing an ID for porn in the first place, though, I wanted to comment on the extreme shortsightedness of any sort of ID verification laws (most specifically, financial KYC laws) that require that each individual company verify and store your identity documents themselves. This is quite simply a data breach hackers dream. For example, when Stripe released their Identity product, which captures ID images and selfies, people were at first surprised that the businesses needing ID verification had full access to the ID images (after all, this is contrary to their credit card processing services where businesses never can get access to full credit card numbers, which is great as it keeps those businesses out of the most arduous requirements of PCI rules). But Stripe explained they had to give every end-business access to all the full image data for regulatory compliance reasons. It would make much more sense to rewrite the regulations so that 99% of companies would never need to store identity verification info themselves, but could just delegate that to an approved provider who has much more stringent security checks (or better yet, allow people to cryptographically sign info to prove their identity without giving up their whole passport image, but that's a ways off). I'm not saying this would solve all issues (big companies get hacked, after all), but I hope by now we've put to bed the idea that companies, generally, can secure their data against determined hackers.
- deleted 3y ago
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- grotorea 3y ago
  Hasn't there been a few countries with some sort of digital ID development already? I get the impression the Anglosphere has an anti-ID card tradition so it seems like it's a bit behind in that.
  - reaperducer 3y ago
    The anti-ID sentiment comes from looking back on history, and not pretending that the future can only be better. People who don't know history repeat its mistakes.
shikon7 3y ago
Why would minors be required to take part in this? To access age-restricted material suitable to them (not 18+ but maybe 13+), or would this registration be mandatory for everyone?
- Macha 3y ago
  I think the line of thinking is: 1. Minors will attempt to access porn sites 2. They will be faced with the picture validation 3. Some of them will try it 4. They will theoretically fail the validation, but the porn site will still be required to keep the data from the attempt.
- cianmm 3y ago
  The article clarifies that this would cover pretty much any website which allows you upload video, so minors would have to take part on YouTube, Facebook, etc. I guess the opt out would be to not use those platforms, but that seems unlikely.
- maronato 3y ago
  The article says any “video-sharing platform” would require all users, adults and children, to upload their IDs and pics. Porn websites are video sharing platforms, so they must comply no matter the age. But don’t worry, porn sites must also run a biometric analysis on the images sent to check if the user is 18+!
AlbertCory 3y ago
Pro tip for Gov't bureaucrats: if the news stories about your initiative begin with "this is not a joke" -- you may want to rethink things.
James_K 3y ago
Regulating porn is just stupid. It's never going to work and I don't get its objectives. Porn probably has a negative effect on children, but much less than something like TikTok. I could at least see the sense in banning children from the entire internet or limiting their access in some way (preferable implemented by ISPs rather than individual websites), but trying to specifically stop them from seeing naked people is pointless. Parents can easily control which parts of the internet their kids have access to, and much more effectively than the state can with the added bonus that it doesn't affect people without kids.
- lifestyleguru 3y ago
  I'm afraid the only way to introduce children is by whitelisting. Service by service, website by website, video by video. Giving them a smartphone with WiFi is like filling cabinet next to their bed with cigarettes, snickers bars, and painkiller pills.
  - James_K 3y ago
    I agree somewhat. Ideally, the internet wouldn't be addictive at all, and hence wouldn't be an issue for children or adults. A whitelist seems reasonable for the current state of the internet, but I can't think of anything beyond Wikipedia that you could put on it. That said, you still run into the more fundamental issue of what exactly is adult content? Violence, gore, and gambling certainly, though I'm not sure casinos should be legal at all. But I struggle to justify it for porn. It's probably more healthy for children to have access to some kind of pornography.
  - nine_k 3y ago
    I did not limit internet access for my children, past certain age. Instead, my children asked me to protect them from disturbing content sometimes. (So I did, setting up an age filter on YouTube.) Most of the time, unless you yourself don't eat snickers bars non-stop while chain-smoking, your children won't, too. Children do what their parents do, not what their parents tell them to do.
  - buu700 3y ago
dachworker 3y ago
Limiting porn exposure for children and early teenagers is probably a good thing, but this is the wrong way to do it, and a weak justification to create a blackmail registry.
antiquoom 3y ago
This is false, they're not building a "porn preference register", they're requiring age verification for pornographic websites. Submitting one's identity documents to access such websites is of course very easily avoided, by simply choosing not to consume pornographic materials online.
- fortyseven 3y ago
  The ol' "if you did nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about" way of thinking, eh?
- cynicalsecurity 3y ago
  I'm sorry, what? Are we still living in a democracy or is it already back to the USSR?
- theodric 3y ago
  This is an extremely short-sighted and crypto-moralistic position masquerading as reasonableness. Why should I be forced to provide a government ID to a random third party simply because I want to view legal images? One does not follow logically from the other; and moreover, secular people should not be forced to live according to the moral strictures of the conservative and/or religious.
- aaronmdjones 3y ago
  If the website is tracking what you visit when logged in (which, they will be, as their business model is serving you relevant videos so you stay on the site longer to see more ads), and now the law is going to require them to verify that your account belongs to a person over the age of majority by storing your biometric information, then that is exactly what this law is doing. Anyone who breaches that website's database (whether an inside job or not) is now going to learn not only what videos RandomUser782 has watched but also who they are, where they are, their birthdate, and what they look like; and if they chose to prove their identity via driving licence, also, their home address. If this doesn't strike you as completely fucking nuts, I don't know what to say.
cynicalsecurity 3y ago
This is not just beyond idiotic, this is straightforward evil and dangerous.
ativzzz 3y ago
I'm pretty libertarian when it comes to things like drugs or sex work, but it's hard for me with porn. Maybe because I've been addicted to it for 20 years at this point so it's personal for me. You can call it a parenting failure or whatever, either way I'm addicted to porn and I think it will stay with me forever simply due to my lifestyle of remote tech worker. Luckily, it's not totally crippling, but it's definitely hampered my development I don't know what a reasonable solution is. We forbid selling alcohol & cigarettes to people under a certain age because we deem it unhealthy for children's development, but we don't have the tools to do that for internet porn on a societal scale. Is digital ID the right solution here? Is there a better way to do this? The HN mentality is to tear down digital walls, and is it even possible without seriously harming the open web or personal privacy & security?
- 127361 3y ago
  These addictions are likely a symptom of another problem. It's not the porn itself that's the problem. It's likely childhood trauma or some other adversity that's caused the addiction.
  - robocat 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - 127361 3y ago
      Maybe it is shit, maybe it isn't. I'll see if any studies were carried out on it. I don't really care what you think about it, I'll carry on as usual, and try to correct my mistakes to the best of my ability. I have rights under the 1st Amendment to express myself freely, including possible amateur psych diagnoses. That's my protected freedom of speech right there.
      - robocat 3y ago
        > I have rights under the 1st Amendment to express myself freely Not where I'm standing* you don't - this is an international forum discussing an international issue. Aside: I'm a foreigner so I personally have very little in the way of constitutional rights. We all have almost no information about each other and text comments on emotionally tangled subjects are easily misread. The risk is that psych comments can easily do more harm than good: the potential for misunderstanding is high. Even without misunderstanding between commenters there is a risk of triggers in readers. It is hard to say what this community thinks is correct but https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html The next obvious step is past-life trauma analysis (yes, that's a real thing that real people do). I'm actually interested in any quantitative papers you can find on that topic. Moderator about an adjacent topic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20psychiatric&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... * My jurisdiction has no first amendment
grork 3y ago
IMHO, this is a misleading headline: They are not building a “porn preference register”, they just going full-dystopian nightmare collecting live biometric data that could be used to _infer_ your porn preferences. We don’t need stupid headlines to make this idea sound dumber, and kinda distracts from the real issue of biometric verification for websites being a stupid idea.
brvsft 3y ago
Highly misleading title. Although I disagree with the plan either way, the state is not building a 'porn preference register.' This concept is introduced in this particular article, but there technically are ways to store user preferences separate from their PII. The linked article from Irish Examiner has a more accurate title: > Porn sites may require passport details in order to stop children from using them
highwaylights 3y ago
I actually think the .xxx TLD plan from a few years ago was about the best version of this legislation that could exist - essentially adult content would be limited to a certain subset of blockable TLDs. If a site is showing adult content and not on an adult TLD, it risks a state-level block until it's compliant. This seems much easier to police, gives 80% of what the legislators are trying to achieve, and doesn't require entrusting KYC to a bunch of dodgy websites. Sure, it won't block VPNs and there would be problems at the start while things migrate, but if realistically your goal is to keep kids off adult websites then it's at least more reasonable than this proposal to entrust the parents/guardians with some amount of responsibility to make sure the safeguards can't be circumvented on their kids' devices.
- jampekka 3y ago
  There's no way of getting kids from getting porn if they really want it. We had plenty of VHS and magazine porn as kids even though shops didn't sell them to kids. Current mainstream porn sites curate off the most hardcore stuff quite well. The dark web versions that will pop up due to draconian KYC will definitely not have such curation.
  - kelseyfrog 3y ago
    I'm not a big fan of this form black or white thinking. We could apply this to guns, bombs, drugs and conclude that it was pointless to reduce numbers. In it's extreme form, a sufficiently motivated teenager built a homemade neutron source[1] therefore we shouldn't control nuclear material. I just don't think this argument, taken to its logical conclusion, is valid. Is there a better way of reformulating it? 1. Silverstein, K. (2005). Radioactive boy scout: The frightening true story of a whiz kid and his homemade nuclear reactor. Turtleback Books.
    - jampekka 3y ago
      I didn't say there should be no restrictions for guns, bombs, drugs or even porn, even though they can't be fully rooted out. The problem is the thinking that they can be rooted out. War-on-Porn would have just as horrible effects as War-on-Drugs has. As for porn, I think the potential effects of it to kids are way overblown. Children should be educated (age appropriately of course) about sexuality so they can handle the stuff and situations they will see at some point anyway.
ortusdux 3y ago
Direct link to document - https://www.cnam.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Draft_Online_Safety_Code_Consultation_Document_Final.pdf https://www.cnam.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Draft_Online_...
throw0101d 3y ago
Web pages are all about tags with data and metadata. It shouldn't be hard to add metadata about content type. I never quite understood why labeling initiatives never gained traction: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_Selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_... * https://www.w3.org/PICS/ https://www.w3.org/PICS/ * https://www.w3.org/2007/powder/ https://www.w3.org/2007/powder/ Throw some <meta> tags in and browsers can parse: then have a password-protected "filter controls" area in settings (and perhaps a GPO for corporate environments). I would think that the porn companies throwing some money at web browser developer resources to implement this wouldn't be a bad idea. Every time this idea comes up (again) they can point to it and say "we did our part, now it's up to the parents" (or whatever).
deleted 3y ago
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sacrosanct 3y ago
The tech savvy will just use VPNs to get around geo-politics such as this, at least a VPN should work in theory to get around verification measures by the Irish State. This advice has been echoed countless times when this issue crops up. One concern is that there are tech-illiterate people who fall victim of such an ID system and don't use a VPN to bypass it. I don't have numbers/stats, but I imagine a good chunk won't be using VPNs. There is also another concern I have; that this verification database could be breached and people's 'preferences' are exposed. The only way to avoid such a breach is to not collect such data in the first place.
- Nifty3929 3y ago
  I'm genuinely worried that increased adoption of VPNs to get around these restrictions will then lead to laws that ban or restrict VPN use. You can tell me that it will be difficult to enforce such a ban - but then it turns us all into criminals - all the better to control us. "We don't normally enforce this law, but in your case we'll make an exception."
  - cynicalsecurity 3y ago
    So, we are going to become China then. Under the pretence of caring for children. Thanks, but no. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And I'm not even sure if those intentions were really good in this case or this all is just an evil pretence.
dbg31415 3y ago
Relevant https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fUspLVStPbk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fUspLVStPbk
duringmath 3y ago
So who's behind these porn laws that are popping all over the place?
- 127361 3y ago
  I'm suspecting that certain Evangelical Christian groups might have something to do with it. They have front groups with names such "anti exploitation network", where nobody would suspect it's a religious organization behind it.
motohagiography 3y ago
There is no reasoning with these people. What, if any, are the alternatives to a war against totalitarian entryists?
asylteltine 3y ago
This is fucking crazy! Keep the government out of the internet.
riffraff 3y ago
Having grown up in a time where porn was illegal for minors but trivially obtained by anyone who cared in VHS, I honestly don't understand why anyone thinks this scheme would be useful for anything.
- nine_k 3y ago
  Why, it would be useful as a general register of people, matched with their online activity here and there. You speak as if you never ran a state surveillance agency, or at least a major search engine! /s
- jgilias 3y ago
  I’m also pretty perplexed regarding who are these people who come up with these ideas. Like, how and where did they grow up? Appeared out of thin air with absolutely zero street smarts? I don’t think I knew anyone so removed from reality when growing up.
- gambiting 3y ago
  To play a devils advocate for a second - when I was growing up(in the 90s) I also saw porn way too early than even remotely appropriate - a friend had a VHS tape that he got somewhere, we had to find a moment in time when his parents weren't home, and we put it on for like 5 minutes, we were so scared we were going to be found out we immediately dumped the tape afterwards and didn't find the contents even remotely exciting - I remember just being really disgusted by it(turns out the overproduced fake 90s porn really isn't a great way to introduce anyone to sex). Nowadays if you speak to any child psychologist about it it's obvious that kids get exposed to it really early(in the UK it's estimated that nearly all kids below age of 10 will have seen some kind of sexual material already) and they do it regularly. It really isn't comparable to what we(pre-internet people) had and what's happening to kids right now. I also want to make it completely clear I'm 10000% against this insane idea proposed here. Just pointing out that it isn't even remotely the same as us watching a random VHS tape.
  - riffraff 3y ago
    I agree with you, kids are exposed to porn too early and too easily these days. I am just doubtful that you can obtain any significant limiting by gatekeeping mainstream porn sites, kids will show each other porn in Signal rather than telling each other "visit www.lots-of-porn.xxx", but it won't change much. I'm afraid it's one of those cases where we can't put the djinn back in the lamp.
karaterobot 3y ago
Bearing in mind that it is practically impossible to both operate a publicly accessible website and avoid getting hacked if someone wants you bad enough, who gets sued when this incredibly sensitive PII is inevitably stolen? Websites who didn't want to store it in the first place, but were legally required to do so, or the government who required them to? I'm not an Irish lawyer, but I have a guess.
nprateem 3y ago
> and a collection of selfies of children kept by the porn sites I hope this journalist never has to do any actual critical thinking. It goes without saying that obviously children wouldn't upload selfies if they're under 18 and that's the purpose of KYC.
lowbloodsugar 3y ago
Do I need to walk around with a yellow star or pink triangle?
janice1999 3y ago
The Irish state has a serious problem with using peoples data and it often uses it maliciously. The Irish Data Protection Commissioner is widely regarded as a joke. Examples include knowingly illegal phone record collection and use in dubious murder cases [0], using medical and school records to pressure parents of disabled children to settle court cases against the state when most vulnerable (and lying about it until caught) and secretly recording all calls to police stations including non-emergency numbers likely to catch whistleblowers [2]. That doesn't include all the private sector scandals, like data breaches that went uninvestigated and unpunished. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/apr/05/mobile-phone-data-retention-in-graham-dwyer-case-broke-eu-law https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/apr/05/mobile-phone-dat... [1] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/dossiers-on-children-with-autism-led-to-crisis-of-trust-charity-chief-1.4527362 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/dossiers-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garda_phone_recordings_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garda_phone_recordings_scandal
Havoc 3y ago
>live selfie Why not just make everyone live stream their wank? /s
antisthenes 3y ago
Good. Will they make search engines provide relevant porn results for me then? I have to wade through thousands of irrelevant and disgusting stuff that doesn't fit my porn needs.
boh 3y ago
For the commenters taking the question of efficient ID solutions seriously, you're missing the point. Simply put, this is an anti-porn bill. The legislatures are fully aware of the ridiculousness of the requirements--that's the point. No one in their right mind is sending passports and videos of themselves to the shadiest corners of the internet. An outright ban would be difficult to achieve, a set of requirements to protect children from offensive material is much easier.
deleted 3y ago
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beebeepka 3y ago
What's Minecraft and how do you tame a horse in it?
bArray 3y ago
> The Irish State announced [..] It's interesting how quickly the EU went from a Trade Union to a Government consisting of states.
matteoraso 3y ago
How far can you take this? Porn is on Facebook, Reddit, and Youtube. Will you need to verify your ID for social media as well? That's not even getting into Stable Diffusion and other tools that could be used to create your own porn on demand.
righthand 3y ago
So I’m a kid who uses my dad/mom/uncle/neighbor’s ID to watch porn then. Totally useless. At best this will just charge people up to create a new set of internet protocols. Then all the adults will be stuck regulating the old net, while porn industry and kids will use the new net.
rappatic 3y ago
Digital age IDs should be equipped with a way to perform a zero-knowledge proof that the bearer is indeed 18 without betraying their identity. Perhaps a full-fledged blockchain is a bit much but a decentralized way to perform basic verification tasks like this makes sense.
toldyouso2022 3y ago
Just ban minors from using smartphones. Works even better for their growth than trying to block them from seeing porn. And it's a very simple law to write, no need for useless bureaucrats to make money (but maybe that's the problem).
- unnouinceput 3y ago
  How about be a responsible parent instead and educate your kids about the dangers of internet/tech? Why limit the curiosity of teens? Let them explore, but do it responsible/under your supervision. Otherwise they will do it anyway but in the worse possible way and you'll have 0 say in the matter.
Blackstrat 3y ago
When the government starts requiring ids to vote or immigrate or stops companies from fraudulently controlling the narrative, eg Facebook, then I’ll take them seriously. If a person is underage on a porn site that’s on the parents not the provider company. The internet needs to be freed from further government restrictions.
yetanother12345 3y ago
Please note: Ireland This is the national internet regulator proposing that it would require that everyone, adult and children alike, would upload their state ID and live selfies, to porn sites to have biometric processing of their facial images performed. Resulting, amongst other things, in an effective register of porn preferences for adults and a collection of selfies of children kept by the porn sites for six years[0] So, all these PII data and sensitive data points[1] would be hosted on American-owned datacentres, which Ireland is densely populated with? Anyone see something slightly worrying here? Anyone? Just asking rhetorically. [0] TFA [1] Not only porn sites, but any site which allows you to post a video (TFA)
draw_down 3y ago
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mulmen 3y ago
How does Ireland define porn for the purpose of age restriction? Is it a "I know it when I see it" standard or something concrete enough that content creators can go right up to the line?
hn_acker 3y ago
> But wait! That's not all! The CnaM Executive Chairman wanted to talk about porn sites because that's the least popular class of entities covered by this regulation. But the age-verification requirement actually can cover any video-sharing platform under the jurisdiction of the Irish State (link to the designation notice under section 139E and section 139G of the Broadcasting 2009 Act). That's a list that includes Facebook, WhatsApp, XTwitter and YouTube, just to pick four household names (because of Section 5 of the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022). It might also mean homegrown platforms such as Mastodon.ie, the most prominent Irish part of the Fediverse, who also allow videos to be shared. ... > Also, these restrictions won't just limit and record access to porn sites. They can be applied to any sites which contains material the Commission decides may be legal, but on the other hand, oughtn't be seen by children. In other countries, this has been the kind of legal provision which has seen libraries restricting access to books involving LGBTQ+ themes, racial justice themes and anything else you could imagine the Burke family objecting to. Protecting children is the emotional wedge for introducing age verification requirements. Video sites are the wedge into all internet sites. The legislators' emphasis on porn is a wedge into any speech (including otherwise legal speech) the government claims is harmful for children. That government-mandated age verification would protect children is an assumption, full of uncertainty of the beneficial first-order effects and full of ignorance (willful blindness?) of the obvious detrimental second-order effects. Mandatory age verification requires mandatory data collection, and strangers are going to read that data: some first-party websites will be forced to collect more information than they currently do; third-party websites involved in the collection and verification processes will collect data as well; and the government will get information about the citizens' internet habits from websites. Adults will lose their privacy because people who have no business knowing their internet habits will know them. Children will lose their privacy, and more. They will grow up learning that it's normal to give their personal information (including but not limited to relatively immutable biological details such as faceprints) to strangers. They will grow up learning that it's normal for the government to know every website a person visits online. The offline analogue is for the government to know every building a person visits offline. No matter how noble the current government's current intentions may be, a stranger has by default no right to know that much about a person's life. Movie theatres can show childrens' films and adult films. The movie theatre doesn't have to store anything about age other than "minor" and "adult". Libraries and bookstores can contain childrens' books and adult books. Malls contain stores for many audiences. Clothing stores have sections for children's clothes, modest adult clothes, and risque adult clothes. You know what the normal way for a child to visit many such buildings is? A caretaker (maybe a parent, but not every child has a parent) brings the child and supervises. On the other side of the equation, it would not be normal for a mall to collect people's ages at the mall entrance (the adult-only stores inside being a different story). A website should have the option to verify age, and the alternative option to require no more than a self-reported "are you at least 18? yes no". Government-mandated age verification is burdensome to small websites, especially small platforms for user-generated content. If a website could choose to remove potentially harmful content instead of verifying age, then the burden would still be too large for small websites. Might as well not host user-generated content at all. Large internet companies like Google and Facebook would eat the costs either way. Small websites would have to rely on third-party age verification services. Software for age verification will be predominantly proprietary or not available to the general netizen or both, so the average person won't be able to know how much information the websites collect and store. What's more, lawyers and judges in privacy-related or accuracy-related court cases (especially regarding biometric verification) will have a hard time examining the software. Making every website collect information the way a bank does is applying a hammer to problems that are not nails. Don't make the entire internet a bank. And as Mike Masnick wrote, "The Internet Is Not Disneyland; People Should Stop Demanding It Become Disneyland" [1]. "Are you at least 18? yes no" paired with proper parenting/caretaking can go a long way. Proper caretaking is not simply knowing what the child does on the internet. It's knowing that the child might visit the internet while the caretaker is occupied. It's teaching the child early on that not all websites are for children. It's setting up parental controls while understanding that parental controls are imperfect, like one slice of Swiss cheese [2]. You are a Swiss cheese layer. By teaching your child what to do if they stumble upon the wrong websites, you will be turning your child from a hula hoop into their own Swiss cheese layer. When you find out that your child stumbled upon porn, you can talk to your child about the incident. As a caretaker, damage control is a necessary part of determining healthy boundaries. Additionally, I don't expect the damage to a younger child from accidentally viewing porn to be as proportionately severe as the damage to an under-21 college freshman from drinking alcohol at a party. You can't talk brain damage from drugs out of someone. But I'm assuming that you can talk the harm from an accidental porn incident out of your child. I like the idea posed by mjevans [3] to make websites respond to a self-reported "kid mode" - as a header in a web request, I presume - by redirecting to a child-friendly site. Websites could also respond by serving only content manually confirmed to be child-safe according to the website's interpretation of the law's definition of child-safe. As part of supporting the "kid mode" header, the website would have to respond with a "kid mode" confirmed. Parental controls on the device would include the "kid mode" header in all web requests whenever kid mode is on. If the website doesn't return the "kid mode confirmed" header then the parental controls can cancel the website visit. Adults would simply leave kid mode off for themselves. The burden on websites (learning how to send a 301 redirect status code at the simplest) would very low, and would avoid the data collection and other privacy problems of age verification. [1] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/09/20/the-internet-is-not-disneyland-people-should-stop-demanding-it-become-disneyland/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/09/20/the-internet-is-not-disn... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38903965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38903965
hulitu 3y ago
> Irish State announce plan to build a porn preference register for most of the EU They (the Irish state - ministers, elected officials) shall do it forst and publish it. Then we will follow suit. /s

235 points by cianmm 3y ago

jimnotgym 3y ago

What if you don't have a passport?

juahan 3y ago
No porn for you then I guess.
cabalamat 3y ago
No porn for you then.
polishdude20 3y ago
Back to Sears catalogues for you peasant!
- anon84873628 3y ago
  More like Nat Geo :-D
seszett 3y ago
The fact that this article talks about passports is a hint that it is at least partly misreporting based on assumptions from someone who didn't know much about the situation. This is within the EU, so obviously what would be asked is an EU id.
- Macha 3y ago
  > EU id There isn't one. Ireland also doesn't have a national ID program, so effectively for most people their passport or driver's license are the only forms of government ID they _might_ have. But even then it's not mandatory to have either.
  - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
    You could use the PSC card I suppose. The union of driver license, passport and PSC probably covers most of the country.
  - seszett 3y ago
    "EU id" was a shortcut for "id documents issued by EU countries", they're valid EU-wide. It's an ID card in most EU countries and that's what would be used for the purposes of this article, except for Irish citizens I guess but they are probably a relatively small percentage of EU visitors of porn sites. Now I just noticed that although the subject is "most of the EU", this is an Irish site, so maybe they just didn't really take this into account.
lifestyleguru 3y ago
torrents?!
- robocat 3y ago
  Beware: you run risk of inadvertently downloading or distributing child sexual abuse material (CSAM). A friend was talking about how their US friend got given a sex offence label due to downloading a zip of porn that unknown to them contained some CSAM. Lost their job and worse. You didn't know is no defence in some jurisdictions. You personally can't check images or image collections for legality, so the risk is real.
  - lifestyleguru 3y ago
    Well, opening a website can save in the browser cache any image which is not displayed on the website. What all these silly mobile apps and games exactly are downloading and uploading? Who knows....
    - robocat 3y ago
      Progress: jail for everyone. Certainly modern life has dangerous tripwires. I just had to google the words for the acronym CSAM - and as a non-citizen it made me double-think about surveillance. Maybe add a couple more paras to your comment? If you give me six sentences written by the most innocent of men, I will find something in them with which to hang them. - powerful political figure (1585 – 1642)
  - 127361 3y ago
    Yes, the Internet has created a real life Orwellian nightmare.
maronato 3y ago
No video-sharing platform for you then.
hombre_fatal 3y ago
Just go to any of the thousands of porn websites that don’t ask for it.
dudul 3y ago
Just torrent your porn. Regulations like this will achieve nothing.

wkat4242 3y ago

Wow I thought Ireland was changing now, they even voted for gay marriage. But the Catholicism still reigns strong there :( A few years ago a hospital even let a woman with a miscarriage die because they didn't want to intervene.

goodluckchuck 3y ago
Why intervene and save one life when to could stand idly by and make a political point that saves thousands? /s
disgruntledphd2 3y ago
> A few years ago a hospital even let a woman with a miscarriage die because they didn't want to intervene. They were legally unable to intervene, without risking prosecution. Yes, it was entirely insane. And that case was a major reason that the constitution was changed to prevent this ever happening again. This is 100% nothing to do with Catholicism, just standard moral hand wringing around what might happen to kids.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  > They were legally unable to intervene, without risking prosecution. They should have done so anyway, obviously. There's no chance they would have been prosecuted for it. Not with all the uproar. I walked in the candlelight demonstrations too. > And that case was a major reason that the constitution was changed to prevent this ever happening again. Only after a referendum which the church opposed, and it's still one of the most restrictive countries in terms of abortion.
  - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
    > They should have done so anyway, obviously. There's no chance they would have been prosecuted for it. Not with all the uproar. I walked in the candlelight demonstrations too. Can you give me some evidence that you're willing to destroy your career in a country on a point of principle? Like, I completely agree that they should have done that, but that's pretty easy for me to say, it wouldn't be my career on the line. > Only after a referendum which the church opposed, and it's still one of the most restrictive countries in terms of abortion. Look man, my wife had a missed miscarraige under the old rules, and I completely agree, but at least that shit won't happen anymore. I did query this with our fertility consultant about what would happen if we were past 12 weeks and got a seriously bad genetic test result, and he just shrugged and said we could go to England, which was pretty disappointing, post referendum.

cabalamat 3y ago

> This is the national internet regulator proposing that it would require that everyone, adult and children alike, would upload their state ID and live selfies, to porn sites to have biometric processing of their facial images performed. Resulting, amongst other things, in an effective register of porn preferences for adults and a collection of selfies of children kept by the porn sites for six years (required to prove they have complied with the regulation, you see). I'm sure this data would never fall into the wrong hands or be misused :-)

hatenberg 3y ago
That’s probably the intent. create massive friction without outright forbidding it
- pixl97 3y ago
  Lol, the fact you're downvoted shows how little critical thinking some people on this site have. The US has done things like this for generations, the 'red scare' is a perfect example of the state creating lists of people's political and personal preferences and using them against them. Knowing the list exists and you could get on it my standing too close to those thoughts not approved was used as a force to keep people only thinking 'good thoughts'.
- patrickaljord 3y ago
  The intent is to ask for ID in order to connect to any website, the article already says that this law will apply to any video sharing site including facebook, twitter, tiktok and even mastodon...
lifestyleguru 3y ago
Yeah what's up with that. Already now many service providers like payment processor or online brokerage requests me to upload "a selfie" holding sheet of paper with something written on it, or holding my document. How they arrived to the conclusion that it's acceptable?!
- 3y ago

Lapalux 3y ago

Misrepresentation of the actual intent of the Irish government, but as result they will end up creating what title says.

disgruntledphd2 3y ago
What's the intent here then? Like, I'm an Irish citizen (a former coworker recently took a job with the body responsible for this policy), and I have no idea what the intent is here (apart from the general think of the children stuff).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

malux85 3y ago

Upload biometric data to porn sites? That seems like a phishers dream come true. Even if the big sites farm this out to third parties, unscrupulous imitators could harvest personal info on an enormous scale for sale on the dark web.

doubled112 3y ago

Wasn't there a tool/bot to confuse search engines by submitting a bunch of random terms? Time for a rewrite.

jimbob45 3y ago

The far right is going hard against porn in multiple countries right now. I don’t agree but I get where they’re coming from. However, I don’t get going after porn before going after casinos. Casinos ruin lives and wreck economies far worse than porn could ever hope to. Going after porn before casinos feels like going after kitchen knives before AR-15s.

Abekkus 3y ago
Same reason people complained about old ladies wearing fur coats, more than bikers who wear leather jackets; one enemy is scarier than another.
mistrial9 3y ago
Is this a "right-v-left" dichotomy really? secondly, different kinds of harm are not directly comparable, more so for their sources.
wkat4242 3y ago
> The far right is going hard against porn in multiple countries right now. I don’t agree but I get where they’re coming from. It's none of their business though. Porn doesn't harm people. And they're not getting rid of it anyway. Just like nobody's getting rid of torrents.
- bloopernova 3y ago
  > Porn doesn't harm people. The girlsdoporn victims would disagree with you. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GirlsDoPorn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GirlsDoPorn
  - cynicalsecurity 3y ago
    Porn actually lowers the amount of sex crimes in the society. Instead of going outside and performing sex with a real person, people simply stay at home. This is by far the cheapest and easiest solution to the problem. Without porn, the amount of victims would be significantly higher and the crimes would be having a much worse outcome. Not many people remember the world before porn, but I do. I vividly remember how rape was a regular crime on the streets of my city. It almost completely disappeared after the invention of the internet and since porn become widely accessible to people.

xeckr 3y ago

This will predictably lead to coomers putting on their pirate hats en masse.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

The topic of ID verification for porn sites has gotten a lot of commentary on HN recently, e.g. North Carolina's law requiring ID recently went into effect. Slightly sidestepping the issue of needing an ID for porn in the first place, though, I wanted to comment on the extreme shortsightedness of any sort of ID verification laws (most specifically, financial KYC laws) that require that each individual company verify and store your identity documents themselves. This is quite simply a data breach hackers dream. For example, when Stripe released their Identity product, which captures ID images and selfies, people were at first surprised that the businesses needing ID verification had full access to the ID images (after all, this is contrary to their credit card processing services where businesses never can get access to full credit card numbers, which is great as it keeps those businesses out of the most arduous requirements of PCI rules). But Stripe explained they had to give every end-business access to all the full image data for regulatory compliance reasons. It would make much more sense to rewrite the regulations so that 99% of companies would never need to store identity verification info themselves, but could just delegate that to an approved provider who has much more stringent security checks (or better yet, allow people to cryptographically sign info to prove their identity without giving up their whole passport image, but that's a ways off). I'm not saying this would solve all issues (big companies get hacked, after all), but I hope by now we've put to bed the idea that companies, generally, can secure their data against determined hackers.

deleted 3y ago
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grotorea 3y ago
Hasn't there been a few countries with some sort of digital ID development already? I get the impression the Anglosphere has an anti-ID card tradition so it seems like it's a bit behind in that.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  The anti-ID sentiment comes from looking back on history, and not pretending that the future can only be better. People who don't know history repeat its mistakes.

shikon7 3y ago

Why would minors be required to take part in this? To access age-restricted material suitable to them (not 18+ but maybe 13+), or would this registration be mandatory for everyone?

Macha 3y ago
I think the line of thinking is: 1. Minors will attempt to access porn sites 2. They will be faced with the picture validation 3. Some of them will try it 4. They will theoretically fail the validation, but the porn site will still be required to keep the data from the attempt.
cianmm 3y ago
The article clarifies that this would cover pretty much any website which allows you upload video, so minors would have to take part on YouTube, Facebook, etc. I guess the opt out would be to not use those platforms, but that seems unlikely.
maronato 3y ago
The article says any “video-sharing platform” would require all users, adults and children, to upload their IDs and pics. Porn websites are video sharing platforms, so they must comply no matter the age. But don’t worry, porn sites must also run a biometric analysis on the images sent to check if the user is 18+!

AlbertCory 3y ago

Pro tip for Gov't bureaucrats: if the news stories about your initiative begin with "this is not a joke" -- you may want to rethink things.

James_K 3y ago

Regulating porn is just stupid. It's never going to work and I don't get its objectives. Porn probably has a negative effect on children, but much less than something like TikTok. I could at least see the sense in banning children from the entire internet or limiting their access in some way (preferable implemented by ISPs rather than individual websites), but trying to specifically stop them from seeing naked people is pointless. Parents can easily control which parts of the internet their kids have access to, and much more effectively than the state can with the added bonus that it doesn't affect people without kids.

lifestyleguru 3y ago
I'm afraid the only way to introduce children is by whitelisting. Service by service, website by website, video by video. Giving them a smartphone with WiFi is like filling cabinet next to their bed with cigarettes, snickers bars, and painkiller pills.
- James_K 3y ago
  I agree somewhat. Ideally, the internet wouldn't be addictive at all, and hence wouldn't be an issue for children or adults. A whitelist seems reasonable for the current state of the internet, but I can't think of anything beyond Wikipedia that you could put on it. That said, you still run into the more fundamental issue of what exactly is adult content? Violence, gore, and gambling certainly, though I'm not sure casinos should be legal at all. But I struggle to justify it for porn. It's probably more healthy for children to have access to some kind of pornography.
- nine_k 3y ago
  I did not limit internet access for my children, past certain age. Instead, my children asked me to protect them from disturbing content sometimes. (So I did, setting up an age filter on YouTube.) Most of the time, unless you yourself don't eat snickers bars non-stop while chain-smoking, your children won't, too. Children do what their parents do, not what their parents tell them to do.
- buu700 3y ago

dachworker 3y ago

Limiting porn exposure for children and early teenagers is probably a good thing, but this is the wrong way to do it, and a weak justification to create a blackmail registry.

antiquoom 3y ago

This is false, they're not building a "porn preference register", they're requiring age verification for pornographic websites. Submitting one's identity documents to access such websites is of course very easily avoided, by simply choosing not to consume pornographic materials online.

fortyseven 3y ago
The ol' "if you did nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about" way of thinking, eh?
cynicalsecurity 3y ago
I'm sorry, what? Are we still living in a democracy or is it already back to the USSR?
theodric 3y ago
This is an extremely short-sighted and crypto-moralistic position masquerading as reasonableness. Why should I be forced to provide a government ID to a random third party simply because I want to view legal images? One does not follow logically from the other; and moreover, secular people should not be forced to live according to the moral strictures of the conservative and/or religious.
aaronmdjones 3y ago
If the website is tracking what you visit when logged in (which, they will be, as their business model is serving you relevant videos so you stay on the site longer to see more ads), and now the law is going to require them to verify that your account belongs to a person over the age of majority by storing your biometric information, then that is exactly what this law is doing. Anyone who breaches that website's database (whether an inside job or not) is now going to learn not only what videos RandomUser782 has watched but also who they are, where they are, their birthdate, and what they look like; and if they chose to prove their identity via driving licence, also, their home address. If this doesn't strike you as completely fucking nuts, I don't know what to say.

cynicalsecurity 3y ago

This is not just beyond idiotic, this is straightforward evil and dangerous.

ativzzz 3y ago

I'm pretty libertarian when it comes to things like drugs or sex work, but it's hard for me with porn. Maybe because I've been addicted to it for 20 years at this point so it's personal for me. You can call it a parenting failure or whatever, either way I'm addicted to porn and I think it will stay with me forever simply due to my lifestyle of remote tech worker. Luckily, it's not totally crippling, but it's definitely hampered my development I don't know what a reasonable solution is. We forbid selling alcohol & cigarettes to people under a certain age because we deem it unhealthy for children's development, but we don't have the tools to do that for internet porn on a societal scale. Is digital ID the right solution here? Is there a better way to do this? The HN mentality is to tear down digital walls, and is it even possible without seriously harming the open web or personal privacy & security?

127361 3y ago
These addictions are likely a symptom of another problem. It's not the porn itself that's the problem. It's likely childhood trauma or some other adversity that's caused the addiction.
- robocat 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - 127361 3y ago
    Maybe it is shit, maybe it isn't. I'll see if any studies were carried out on it. I don't really care what you think about it, I'll carry on as usual, and try to correct my mistakes to the best of my ability. I have rights under the 1st Amendment to express myself freely, including possible amateur psych diagnoses. That's my protected freedom of speech right there.
    - robocat 3y ago
      > I have rights under the 1st Amendment to express myself freely Not where I'm standing* you don't - this is an international forum discussing an international issue. Aside: I'm a foreigner so I personally have very little in the way of constitutional rights. We all have almost no information about each other and text comments on emotionally tangled subjects are easily misread. The risk is that psych comments can easily do more harm than good: the potential for misunderstanding is high. Even without misunderstanding between commenters there is a risk of triggers in readers. It is hard to say what this community thinks is correct but https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html The next obvious step is past-life trauma analysis (yes, that's a real thing that real people do). I'm actually interested in any quantitative papers you can find on that topic. Moderator about an adjacent topic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20psychiatric&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... * My jurisdiction has no first amendment

grork 3y ago

IMHO, this is a misleading headline: They are not building a “porn preference register”, they just going full-dystopian nightmare collecting live biometric data that could be used to _infer_ your porn preferences. We don’t need stupid headlines to make this idea sound dumber, and kinda distracts from the real issue of biometric verification for websites being a stupid idea.

brvsft 3y ago

Highly misleading title. Although I disagree with the plan either way, the state is not building a 'porn preference register.' This concept is introduced in this particular article, but there technically are ways to store user preferences separate from their PII. The linked article from Irish Examiner has a more accurate title: > Porn sites may require passport details in order to stop children from using them

highwaylights 3y ago

I actually think the .xxx TLD plan from a few years ago was about the best version of this legislation that could exist - essentially adult content would be limited to a certain subset of blockable TLDs. If a site is showing adult content and not on an adult TLD, it risks a state-level block until it's compliant. This seems much easier to police, gives 80% of what the legislators are trying to achieve, and doesn't require entrusting KYC to a bunch of dodgy websites. Sure, it won't block VPNs and there would be problems at the start while things migrate, but if realistically your goal is to keep kids off adult websites then it's at least more reasonable than this proposal to entrust the parents/guardians with some amount of responsibility to make sure the safeguards can't be circumvented on their kids' devices.

jampekka 3y ago
There's no way of getting kids from getting porn if they really want it. We had plenty of VHS and magazine porn as kids even though shops didn't sell them to kids. Current mainstream porn sites curate off the most hardcore stuff quite well. The dark web versions that will pop up due to draconian KYC will definitely not have such curation.
- kelseyfrog 3y ago
  I'm not a big fan of this form black or white thinking. We could apply this to guns, bombs, drugs and conclude that it was pointless to reduce numbers. In it's extreme form, a sufficiently motivated teenager built a homemade neutron source[1] therefore we shouldn't control nuclear material. I just don't think this argument, taken to its logical conclusion, is valid. Is there a better way of reformulating it? 1. Silverstein, K. (2005). Radioactive boy scout: The frightening true story of a whiz kid and his homemade nuclear reactor. Turtleback Books.
  - jampekka 3y ago
    I didn't say there should be no restrictions for guns, bombs, drugs or even porn, even though they can't be fully rooted out. The problem is the thinking that they can be rooted out. War-on-Porn would have just as horrible effects as War-on-Drugs has. As for porn, I think the potential effects of it to kids are way overblown. Children should be educated (age appropriately of course) about sexuality so they can handle the stuff and situations they will see at some point anyway.

ortusdux 3y ago

Direct link to document - https://www.cnam.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Draft_Online_Safety_Code_Consultation_Document_Final.pdf https://www.cnam.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Draft_Online_...

throw0101d 3y ago

Web pages are all about tags with data and metadata. It shouldn't be hard to add metadata about content type. I never quite understood why labeling initiatives never gained traction: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_Selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_... * https://www.w3.org/PICS/ https://www.w3.org/PICS/ * https://www.w3.org/2007/powder/ https://www.w3.org/2007/powder/ Throw some <meta> tags in and browsers can parse: then have a password-protected "filter controls" area in settings (and perhaps a GPO for corporate environments). I would think that the porn companies throwing some money at web browser developer resources to implement this wouldn't be a bad idea. Every time this idea comes up (again) they can point to it and say "we did our part, now it's up to the parents" (or whatever).

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

sacrosanct 3y ago

The tech savvy will just use VPNs to get around geo-politics such as this, at least a VPN should work in theory to get around verification measures by the Irish State. This advice has been echoed countless times when this issue crops up. One concern is that there are tech-illiterate people who fall victim of such an ID system and don't use a VPN to bypass it. I don't have numbers/stats, but I imagine a good chunk won't be using VPNs. There is also another concern I have; that this verification database could be breached and people's 'preferences' are exposed. The only way to avoid such a breach is to not collect such data in the first place.

Nifty3929 3y ago
I'm genuinely worried that increased adoption of VPNs to get around these restrictions will then lead to laws that ban or restrict VPN use. You can tell me that it will be difficult to enforce such a ban - but then it turns us all into criminals - all the better to control us. "We don't normally enforce this law, but in your case we'll make an exception."
- cynicalsecurity 3y ago
  So, we are going to become China then. Under the pretence of caring for children. Thanks, but no. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And I'm not even sure if those intentions were really good in this case or this all is just an evil pretence.

dbg31415 3y ago

Relevant https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fUspLVStPbk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fUspLVStPbk

duringmath 3y ago

So who's behind these porn laws that are popping all over the place?

127361 3y ago
I'm suspecting that certain Evangelical Christian groups might have something to do with it. They have front groups with names such "anti exploitation network", where nobody would suspect it's a religious organization behind it.

motohagiography 3y ago

There is no reasoning with these people. What, if any, are the alternatives to a war against totalitarian entryists?

asylteltine 3y ago

This is fucking crazy! Keep the government out of the internet.

riffraff 3y ago

Having grown up in a time where porn was illegal for minors but trivially obtained by anyone who cared in VHS, I honestly don't understand why anyone thinks this scheme would be useful for anything.

nine_k 3y ago
Why, it would be useful as a general register of people, matched with their online activity here and there. You speak as if you never ran a state surveillance agency, or at least a major search engine! /s
jgilias 3y ago
I’m also pretty perplexed regarding who are these people who come up with these ideas. Like, how and where did they grow up? Appeared out of thin air with absolutely zero street smarts? I don’t think I knew anyone so removed from reality when growing up.
gambiting 3y ago
To play a devils advocate for a second - when I was growing up(in the 90s) I also saw porn way too early than even remotely appropriate - a friend had a VHS tape that he got somewhere, we had to find a moment in time when his parents weren't home, and we put it on for like 5 minutes, we were so scared we were going to be found out we immediately dumped the tape afterwards and didn't find the contents even remotely exciting - I remember just being really disgusted by it(turns out the overproduced fake 90s porn really isn't a great way to introduce anyone to sex). Nowadays if you speak to any child psychologist about it it's obvious that kids get exposed to it really early(in the UK it's estimated that nearly all kids below age of 10 will have seen some kind of sexual material already) and they do it regularly. It really isn't comparable to what we(pre-internet people) had and what's happening to kids right now. I also want to make it completely clear I'm 10000% against this insane idea proposed here. Just pointing out that it isn't even remotely the same as us watching a random VHS tape.
- riffraff 3y ago
  I agree with you, kids are exposed to porn too early and too easily these days. I am just doubtful that you can obtain any significant limiting by gatekeeping mainstream porn sites, kids will show each other porn in Signal rather than telling each other "visit www.lots-of-porn.xxx", but it won't change much. I'm afraid it's one of those cases where we can't put the djinn back in the lamp.

karaterobot 3y ago

Bearing in mind that it is practically impossible to both operate a publicly accessible website and avoid getting hacked if someone wants you bad enough, who gets sued when this incredibly sensitive PII is inevitably stolen? Websites who didn't want to store it in the first place, but were legally required to do so, or the government who required them to? I'm not an Irish lawyer, but I have a guess.

nprateem 3y ago

> and a collection of selfies of children kept by the porn sites I hope this journalist never has to do any actual critical thinking. It goes without saying that obviously children wouldn't upload selfies if they're under 18 and that's the purpose of KYC.

lowbloodsugar 3y ago

Do I need to walk around with a yellow star or pink triangle?

janice1999 3y ago

The Irish state has a serious problem with using peoples data and it often uses it maliciously. The Irish Data Protection Commissioner is widely regarded as a joke. Examples include knowingly illegal phone record collection and use in dubious murder cases [0], using medical and school records to pressure parents of disabled children to settle court cases against the state when most vulnerable (and lying about it until caught) and secretly recording all calls to police stations including non-emergency numbers likely to catch whistleblowers [2]. That doesn't include all the private sector scandals, like data breaches that went uninvestigated and unpunished. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/apr/05/mobile-phone-data-retention-in-graham-dwyer-case-broke-eu-law https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/apr/05/mobile-phone-dat... [1] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/dossiers-on-children-with-autism-led-to-crisis-of-trust-charity-chief-1.4527362 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/dossiers-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garda_phone_recordings_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garda_phone_recordings_scandal

Havoc 3y ago

>live selfie Why not just make everyone live stream their wank? /s

antisthenes 3y ago

Good. Will they make search engines provide relevant porn results for me then? I have to wade through thousands of irrelevant and disgusting stuff that doesn't fit my porn needs.

boh 3y ago

For the commenters taking the question of efficient ID solutions seriously, you're missing the point. Simply put, this is an anti-porn bill. The legislatures are fully aware of the ridiculousness of the requirements--that's the point. No one in their right mind is sending passports and videos of themselves to the shadiest corners of the internet. An outright ban would be difficult to achieve, a set of requirements to protect children from offensive material is much easier.

deleted 3y ago

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beebeepka 3y ago

What's Minecraft and how do you tame a horse in it?

bArray 3y ago

> The Irish State announced [..] It's interesting how quickly the EU went from a Trade Union to a Government consisting of states.

matteoraso 3y ago

How far can you take this? Porn is on Facebook, Reddit, and Youtube. Will you need to verify your ID for social media as well? That's not even getting into Stable Diffusion and other tools that could be used to create your own porn on demand.

righthand 3y ago

So I’m a kid who uses my dad/mom/uncle/neighbor’s ID to watch porn then. Totally useless. At best this will just charge people up to create a new set of internet protocols. Then all the adults will be stuck regulating the old net, while porn industry and kids will use the new net.

rappatic 3y ago

Digital age IDs should be equipped with a way to perform a zero-knowledge proof that the bearer is indeed 18 without betraying their identity. Perhaps a full-fledged blockchain is a bit much but a decentralized way to perform basic verification tasks like this makes sense.

toldyouso2022 3y ago

Just ban minors from using smartphones. Works even better for their growth than trying to block them from seeing porn. And it's a very simple law to write, no need for useless bureaucrats to make money (but maybe that's the problem).

unnouinceput 3y ago
How about be a responsible parent instead and educate your kids about the dangers of internet/tech? Why limit the curiosity of teens? Let them explore, but do it responsible/under your supervision. Otherwise they will do it anyway but in the worse possible way and you'll have 0 say in the matter.

Blackstrat 3y ago

When the government starts requiring ids to vote or immigrate or stops companies from fraudulently controlling the narrative, eg Facebook, then I’ll take them seriously. If a person is underage on a porn site that’s on the parents not the provider company. The internet needs to be freed from further government restrictions.

yetanother12345 3y ago

Please note: Ireland This is the national internet regulator proposing that it would require that everyone, adult and children alike, would upload their state ID and live selfies, to porn sites to have biometric processing of their facial images performed. Resulting, amongst other things, in an effective register of porn preferences for adults and a collection of selfies of children kept by the porn sites for six years[0] So, all these PII data and sensitive data points[1] would be hosted on American-owned datacentres, which Ireland is densely populated with? Anyone see something slightly worrying here? Anyone? Just asking rhetorically. [0] TFA [1] Not only porn sites, but any site which allows you to post a video (TFA)

draw_down 3y ago

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mulmen 3y ago

How does Ireland define porn for the purpose of age restriction? Is it a "I know it when I see it" standard or something concrete enough that content creators can go right up to the line?

hn_acker 3y ago

> But wait! That's not all! The CnaM Executive Chairman wanted to talk about porn sites because that's the least popular class of entities covered by this regulation. But the age-verification requirement actually can cover any video-sharing platform under the jurisdiction of the Irish State (link to the designation notice under section 139E and section 139G of the Broadcasting 2009 Act). That's a list that includes Facebook, WhatsApp, XTwitter and YouTube, just to pick four household names (because of Section 5 of the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022). It might also mean homegrown platforms such as Mastodon.ie, the most prominent Irish part of the Fediverse, who also allow videos to be shared. ... > Also, these restrictions won't just limit and record access to porn sites. They can be applied to any sites which contains material the Commission decides may be legal, but on the other hand, oughtn't be seen by children. In other countries, this has been the kind of legal provision which has seen libraries restricting access to books involving LGBTQ+ themes, racial justice themes and anything else you could imagine the Burke family objecting to. Protecting children is the emotional wedge for introducing age verification requirements. Video sites are the wedge into all internet sites. The legislators' emphasis on porn is a wedge into any speech (including otherwise legal speech) the government claims is harmful for children. That government-mandated age verification would protect children is an assumption, full of uncertainty of the beneficial first-order effects and full of ignorance (willful blindness?) of the obvious detrimental second-order effects. Mandatory age verification requires mandatory data collection, and strangers are going to read that data: some first-party websites will be forced to collect more information than they currently do; third-party websites involved in the collection and verification processes will collect data as well; and the government will get information about the citizens' internet habits from websites. Adults will lose their privacy because people who have no business knowing their internet habits will know them. Children will lose their privacy, and more. They will grow up learning that it's normal to give their personal information (including but not limited to relatively immutable biological details such as faceprints) to strangers. They will grow up learning that it's normal for the government to know every website a person visits online. The offline analogue is for the government to know every building a person visits offline. No matter how noble the current government's current intentions may be, a stranger has by default no right to know that much about a person's life. Movie theatres can show childrens' films and adult films. The movie theatre doesn't have to store anything about age other than "minor" and "adult". Libraries and bookstores can contain childrens' books and adult books. Malls contain stores for many audiences. Clothing stores have sections for children's clothes, modest adult clothes, and risque adult clothes. You know what the normal way for a child to visit many such buildings is? A caretaker (maybe a parent, but not every child has a parent) brings the child and supervises. On the other side of the equation, it would not be normal for a mall to collect people's ages at the mall entrance (the adult-only stores inside being a different story). A website should have the option to verify age, and the alternative option to require no more than a self-reported "are you at least 18? yes no". Government-mandated age verification is burdensome to small websites, especially small platforms for user-generated content. If a website could choose to remove potentially harmful content instead of verifying age, then the burden would still be too large for small websites. Might as well not host user-generated content at all. Large internet companies like Google and Facebook would eat the costs either way. Small websites would have to rely on third-party age verification services. Software for age verification will be predominantly proprietary or not available to the general netizen or both, so the average person won't be able to know how much information the websites collect and store. What's more, lawyers and judges in privacy-related or accuracy-related court cases (especially regarding biometric verification) will have a hard time examining the software. Making every website collect information the way a bank does is applying a hammer to problems that are not nails. Don't make the entire internet a bank. And as Mike Masnick wrote, "The Internet Is Not Disneyland; People Should Stop Demanding It Become Disneyland" [1]. "Are you at least 18? yes no" paired with proper parenting/caretaking can go a long way. Proper caretaking is not simply knowing what the child does on the internet. It's knowing that the child might visit the internet while the caretaker is occupied. It's teaching the child early on that not all websites are for children. It's setting up parental controls while understanding that parental controls are imperfect, like one slice of Swiss cheese [2]. You are a Swiss cheese layer. By teaching your child what to do if they stumble upon the wrong websites, you will be turning your child from a hula hoop into their own Swiss cheese layer. When you find out that your child stumbled upon porn, you can talk to your child about the incident. As a caretaker, damage control is a necessary part of determining healthy boundaries. Additionally, I don't expect the damage to a younger child from accidentally viewing porn to be as proportionately severe as the damage to an under-21 college freshman from drinking alcohol at a party. You can't talk brain damage from drugs out of someone. But I'm assuming that you can talk the harm from an accidental porn incident out of your child. I like the idea posed by mjevans [3] to make websites respond to a self-reported "kid mode" - as a header in a web request, I presume - by redirecting to a child-friendly site. Websites could also respond by serving only content manually confirmed to be child-safe according to the website's interpretation of the law's definition of child-safe. As part of supporting the "kid mode" header, the website would have to respond with a "kid mode" confirmed. Parental controls on the device would include the "kid mode" header in all web requests whenever kid mode is on. If the website doesn't return the "kid mode confirmed" header then the parental controls can cancel the website visit. Adults would simply leave kid mode off for themselves. The burden on websites (learning how to send a 301 redirect status code at the simplest) would very low, and would avoid the data collection and other privacy problems of age verification. [1] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/09/20/the-internet-is-not-disneyland-people-should-stop-demanding-it-become-disneyland/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/09/20/the-internet-is-not-disn... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38903965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38903965

hulitu 3y ago

> Irish State announce plan to build a porn preference register for most of the EU They (the Irish state - ministers, elected officials) shall do it forst and publish it. Then we will follow suit. /s