Canada’s proposed Bill S-209, which addresses online age verification, is currently making its way through the Senate, and its passage would be yet another mistake in tech policy.
The bill is intended to restrict young peoples’ access to online pornography and to hold providers to account for making it available to anyone under 18. It may be well-intentioned, but the manner of its proposed enforcement – mandating age verification or what is being called “age-estimation technologies” – is troubling.
Globally, age-verification tools are a popular business, and many companies are in favour of S-209, particularly because it requires that websites and organizations rely on third parties for these tools. However, they bring up long-standing concerns over privacy, especially when you consider potential leaks or hacks of this information, which in some cases include biometrics that can identify us by our faces or fingerprints. […]
“Those that trade privacy for security deserve neither.”
How about they start addressing the actual problem rather than half-measures from think tanks. If it was truly about children, they should be passing policies from a macro standpoint that encourage people to have a family and kids. Right now, it’s economically grim and has been sliding that way for many decades. The rise of fascist and surveillance state policies is only going to make it worse. Say bye-bye to your birthrate and we’re right back where we started again with the gov trying to pump the numbers via mass immigration.
What does all this have to do with this bill? The intent may be framed as protecting/preventing kids from adult material, but it’s also about making it desirable to have kids because “big brother is watching you/protecting you” (SMH here on how stupid this all is). These legislators are out of touch. We as a society need to address the root of the problem - why do we have a CSAM problem in the first place? It’s a horrific thing to have, and to be honest, those that turn to it likely have a mental illness.
As for kids accessing adult material online - why is the government being a nanny state? This is the parent’s job.
I have zero confidence that they can keep everyone’s data private and safe given how many breaches there are.
Yes and no
Call it a nanny state but companies have been abusing kids to help and back with social media which, IMHO is a much, MUCH bigger problem than porn. I’m all for a ban on social media for kids under 18 at least.
I fully agree that we need privacy and a system should be put in place that does t spy on the citizens bu at the same time we do need protections for the citizens
The entire “he who sacrifices privacy for security” is a bad faith argument. Tell that to a 70yo granny who just lost all of her life savings to scammers. Tell that to the 15 year old that just committed suicide due to some social media bullshit. Tell that to the countless teenagers wrestling with anxiety and can’t get themselves away from social media anymore because companies refined their algorithms so far that they’re addicting as fuck.
That is where governments are supposed to step in. Not everything should be legal or else we should also permit owning weapons grade plutonium. Yes, that is an extreme, but its to show that we need limits and the question is where
Yes, government can be abusive and very much on the wrong side, like with the marijuana prohibition that broke and ended countless lives. Now Europe wants to spy in all chats FFS.
Those are great examples.of bad government control but just because these bad examples exist doesn’t meant hat any government control is bad
I would favor an age verification system that is guaranteed anonymous. That shouldn’t be too hard to setup if the government gives out codes to the citizens, and they can give independent non profit foundations a list of the codes with only the birthdate. Citizen supplies the anonymous code to website, website requests age at foundation, that’s it.
Foundation can’t legally reveal to government (or anyone for that matter) what code visited what, and the foundation doesn’t know what code is what citizen
It’s just a random idea written on the toilet, I’m sure there are better algorithms out there to do this, but the point is that it can be done in a fair, dependable and anonymous way.
We need SOME control, no control just doesn’t work.
At least apply the controls to all the big players for starters
I can agree with some points, but disagree with a lot of the other things.
Black mail and scams are not new. Just that the internet has enabled it on turbo speed. The culprit we know is social media algorithms aimed initially to maximize engagement and now completely refined to twist reality. It’s funny because during the time I commented and now, Australia banned anyone younger than 16 y/o from all social media. I can agree with this - I have no idea right now as how they will implement this flawlessly though. Companies that are structured for maximum “engagement” should be regulated. Look at theme parks and they have age and height restrictions on certain rides for safety - for the sake of mental health in youth, social media should be regulated in the same manner and attitude. But do video games fall into the same category - at what point are they considered more social media than game? All of these will have to be clearly defined - which I have no faith in politicians to be able to do so. As for the elderly, I can only say, the world changes fast and we must always be vigilant - especially in the age of AI. Fake phone calls, fake videos - what about all that? Even before the internet and social media people were already getting scammed - remember the Nigerian prince in your emails? There just wasn’t enough political will to truly fix the problem. The government is playing whack-a-mole by legislating it via invasion of privacy - I predict this is going to be a policy failure.
Our government can’t even keep the big telecoms in line to stop spam calls, what makes you think that they will even be able to stop some sophisticated scam? We can’t even manage to tax media companies properly. But sure, let’s all give government even more mass surveillance tools. Also, the weakest link in cyber security these days isn’t the computer itself - it’s you/the person.
If this ever becomes a thing, I’d want the spirit of this law written out in plain language on what this can and can’t be used for - especially in court. Also a sunset clause that this topic will be review every couple of years. Anything short of that is just asking for it to be abused.
Your code would still be unchanging and unique to you, which would be easy to correlate activity with. It’s basically a government-issued ID number.
And if it could somehow be anonymous, there’s nothing to stop people from sharing it. It just becomes a password you need to access the internet, except all sotes must accept any of 20 million passwords, and you definitely know a bunch of people who will share.
I know, and as I said, it’s something that I was writing as a quick idea, there are better ways, for sure
My point was though that social media is ruining kids, and that is something that needs a fix.
I’m not saying my way is perfect (still better than what governments are trying), I’m saying we need something
I can’t think of any method of restricting content from children that couldn’t be leveraged to restrict content in general, or collect personal information.
The dangerous parts of social media affect adults too. Maybe we need to regulate social media platforms in some way.
Or just have better and more widely available local parental control systems. I can block specifically all social media without affecting other sites, but that’s because I know how. Perhaps DNS blockers need to be government recommended?
So in this post we have a personal moral panic with no basis and then the claim we need “some control” as if it were not true that every single fucking person discussing in this thread grew up in a world without these age restrictions and generally ended up fine.