I don't doubt porn addiction is somewhat harmful to some people (I doubt it is nearly up there with alcohol, which afaik is easily in a class of its own).

I've also had a kid in a London school for the last 9 years, so I'm in the parent whatsapp groups etc, and talk to parents about what should be done.

For a politician, getting parents to agree to "Should we protect kids from harmful material on the internet?" is an easy statement to make, and an easy one for parents to answer. The next steps are the hard ones, which is why enforcement of this legislation was delayed over and over again. This was first legally mandated in 2017! Then delayed, abandoned, delayed, reintroduced, etc. Why? Because getting the implementation right is very hard, and I do not think that this current system will be effective at stopping much harm to consumers of pornography, but I do think it will lead to terrible privacy breaches.

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pyman 2 days ago | parent [-]

I'm a teacher in a private high school which allows students to have smartphones. Kids have unlimited access to porn and they circulate it during school hours, and there's not much we can do about it.

AFAIK, the UK forced the big porn tech giants to hide explicit images and videos from the public unless users verify their age. Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp, Reddit and other companies failed to do that. These US businesses turned a blind eye to porn just to make more money.

I think what the UK is doing is a step in the right direction. It's about holding the billionaires behind these apps accountable for what they show to kids. It won't fix everything, but it will force the big players to change their software. And that's the first step toward making things better.

In my opinion, this should be a universal law: want to gamble, watch porn, smoke or buy alcohol? Show your ID. Simple as that.

> I do not think that this current system will be effective at stopping much harm to consumers of pornography, but I do think it will lead to terrible privacy breaches.

You mean the system that verifies age could get hacked and expose all the IDs people uploaded? Yeah, that's the risk. But we already hand over ID for flights, banks, hotels, etc. The real issue isn't showing ID, it's trusting the people behind these porn sites, which we know cannot be trusted.

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Quarrel 2 days ago | parent [-]

> AFAIK, the UK forced the big porn tech giants to hide explicit images and videos from the public unless users verify their age. Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp, Reddit and other companies failed to do that. These US businesses turned a blind eye to porn just to make more money.

Until just now, no, they had not forced them. They had repeatedly delayed and denied, just trying to win electoral points.

I think you underestimate how easy these regulations will be to get around. I was once a teenage boy with some tech-nous. This would have been a walk in the park then, and kids these days know a lot more than I did back then, not to mention all the bad-actors that will happily help them. It isn't as simple as "oh no, so IDs will be leaked".

Also, if you think you can understand the depth of the people behind the porn sites, you're in for a new awakening. Of course, you can't trust them- but if you could, then there would be new porn sites the next day that you could not. Which sites will implement these changes? Which ones will not? The answer to this is half the battle being faced ..

	▲	pyman 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree, VPNs make it way too easy to get around age checks. Maybe the solution is for governments to set up a simple age verification service, an official site where you pay $1 (refundable) to prove you're over 18. Then they could offer APIs that any website can plug into to verify users. Kind of like how barcodes work. To avoid privacy issues, the verification site should only store a hash of the email, no images, no credit card info, nothing else. Just enough to confirm the person passed the check. A digital proof-of-age system without tracking or storing sensitive data.