From the US and Australia to France and Italy, those seeking to obliterate privacy and restrict content are on the move, says technology journalist Taylor Lorenz
I totally understand that. And FWIW, I used to sit squarely in the camp that this wasn’t just foolish, it was nefarious.
But the challenge is really in how the UK has decided to implement this - zero knowledge proofs should have been a legal requirement like it is the the EU infrastructure regulation.
If there really, truly was no way to tie back proving your age to who proved their age, then surely this is a good thing? The slippery slope argument I understand but it is, at heart, at fallacy. “Well, if you start putting people in prison for murder, then pretty soon you’ll start putting people in prison for breathing”.
I’m obviously against having to prove your identity to access some content. But can I not support having to prove your age (in a fully anonymous way) without automatically saying “let’s know exactly who is accessing what and when”?
If there really, truly was no way to tie back proving your age to who proved their age, then surely this is a good thing?
Still nope.
The government shouldn’t be putting up mandatory barriers for what adults watch in the privacy of their own home. It’s a huge overreach.
Imagine being an adult in your 40s, living alone without a minor anywhere near you, and having to prove you’re an adult with a fucking Android app every time you want to open your liquor cabinet. That’s how this feels to me, and I find it extremely offensive. Like, get out of my life.
And then this age gating crap doesn’t even solve the problem, and has the potential to make things worse, because only the major players like pornhub and reddit will comply. For shits and giggles, I set my VPN to UK the other day, and was able to find non-age gated porn in no time. So this is just driving minors who want to view porn to more sketchy, less moderated sites.
In the UK all pornography has to be sold in a licensed store for which you have to be 18 to enter.
Yes, obviously the internet has made that slightly anachronistic at this point, but age restrictions and having to prove your age is extremely common here.
16 to buy a lottery ticket.
18 to buy a scratch card.
16 to buy an energy drink.
18 to buy tobacco.
16 to drink a low-alcohol drink with a meal and an adult in a licensed establishment.
18 to buy a drink in a licensed established.
18 to buy alcohol to take away (“off licensed”).
Kids have to prove their age ALL THE TIME. My daughter never goes anywhere without a means of proving her age.
Why is online special?
Your analogy is poor, in my humble opinion. The alcohol you have in your home you had to be legal age to buy in the first place. Similarly if you had a porn DVD at home you would have had to prove your age when you bought it (at least here in the UK). Given that online pornography is streamed there is only “now” to prove that you’re of legal age to watch it.
Are you against age gating on everything? If not, why is age gating on some things fine but age gating on other things wrong?
In the U.K. you can buy alcohol online. When it gets delivered the delivery driver has to check your age before handing it over to you.
Your examples only serve to show what a shithole nanny state the UK has been sliding down towards to, and what a slippery slope all these “omg think of the children! 😱” legislations are.
The alcohol you have in your home you had to be legal age to buy in the first place. Similarly if you had a porn DVD at home you would have had to prove your age when you bought it
I live in a EU country, never in my life have I had to provide an ID to buy alcohol or pornography, neither online nor in person.
Why is online special?
Online, there are risks of privacy and security. It’s already difficult enough to maintain a reasonable security and privacy stance that balances between convenience and not being tracked and targeted everywhere, without putting age gates into the mix. Even if you made the perfect age gate app without vulnerabilities (which you can’t), that perfect app could still be spoofed to trick people into providing sensitive identifying information to bad actors. It happens with banking apps, it will happen with age gate apps.
In real life the government does not get in the middle. It is a private transaction between a buyer and the seller, and the unspoken assumption is that the buyer is an adult of legal age. Only when there are serious doubts about the buyer’s age will the seller scrutinize. Online, the assumption of being bona fide is reversed: the assumption is that everyone is a minor until proven otherwise.
Online is also typically not a one stop transaction. In a single browsing session an adult might want to access many different pieces of content, spread out over several different sites. Adults having to stop and prove their age at every turn online is burdensome, draconian and has a huge chilling effect. Data has shown that sites that introduce an age gate, only retain about 10% of their users. So the other 90% either goes dark or is dissuaded entirely from accessing said materials. Neither of those are good outcomes.
Online is also special in that it doesn’t even work. An online age gate doesn’t really prevent anything, it just sends traffic elsewhere, making it little more than a nuissance. If a liquor store denies a minor buying liquor, the minor is SOL because there are only so many places they can physically try. Online they can just click the next link, or the next, or the next,… It’s simply impossible to age gate all the sites where you can find porn. And yes, it’s ridiculously trivial to find non-age gated porn, when I tried it with a UK VPN yesterday it was as simple as typing “porn videos” in DDG, and clicking the first link.
Finally, there is also a huge difference in harmfulness between consuming certain physical substances like alcohol, and viewing adult content. The very idea that it is particularly harmful for teens to view sexual materials is scientifically dubious, making this more an overbearing and disproportional “moral panic” type of reaction than a proportional, well studied and well reasoned measure. It also conveniently ignores and does nothing about much greater harms that young people fall prey to online, like what TikTok is doing to the attention span of kids, or incel/manosphere echo chambers and various other misinformation spheres, or online bullying, or screen addiction, or unrealistic and ultra-materialistic world views promoted by influencers. It aims to be a technological solution to a tiny part of a much larger societal problem, and that never works.
In my opinion, the true intent of this legislation has never been to protect children. Instead it is a power grab by a control obsessed government, and an ideological attack against those who create, distribute and view porn. The children, as usual, are only there to provide emotional blackmail to get people to accept intrusive, draconian measures. And you, my friend, fell for it hook, line and sinker.
It’s worth recognising that the eIDAS 2.0 / DSA regulation across the EU will function much the same way and lead to age gating requirements across the EU too. So if your definition of a shithole country is that it has online age-gating you might have to soon move away to something much better. Let me know if you find it.
you might have to soon move away to something much better. Let me know if you find it.
Great “counter” argument 👍
I find it rather disturbing that all these governments are trying to sneak this kind of legislation through in the calm between election cycles, without public debate whatsoever. There is almost no reporting about it in mainstream news, until it is a “fait accompli”, and it is completely absent from the various parties’ programs upon which they got elected. It’s almost as if they fear public opinion.
I totally understand that. And FWIW, I used to sit squarely in the camp that this wasn’t just foolish, it was nefarious.
But the challenge is really in how the UK has decided to implement this - zero knowledge proofs should have been a legal requirement like it is the the EU infrastructure regulation.
If there really, truly was no way to tie back proving your age to who proved their age, then surely this is a good thing? The slippery slope argument I understand but it is, at heart, at fallacy. “Well, if you start putting people in prison for murder, then pretty soon you’ll start putting people in prison for breathing”.
I’m obviously against having to prove your identity to access some content. But can I not support having to prove your age (in a fully anonymous way) without automatically saying “let’s know exactly who is accessing what and when”?
Still nope.
The government shouldn’t be putting up mandatory barriers for what adults watch in the privacy of their own home. It’s a huge overreach.
Imagine being an adult in your 40s, living alone without a minor anywhere near you, and having to prove you’re an adult with a fucking Android app every time you want to open your liquor cabinet. That’s how this feels to me, and I find it extremely offensive. Like, get out of my life.
And then this age gating crap doesn’t even solve the problem, and has the potential to make things worse, because only the major players like pornhub and reddit will comply. For shits and giggles, I set my VPN to UK the other day, and was able to find non-age gated porn in no time. So this is just driving minors who want to view porn to more sketchy, less moderated sites.
In the UK all pornography has to be sold in a licensed store for which you have to be 18 to enter.
Yes, obviously the internet has made that slightly anachronistic at this point, but age restrictions and having to prove your age is extremely common here.
16 to buy a lottery ticket. 18 to buy a scratch card. 16 to buy an energy drink. 18 to buy tobacco. 16 to drink a low-alcohol drink with a meal and an adult in a licensed establishment. 18 to buy a drink in a licensed established. 18 to buy alcohol to take away (“off licensed”).
Kids have to prove their age ALL THE TIME. My daughter never goes anywhere without a means of proving her age.
Why is online special?
Your analogy is poor, in my humble opinion. The alcohol you have in your home you had to be legal age to buy in the first place. Similarly if you had a porn DVD at home you would have had to prove your age when you bought it (at least here in the UK). Given that online pornography is streamed there is only “now” to prove that you’re of legal age to watch it.
Are you against age gating on everything? If not, why is age gating on some things fine but age gating on other things wrong?
In the U.K. you can buy alcohol online. When it gets delivered the delivery driver has to check your age before handing it over to you.
Your examples only serve to show what a shithole nanny state the UK has been sliding down towards to, and what a slippery slope all these “omg think of the children! 😱” legislations are.
I live in a EU country, never in my life have I had to provide an ID to buy alcohol or pornography, neither online nor in person.
Online, there are risks of privacy and security. It’s already difficult enough to maintain a reasonable security and privacy stance that balances between convenience and not being tracked and targeted everywhere, without putting age gates into the mix. Even if you made the perfect age gate app without vulnerabilities (which you can’t), that perfect app could still be spoofed to trick people into providing sensitive identifying information to bad actors. It happens with banking apps, it will happen with age gate apps.
In real life the government does not get in the middle. It is a private transaction between a buyer and the seller, and the unspoken assumption is that the buyer is an adult of legal age. Only when there are serious doubts about the buyer’s age will the seller scrutinize. Online, the assumption of being bona fide is reversed: the assumption is that everyone is a minor until proven otherwise.
Online is also typically not a one stop transaction. In a single browsing session an adult might want to access many different pieces of content, spread out over several different sites. Adults having to stop and prove their age at every turn online is burdensome, draconian and has a huge chilling effect. Data has shown that sites that introduce an age gate, only retain about 10% of their users. So the other 90% either goes dark or is dissuaded entirely from accessing said materials. Neither of those are good outcomes.
Online is also special in that it doesn’t even work. An online age gate doesn’t really prevent anything, it just sends traffic elsewhere, making it little more than a nuissance. If a liquor store denies a minor buying liquor, the minor is SOL because there are only so many places they can physically try. Online they can just click the next link, or the next, or the next,… It’s simply impossible to age gate all the sites where you can find porn. And yes, it’s ridiculously trivial to find non-age gated porn, when I tried it with a UK VPN yesterday it was as simple as typing “porn videos” in DDG, and clicking the first link.
Finally, there is also a huge difference in harmfulness between consuming certain physical substances like alcohol, and viewing adult content. The very idea that it is particularly harmful for teens to view sexual materials is scientifically dubious, making this more an overbearing and disproportional “moral panic” type of reaction than a proportional, well studied and well reasoned measure. It also conveniently ignores and does nothing about much greater harms that young people fall prey to online, like what TikTok is doing to the attention span of kids, or incel/manosphere echo chambers and various other misinformation spheres, or online bullying, or screen addiction, or unrealistic and ultra-materialistic world views promoted by influencers. It aims to be a technological solution to a tiny part of a much larger societal problem, and that never works.
In my opinion, the true intent of this legislation has never been to protect children. Instead it is a power grab by a control obsessed government, and an ideological attack against those who create, distribute and view porn. The children, as usual, are only there to provide emotional blackmail to get people to accept intrusive, draconian measures. And you, my friend, fell for it hook, line and sinker.
It’s worth recognising that the eIDAS 2.0 / DSA regulation across the EU will function much the same way and lead to age gating requirements across the EU too. So if your definition of a shithole country is that it has online age-gating you might have to soon move away to something much better. Let me know if you find it.
Great “counter” argument 👍
I find it rather disturbing that all these governments are trying to sneak this kind of legislation through in the calm between election cycles, without public debate whatsoever. There is almost no reporting about it in mainstream news, until it is a “fait accompli”, and it is completely absent from the various parties’ programs upon which they got elected. It’s almost as if they fear public opinion.