The UK tries, once again, to age-gate pornography
The UK tries, once again, to age-gate pornography
Four years after its last attempt fizzled out.
Because that are the real problems the UK must fight right now…
45I guess someone was complaining about "too many wankers in government".
43Ah age-gate but it's a maximum age to watch porn instead
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I think the government thinks Rwanda will deal with everything else. Poor people? Ship them to Rwanda. Health problems? Ship them to Rwanda. 7 prime ministers in 10 minutes, I guess you just keep saying the word 'Rwanda' until everyone forgets?
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And once again, it will not be about pornography, but about creating and establishing a framework to regulate access to content.
29Ah... UK... The embodiment of a shitshow...
6This is the best summary I could come up with:
UK telecoms regulator Ofcom has laid out how porn sites could verify users’ ages under the newly passed Online Safety Act.
The regulator is consulting on these guidelines starting today and hopes to finalize its official guidance in roughly a year’s time.
The measures have the potential to be contentious and come a little over four years after the UK government scrapped its last attempt to mandate age verification for pornography.
“The majority of those are coming across it accidentally and stumbling across it on the web.” Ofcom’s press release cites research that suggests nearly eight in 10 children have seen “violent pornography depicting coercive, degrading or pain-inducing sex acts” before turning 18.
Once the duties come into force, pornography sites will be able to choose from Ofcom’s approaches or implement their own age verification measures so long as they’re deemed to hit the “highly effective” bar demanded by the Online Safety Act.
“Age verification technologies for pornography risk sensitive personal data being breached, collected, shared, or sold.
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6The only way this has a shot in hell of ever working is via the use of a state made API that independently confirms a user's age based on a state issued unique identification, with strong penalties for providing access without age verification via the API
Frankly that age gate API should also block access to online purchases, and to algorithm based content presentation models. That alone will significantly help the screen time crisis with today's youngins.
4Rather than implement the api, porn software administrators would block connections from the UK, at which point everyone would use a vpn to get around it pretty easily.
You can't fix it with mandatory access control. It's not up to the government anyway, it's up to parents to properly use device lockdowns. That's what they should be doing, a free state sponsored, maintained and up to date opt in software program that allows parents to lock down purchases and porn on their own children's device. This program would be taxpayer funded and paid humans would maintain a list of approved/blocked websites and automatic third party application configuration, with client side verification for CSAM or abuse material of the child's device.
The public at large is not responsible for the education and protection of children they do not have. That's a parent's and only a parent's duty, which means the control should be opt in by parents.
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