https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/age-assurance...
Hopefully false positives won't be set high and this abused as an excuse to obtain sensitive personal information on their users.
It wouldn’t deter kids if you want to let them have unsupervised root access to a computer (like I enjoyed when I was 12), but I think it would be fairly effective for a walled garden like an iPhone
Super annoying!
Given Australia doesn't even require Age Verification on porn sites (only on social media sites), the incentives hint this was strongly supported by legacy media (90% of Aussie media is owned by two companies, Newscorp and Nine Entertainment).
The internet licence will make it difficult for both authors and readers on alternative media platforms. And it will outright prohibit young people from getting information from non-permitted sources (of course, legacy sources are not affected - incidentally, they're probably more harmful than the prohibited sources). (I've long said, to try to think clearly after watching 'the news' is akin to trying to operate heavy machinery after consuming alcohol).
Verification is the stick, AI is the carrot.
More than one answer is a bug - Eric Schmidt
Not really? Like the article says, they’ll just go to sites that don’t require age verification.
A good example of where social media can really matter is for say, gay kids in a religious households, where they might not be able to talk to someone in person. Social media makes it easy to create a dummy account and visit forums for advice or reassurance.
What a silly idea. The modern world was built while traditional media existed. The decay and backsliding conicides with modern day social media. How does that point to traditional media being the culprit?
But the inverse is also true: the best content on social media is orders of magnitudes better than the best content on mainstream media.
An individual should be able to choose what works for them, not have the government disallow swaths of sources.
Am I only one who sees loophole in creating a social media site, which will be a porn site first? FaceHub or Pornbook.
the internet is no longer anonymous
The kids in my family were well protected and supervised, they got into contact with hardcore porn at the age of 6 when other kids had access to smartphones and exposed them to it.
I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex.
In my 20s I was promiscious and lived what I saw in pornography, only later in life I learned about normal sex.
In germany we had a state sponsored porn flick once produced by ZDF Neo, maybe that is the approach to expose the kids to material that shows sex as a respectable flow rather than an extreme fantasy.
Only if they have no other exposure to this pretty damn normal thing. If all the adults in their life refuse to talk about because of some misplaced idea it is shameful, where are they going to get that info?
Not saying that’s the case for you, just that it’s the impression I get from many people.
There’s a bunch of studies on this and at the individual level it seems to do a bunch of stuff, but at the population level it has at most an effect so small it can’t be measured. Which IMO suggests causation goes in the other direction. IE if you’re entering puberty early you may seek both porn and sex at a younger age.
That said, I’m not an expert and have only briefly looked through the literature.
For all these things, we rely on people's world experience and common sense to figure it out. I think it's pretty obvious that sex is not like porn, and I don't understand why so many people are convinced that people can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality in this domain specifically.
Mainstream porn sites show a lot of weird practices (what's up with that strangulation fetish??) and I do think it has a bad influence.
I don't think age verification is a good solution, because we don't become immune to influence at age 18. Adults are just as vulnerable to copying poor behavior as minors.
I think we should do the opposite: Remove stigma associated with sexuality. Why can't more movies just include everyday sex scenes? Why do we need to make this distinction where you need to go to a different site if you want to see something more explicit than a nipple? Most people probably wouldn't even go to porn sites if they could just watch something steamy on Netflix.
Lol what, what makes you think it was caused by James Bond, not countless other anti smoking initiatives?
When there was a push to regulate smoking in advertising, it cut the original feedback loop which made film/tv characters not use smoking as a sign of being cool. This led to advertising (if it were allowed) to be less effective at portrayal of coolness via smoking.
It's not a simple one-to-one cause and effect.
Also, we (usually) talk about these things - video games are not the only source of discourse of violence or conflict, but sex is such a taboo topic that it’s highly likely most or all of someone’s knowledge will come from what they’ve learned on the internet
Now the EU is slowly turning into a oligarchy where very few control the majority. For every stupid law they make, the more I wish for it's destruction.
It's hurting their own case by giving the EU commission the easiest retort imaginable. If you really don't want age verification, that's bad, because they usually get the last word in.
Better to respond in good faith to the commission's strongest possible argument, rather than do this, which is going to get brushed aside while handing them a win.
Introducing laws that are going to be relatively trivially circumvented, which do not provide the protection they purport to provide, and which burden citizens with rather useless but onerous duties, should be called out as a failure at lawmaking. I think the best defense against such laws is to show thoroughly why and how bad and useless such laws are, so that large enough political constituencies (that is, us, citizens) would become interested in fixing or repealing them, and would vote accordingly.
But of course that's not what it's about.
Online age verification and content moderation was never about protecting anyone. It's about controlling the masses and tricking them into believing that it's for their own good.
That's why you do quality control on AI-generated content :^)
I don't like it, but for the most part the internet is now a better place for me to browse.
> But that comparison is dishonest: on a gambling or merchant site, users already expect to submit personal data — credit card info, name, phone number, address. They are paying for something. On a free site, users do not expect to hand over private data. They simply refuse — and move on to other sites. Why wouldn’t they?
the success of OnlyFans destroys this argument. It is not that people do not pay for porn - the authors try to uphold their free, ad-based model. But looking at OnlyFans, people absolutely seem to be OK submitting their personal data incl. payment details.
Porn is partially protected by the constitution and it is politically impopular to tell people what they can't do.
> Device-level parental controls have existed for years, and can actually block a million sites. But politicians can’t take credit for them.
UrMomsRobotLovr•54m ago
Seems like porn VPN would be popular.
decimalenough•51m ago
As the article says, all this means is that law-abiding porn sites (that, for example, respond to requests to delete CSAM and revenge porn) will go bankrupt and everybody will be driven to sketchypron.xxx instead.
delusional•39m ago
How would that work? Can PornHub not exist without the "lucrative" market of children watching porn?
Meneth•34m ago