- cross-posted to:
- bbc@rss.ponder.cat
- cross-posted to:
- bbc@rss.ponder.cat
Summary
Under the UK’s Online Safety Act, all websites hosting pornography, including social media platforms, must implement “robust” age verification methods, such as photo ID or credit card checks, for UK users by July.
Regulator Ofcom claims this is to prevent children from accessing explicit content, as research shows many are exposed as young as nine.
Critics, including privacy groups and porn sites, warn the measures could drive users to less-regulated parts of the internet, raising safety and privacy concerns.
How would you solve it then? I’m not saying Ofcom are right, but should it be left wholly on parents to police the whole internet?
Nope. Just their kids.
Like always.
They don’t have to police the whole internet, just their kids. Frankly children that age shouldn’t be on social media especially unsupervised.
Parents should be using device level controls to monitor their kids internet habits. All of this should be built into the device and browser, and parents need to take basic accountability.
It could be. Putting adult filters on your routers and devices isn’t difficult.
Whereas if this is implemented, I think it pushes the public towards the dark net…and if your intent is protecting minors, that’s absolutely not the result you want.
At least on pornhub these days I have a reasonable assurance I’m not stumbling into something I shouldn’t. In the dark corners of the internet, that illusion of protection is gone.
Parental Controls have never been easier to enact. All my.kids have tablets with 4 layers of adguards, autolocks, timers, and app restrictions. It took maybe an hour to set all of them up. Are your kids worth an hour of your time? I think so. Especially if it means we dont restrict freedoms for shitty solutions.
Yes. Parent controls have been available for this stuff for ages. It’s not a problem for the state to solve.
If the alternative is not solving the problem while making other stuff worse, yeah.
Understanding that I can’t solve the whole issue right here and now on my own, the very first thing I’d take a look at is changing from having an ‘on by default’ connection to other machines, to having an ‘off by default’ connection. I’d also worry about complicating the entire process to the point where parents can’t reasonably understand/control how their machines are used by their children (the first point assists with that).
One other thing which I believe is important to actually protect children would be to establish and maintain national borders, similar to China’s great firewall. The more automatic systems become, the more opportunity exists for bad actors to exploit them for untoward purposes. Understanding that we can’t conclusively resolve every potential issue, we ought to at least do what we can to ensure that those participating in the ecosystem share similar goals and values with each other, which is really the point of borders in the first place.