What are your thoughts on restricting children’s access to pornography online?
What are your thoughts on restricting children’s access to pornography online?
There are a lot of GOP-controller legislatures in the USA pushing through so-called “child protection” laws, but there’s a toll in the form of impacting people’s rights and data privacy. Most of these bills involve requiring adults to upload a copy of their photo ID.
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There's no way for a government to do it that wouldn't interfere with adults' privacy.
There technically is, but it's going to be a while until the government is ok with it. It's called zero knowledge cryptography, where a user could prove they have an identification that is government issued, and that they are of age, without revealing any other information.
There’s a vanishingly small chance that the government wouldn’t fuck that up. Here is what would happen:
- bill gets signed
- no bid contract is assigned to a technology firm with a history of incompetence at everything other than lobbying for billions of dollars
- 3-letter agencies secretly inject back door stipulations into the system so that they can keep spying on everyone
- years late and at double the budget, it releases
- two months later, someone shows off the secret backdoor keys at DEFCON, along with instructions on how to dump the access database
- years of extortion material for spy agencies and organized crime around the world
- zero children protected: they learn an ancient technology called “torrenting”
- new calls for even more draconian control of information to save the children from sexy terrorists
Internet companies that are forced to take people's personal information could do it at their cost
If the government really wanted to, it could provide citizens with a portal that would do oauth (or something similar) to authorize the porn access.
They could do some crypto crap to avoid storing anything about the citizen, so, unless the system is subborned, it doesn't store anything about users.
EDIT: the point is that this kind of system can be implemented in a privacy-preserving manner. I'm ambivalent about the idea, but it has been enacted by a democratically elected government, so they should go about it in the most responsible manner possible.
No. Absofuckinglutely not.
If the service is open source, I could actually see this working.
No. Open Source does not make violations of freedom somehow okay.
I thought it was obvious, but I guess I'm gonna go step-by-step. So, what's needed to verify if you're 18? Exactly one thing - a flag telling the other system yes/no! Very privacy friendly, porn site doesn't know anything else about you. And obviously the auth system shouldn't log that you verified for a porn site. That's why it should be open source, so you can trust it.
The auth system knows you verified for something. The only way to actually preserve privacy is total anonymity to everyone.
Nope, it doesn't. Did you read what I wrote or did you just have a knee-jerk reaction?
Please explain it to me like I'm five. How can the authentication service not know what your authenticating against? How can it provide you a token that you can't use over and over again, or past other people?
OAuth specifically wants to know what you're using your tokens for.
In principle if you insert a middleman into a transaction the middleman knows about the transaction. Thus it's violates privacy
What good is it for the system to know, if the system disregards that information right after auth? Effectively it's like no one ever knew.
You're confusing intents and capabilities. When we're talking about security and privacy we have to talk about capabilities. Not intents.
Somebody could have the best intentions, but you don't want to give them the capability to hurt you. If it's not necessary. So does a daycare need a volunteer militia to hang out all day cleaning their weapons? Probably not, the capability even if well intended is antithetical to the security and welfare of the children.
Even if the intention is good today, putting the framework and capability in just invites future corruption.
It is a basic tautological fact that you cannot verify an identity while keeping that identity private from the verifier.
Then you don't know much about IT. Sure, the verifier must know your identity at the point of identification. Doesn't mean it has to store any information about what you did. Unless of course you're worried that the PC itself will magically come to life and do something with the information. In that case you need an entirely different kind of help. Source for my claims: Designing system architecture is literally my job.
If it's private and secure and isn't linked to your identity, we will share it and it will be useless because everyone who shares the same login is the same over-18 person.
If it is in any way linked to your identity, the data is online and a target for breach which will expose said identity.
There is no realistic way to implement this which both actually does anything at all, AND does not require adding attack surface for breaches.Please reread what I wrote. And regarding attack surface, everything you use adds attack surface.
Please reread what I wrote. And regarding everything you use adding attack surface, that is the absolute best argument to not use an additional service such as the aforementioned 3rd party auth.
What are we doing here?
Yeah. It's possible, but I'm guessing there isn't a will or an understanding of available tools.
Your original post said the last can't be implemented in a privacy preserving manner. It can.
It absolutely cannot.
I disagree. I could literally put some porn in this very comment. So the fediverse needs a porn barrier, and every file hoster, we can't allow TOR, there is porn, and illegal porn as well. So please show us your id before entering TOR, pls.
It is an authoritarian move. It is undermining privacy. It is censoring the web.
It is parents and maybe schools responsabilty to teach kids how to interact with media, that porn exists and is not an actual representation of sex, and to restrict their access to pornography or media in general.
Furthermore, on planet earth, there are no perfect democracies, and the democratic system of the USA is flawed to a degree where it is at least questionable if your leaders are elected democratically.