Apologies if this isnāt the right place to ask this, but I thought actual developers with a deep understanding of how technology actually works would be the people to ask!
If you were tasked with setting up a safe and secure way to do this, how would you do it differently than what the UK government is proposing? How could it be done such that I wouldnāt have to worry about my privacy and the threat of government suppression? Is it even theoretically possible to accomplish such a task at such a scale?
Cheers!
EDIT: Just to be clear: Iām not in favour of age verification laws. But theyāre on their way regardless. My question is purely about the implementation and technology of the thing, rather than the ethics or efficacy of it. Can this seemingly-inevitable privacy hellscape be done in a non-hellscapish way?
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You said teens. I didnāt know you meant 18. Even if it wasnāt your topicā¦surely kids having access to hardcore porn, fetish scenarios, etcetc before they have access to sex ed isnāt optimal.
Yeahā¦things are better, sex ed wise, then they were in the 80s. Miles better. Thatās a great thing - but as I said above, sex-ed canāt keep up with what children are being exposed to. Weāre not talking about Playboys and R-Rated movies here.
You didnāt really get my point, no. My point was that some children are being bombarded with sexual information from all angles, and itās having unintended consequences. We essentially opened a new all-encompassing type of media and barely tried to regulate it.
The question isnāt whether having access to hardcore porn is harmful. The question is the relative degree of harm.
When a web service can reliably distinguish between adult and child, it can specifically target content to either. Netflix can provide age-appropriate content to its users. Thatās great.
Groomers can specifically target members of their desired audience. Thatās not so great. Thatās bad. Thatās really, really bad. Thatās much worse than kids finding hardcore pornography. And that degree of targeting is only possible with widespread age verification laws.
Thereās no question that certain types of adult content, not restricted to hardcore porn is harmfulā¦we know it is.
Itās not āwe deal with groomers OR we deal with harmful adult contentā¦OR we only regulate popular streaming sites. We can do all of the above. We certainly donāt just throw up our hands and say āitās not profitable to protect our childrenā (not what youāre saying, but rather whatās happening).
The way regulators are currently dealing with age-gating - say, in Australia - isnāt what we need to do. That certainly empowers groomers because thereās zero expertise or thought out into it: itās an ISP-friendly virtue signal that attempts to preserve profits while making Boomers feel like something is happening.
I donāt have the answerā¦but I DO know there are a ton of answers that include actually attempting to study and regulate all addictive content, including adult content - ie content at the hosting level and requiring that providers and purveyors regulate their content with actual humans. We can never āwinā the war if the status quo is automated moderation and profits above protection.
No, we cannot. At a societal level, we canāt do any of it.
Protecting a child from content on the internet requires a massive invasion of the childās privacy. That degree of privacy invasion should not be granted to society in general. It should not be granted to the operators of a pornography site. It should certainly not be granted to the groomers.
The only place where that degree of privacy invasion is reasonable and acceptable is between parent and child. If you want to protect the children, you give parents the tools to regulate content. You donāt provide those privacy-invading tools to the content providers and you certainly donāt expect them to take a parental role over your kids, let alone your neighbors and yourself.
Well, we can protect them as societies and villages and we do.
This notion that somehow groomers are neutralized if we abandon any attempt at protecting children at large is absurdā¦talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water. Imagine a world where we just ignore the source of the issueā¦the groomers would have a hay day. āSorry kidā¦you should have had better parentsā.
Putting it all on the parents just means that a small portion of rich and savvy parents will be able to āprotectā their kids, usually with draconian practices that put kids far more at risk. Pardon meā¦but you donāt know what youāre talking about.
No, here in reality we should continue to institute and advocate for effective measures.
No. I never suggested that. My argument is that using age verification makes it easier for groomers. That is a harm that arises from age verification. The harm to children from age verification greatly exceeds the benefit to children.
Correct. And I described how we can do that: By providing parents with the means to do it. Not pornographers. Not groomers. Not society in general. Providing these means to anyone except the parents is an unacceptable invasion into the privacy. Even to the parents, these measure deprive the child of a certain degree of privacy, but children have no broad expectation of privacy from their parents. Itās OK for parents to invade their childās privacy; it is not OK for anyone else.
Iām not āputtingā it on the parents: Itās already on the parents. That responsibility should stay with the parents, because nobody else is qualified to wield it. Pornographers, groomers, politicians, and you will not invade the privacy of my children, and I should not be empowered to invade your childās privacy either.
A small portion of parents use draconian practices that put far more kids at risk? What the hell are you even talking about?
Age verification is not an āeffective measureā. The only person who needs to know the userās age is the parents.
With āage verificationā, we are supposed to place our trust in the pornographer and the groomer. Most of them arenāt even in the same legal jurisdiction and are immune to criminal prosecution or civil judgment. Yet, we are supposed to grant them the power to invade our childrensā privacy, as well as our own. That is by no means an āeffectiveā measure.
An effective measure would be creating a free, publicly available blacklist of adult content, and any number of free apps to implement that blacklist to block content on the childās device. Which we already have. Hundreds of them. They are extremely effective at protecting children, without invading their privacy or enabling grooming.
Youād need to demonstrate that age verification protects groomers v childrenā¦all the data says the opposite. On a basic level, we know anonymous age-gating worksā¦but it goes nowhere near far enough.
Your only strategy canāt be tools for parents. Thatās one, albeit important, pillar. Youāre essentially giving tools to the people who need them the least, and leaving the children at risk out in the cold. The majority of parents arenāt savvy enough, aware of, or have the time to use the tools.
Iām talking about the real world outcomes of āleaving it to the parentsā. The most common way for parents to try to protect children is prohibitionā¦and we know that prohibition puts kids more at risk. This isnāt an edge caseā¦this is well meaning parents putting their children in danger because they donāt understand the realities of danger. Againā¦draconian prohibition is currently the most commonĀ strategy - thatās what Iām talking about. These parents most often the same parents who want to restrict sex education in schools, by the way.
You have a strange and incorrect understanding of how age verification functions, or can function. Youāre creating this straw man scenario where children are broadcasting their age publiclyā¦thatās not really a thing. Thereās an array of private ways to verify who a person isā¦we do it all the time when weāre protecting money assets or for other security. The only problem here is the expense of instituting these methods on a large scale, and requiring that the data isnāt harvested or sold or used in any other way. Itās bizarre to suggest that because a tiny portion of is vulnerableā¦we should stop looking at data. The harm reduction option is definitely not āleave it to the parentsā.
I highly recommend educating yourself about the methods of restricting adult contentā¦which arenāt limited to age verification by the way. It really seems like you have a specific and personal axe to grind with internet restrictions that youāre not talking about.
All I need to show is that groomers can use the tools to distinguish between adults and children. The California law requires your OS announce your age to a ādeveloperā before downloading an āapplicationā. The way the law is crafted, though, ādeveloperā = āweb serverā, and āapplicationā = āweb pageā.
Furthermore, the way the law is written, groomers arenāt just allowed to get your age; they are required to get your age if they offer web services to Californians.
Youād be hard pressed to find an adult who was successfully isolated from pornography as a minor. From that, we can conclude that the overwhelming majority of children arenāt actually harmed by porn. Quite the contrary, instilling the idea in them that seeking pornography is somehow sinful or disobedient is quite harmful on multiple levels. But I digressā¦
The fact that fucking everyone has seen porn before their 18th birthday --without harm-- demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of kids donāt actually need the tools. You see parents not using the tools as not knowing they exist or how to use them; I see parents trusting their kids. I see parents feigning ignorance of such tools in order to keep puritanical nitwits off our backs.
No, that puts fewer kids at risk. Only the kids of those draconian parents are put at risk by those prohibitions. Age verification expands that to every kid. Youāve got the test backwards.
While those draconian parents are putting their kids at risk, their normal peers are inoculating them with sanity. Expand their insane bullshit to the rest of society, and that sanity is replaced with puritanical dogma.
Read the California law. That is a thing, effective January 1st, 2027. There are provisions against requiring data for other purposes or giving it to third parties, but those provisions require first-party groomers to have their webservers collect that data on every page load.