A House of Commons committee is set to study legislation proposed by Independent Sen. Julie Miville-Dechêne that would require Canadians to verify their age to access porn online.
At this point there are people in their forties who had access to online porn as minors. Have any actual studies been done to show that a significant portion of the many, many people who’ve grown up in the last 20-30 years have been harmed by having access to online porn while they were younger, or are these laws just something that’s trendy at the moment?
I’m in my 50’s and never had issues finding porn/alcohol/drugs when I was under 18, even though I was in a religious area for part of it.
These people are sniffing glue if they actually think this bill will do anything other than erode privacy.
At best all it will do is lead kids away from normal sites and towards the sketchy parts of the web where things get even weirder.
The goal is to erode privacy, and the pearl clutching about children is always the excuse. There are a lot of groups who want to eliminate privacy online: cops, copyright holders, and religious nuts to name a few. They’re the ones driving this stuff.
I’m kind of disappointed that the Ndp voted in favor of this bullshit plan.
Ugh. I hadn’t heard. I expected better, but the NDP have been a terrible disappointment in the last decade or so.
Ya, it seems every time they take a step or two forward they somehow end up taking a step back again.
There’s a HUGE lobbying effort to convince the people in power that this is a good idea. Lots of tech-surveillance companies bidding for this to go through, so everyone is forced to use their services. You think identity theft is bad now? Wait until you need to put your ID on the internet and that gets leaked.
If age verification is really the intent then it ought to be possible to develop a service these websites can call into that gives some kind of zero-knowledge age check. The age check service doesn’t need to know the identity of the service that’s asking, and the requesting service doesn’t need to know the identity of the person whose age they’re checking. You’d authenticate on a site that only knows someone’s doing an age check, and the verifying site would just get a token indicating that the age check was successful.
Am I missing some reason why this wouldn’t be possible? It seems to be a problem ripe for zero-knowledge solutions.
If it is possible, there’s really no need for an age check requirement to involve disclosing your identity to the site you’re visiting, or to disclose your viewing habits to anyone. And if governments or lobbyists are pushing for everyone to upload their full identity to web sites, it suggests either they’re ignorant or their motives aren’t what they claim.
This bill is a government login that sends an authentication string to the requesting website
Equivalent of CRA now or as an implementation that you’re familiar with “sign in with google”
The worry security wise is less about it getting leaked as it is opening a new string of fake websites (because the government data getting leaked/attacked is already an issue)
“Sex harms the youth” has been established lore since the Victorian age, when hiding it in the first place was a new project driven by religious concerns. Nobody questions it because nobody wants to look like a pedophile (which, for the record, are bad).
There are many studies that indicate porn use can negatively affect your brain, sexual performance, and pro-social behaviour.
Porn linked to decreased grey matter
Porn addiction linked to lower executive functioning
Porn linked to negative social behaviour
Meta analysis on research into adolescents porn use discusses a range of negative outcomes such as anxiety, suicidal ideation, social isolation, and academic disengagement
I’m not really sure this law will “solve” the problem, or if it’s a good solution to the problem. But there are real, negative outcomes of internet porn
There seems to be a lot of issues with the methodology used in those studies.
For example, “…reported hours of pornography consumption per week…”. Hours seems excessive. What’s the average duration for all visitors?
And, “Women were excluded from the research, because men more easily encounter such problems due to their frequent contact with pornographic materials.”. That’s an assumption. Women can also have "frequent contact " with porn, so they should have included women.
And one of them seemed to suggest that men who watched more porn had ED. But maybe men with ED first, have had to use porn to help? Chicken and egg situation.
I’m not defending porn, and I tend to make data driven choices.
But I’m acutely aware that methodology can have averse effects on the conclusion, and I tend to be highly skeptical of studies that appear to manipulate the outcome with their selection bias.
I agree some are problematic. The first one is based on brain scans, which is hard to refute. And there are many more like it
The porn industry has a vested interest in suppressing this, and billions of dollars to spend muddying the waters.
The first one is based on brain scans, which is hard to refute.
Yes, but the participant selection was dubious.
Also, while brain scans are used, it’s impossible to form a conclusion based on it.
For instance, do men with less grey matter watch more porn? Or does watching more porn cause men to have less grey matter?
A similar study was done on vegetarians. I don’t recall the details, but it went somewhere along the lines of “vegetarians have more brain activity associated with empathy”. Does that mean vegetarianism improves empathy? Or do empathetic people naturally gravitate towards vegetarianism?
Behavioral studies are so much harder to do compared to health studies. I don’t envy the study coordinators!
But more data can always bring us closer to answers, so I’m glad that at least some informational gaps are being filled.
There’s also a huge spectrum of consumption between porn addiction and adolescant curiosity. These studies seem to reference several consumption quantities which go beyond the scope of the original question.
Check the financing on those.
It seems to me much more likely that the porn industry is financing studies that say there is nothing wrong with porn use. The means and motive make a lot more sense going in that direction, as they don’t want to be seen as the new cigarettes
Same with Alcohol for those points you listed.
as a teen my buddy bought a penthouse collection off of two old ladies at a yardsale. Blocking Pornhub will do nothing unless they also block VPN and TOR use
Remember your high school friend that had porn mags in their locker?
In my fifties, saw porn as a minor. Paper was a thing for the last century, at least!
It’s the year 2024 and legislators STILL don’t understand that the internet doesn’t have borders. They can regulate PH because its a Canadian company, but good luck getting every other porn site on the internet to comply
Any law is only as effective as its level of enforcement. I have a hard time understanding how they think they can regulate access to porn on the Internet. If anything, if legitimate, more mainstream sites get more difficult to access, will our youngsters really stop their Google search there, or will they just click on the next link that just won’t have age verification, with potentially much “worse” porn than what they’d have watched initially lol? Did any of the countries that implemented age verification already really see any significant impact?
Students figure out how to dodge any website blocking schools put into place. It just takes one kid to figure it out, then it spreads through the whole school, and pretty soon everyone is using a sketchy free VPN that might be doing man-in-the-middle attacks or running a crypto miner or whatever.
The only real solution is parental (and teacher, in the context of schools) training and supervision. Anything else and students will figure out Tor, or VPNs, or private trackers, or pirate streaming sites, or random sketchy websites (depending on what they’re trying to block). It’s futile, and encourages students to do unsafe things to get around the blocks.
This will be no different. There are hundreds of ways to avoid this. For a high-profile example, see “VPN” search trends in Utah after porn sites geoblocked the state of Utah.
There is Very Probably No way to get around this kind of thing. You know until GovCan allows Bell and Rogers to filter “hackers” traffic to protect Canadians.
And then you just upgrade your VPN software, and look for sketchier providers. We could switch to an intranet like Cuba, but then our economy might end up like Cuba because it will suck. And I would switch to pirate radio bursts to move content around, so I’m still going to be able to get my scientific papers without buying them. Or porn.
If there were a standardized large scale mesh network I would be all over that. Like if everyone agreed (before governments get too handsy) on a TCP/IP over HAM setup, a ‘free’ internet could be built and ready to go when the corporate owned networks go 1984.
So on a second read, I think you might be talking about a situation where the government still allows an alternate system to operate, at least if it’s established. I already wrote this up from the same worst-case perspective as in OP.
For daily driving, the trick with that would be offering something commercial providers can’t, other than an abstract long-term argument. Without that, you’re basically just trying to start your own ISP, but without any investors. For enthusiast use, see APRS below, which is a thing.
APRS is kind of the relevant current standard. The trick is that being carried by radios that are unpredictable, it has no upper bound on latency (I think). If you want the same browsing experience (TCP especially needs a lot of back and forth) that’s really hard, because presumably big brother isn’t going to let you have a mesh station online for very long.
The burst thing I was talking about is genuinely how spies do it in locked-down places like Eritrea or Turkmenistan - you go to a busy public place and absolutely hog bandwidth for just one second, using a disguised radio, and then wander out with your groceries before the radio detectors can catch up. I suppose open-source resources for that would be good, if they don’t already exist.
I’d love to look at the transport layer of NATO’s system. It’s designed for both wartime (so arbitrary failure rate, type and pattern) and extensibility, and I’d be fascinated to know how they did it. Unfortunately, it’s also a big damn secret, to the point it’s the main thing they bring up when the media asks about China getting their hands on a working F-35. I’d also anticipate that it relies on every user registered as friendly acting friendly, at least over the long term.
One of the things that’s on my future project list is over-the-air crypto, so you can pay someone to transmit your 50 meg thoughtcrime video slowly but persistently. As far as I know there’s no prohibition on digital sigs (like there is on encryption), so it should be doable somehow.
And theyre calling it ArriveCam
They should talk to YouTube to find out how successful their months long efforts to block at blockers have been. This is an effort by pearl clutchers to do the impossible in a domain that they know absolutely nothing about.
There is better porn than porn hub on almost every site that offers it. Unless you are a shareholder in porn hub this is a non issue.
Whoosh .