Want to watch porn in Britain? Get your passport ready
New ID checks kick in next year amid a fierce global debate between child protection groups and privacy warriors.
I hope this encourages children to learn an important life skill that will help them in numerous ways: Piracy.
It's honestly stupid. They just go to less moderated sites, or if you're lucky, learn how to use a VPN and bypass all this nonsense anyway.
It is life changing really. I don't recall ever paying for digital content. I still go to the theatres for an exceptional movie but that's it. It has made me learn more about computers, be a bit savvy in tech. I can't count how many times that has helped me get through my job. It really is an important life skill
You want children to watch porn?
Kids will do that either way when they get to that age.
I think he just meant that children are the most likely to uhhh, find a way.
Oh the humanity. They might get deeply inaccurate ideas about the perks of pizza delivery.
One should be vastly more worried about people who when they think of children think of porn, or vice-versa.
Normal people might think of children and think of playground safety or maybe how SUVs should be banned because they're so much more dangerous for children on streets than normal cars.
People whose top concern when it comes to "children" is "porn" are emotionally invested in a certain kind of association that normal people don't usually have in their minds in such strong terms.
Do you think this will stop them?
I watched porn as a teen. Look, maybe in America you're all puritans or whatever, but I started looking at magazines when I was 13 and then later found online porn (and hell I was LATE to the game according to my classmates). This is a reality y'all have to come to terms with. Teens watch porn.
Headlines next year: "VPN subscriptions in the UK up 42069% for some reason"
As a quote in the article states, porn is the canary in the coal mine - with some MPs apparently advocating for blocking VPNs to prevent work arounds.
I truly appreciate the number you used. Chef's kiss
I mean, the government could tackle homelessness, or end child hunger, many appropriate subjects. But instead they want to regulate jerk-off material. Sad.
They are way more concerned with genitals than they should be.
Our genitals at that.
its always nice that they want your official id associated with your porn. i just want to see what happens when that database gets hacked.
Steve Shives?
you got me.
In case anybody needs a reminder, the UK Government's response to the Snowden Revelations that showed even more widespread surveillance of civil society in the UK than in the US was, unlike in the latter country, to pass laws that retroactivelly made the whole thing legal.
This might be a big nitpick, but "Child Protection Groups", vs "Privacy Warriors", sounds sleazy.
As positive connotations as possible on one side, vaguely negative on the other.
Pretty positive this is going to end up being a DNS level block that will be as simple as setting a dns server outside of the UK to bypass.
Because anything else would create an unbelievable amount of administrative overhead.
Also imagine the spike in identity theft this is going to cause.
China: “Hold my Tsing Tao”
I'm an advocate of VPN but this is not the situation to recommend them but to chastise regulators and lawmakers for even allowing this. This is eroding our freedom of speech. I can see politicians expanding this and censoring terrorist speech and speech of certain political ideologies. It is the erosion our civil liberties we need to worry about.
Porn perusers will soon have to prove their age by uploading an identity document like a passport, registering a credit card, [...]
Ah, mandatory account creation with linked credit card being the most widely available and likely easiest option?
No wonder the porn sites aren't fighting this too hard!
(...or are they?)
My guess is that some companies will greatly benefit from this regulation because they can somewhat monopolize the market. I also wouldn't be surprised if those were the ones who lobbied for this.
Oi yer got ye wankn loicense
Discounting VPNs for a moment..
What if one person made an account with ID and then the entirety of the country just happened to know the login?
Usr: admin Pass: admin
Basically the idea of https://bugmenot.com
Ofcom wants porn consumers to "think of the children".
Not this shit again
So the latest the UK can call an election and get Labor in charge is January 2025, the same month this goes into effect. Wonder if they will rush a repeal or get blamed for it starting?
Easy. Everything bad that happens before January 2025 is Gordon Brown's fault, and everything after it's Kier Starmer's. You know it's true because it says so in the Daily Mail.
Whilst I appreciate the satire of the Tories' one and only politican strategy, as the Snowden Revelations showed back then, New Labour wasn't any better in their "keeping a watchful eye on the plebes" ways.
Looking down on the rest as riff-raff that needs to be kept in place is a feature of both Tories and New Labour.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Porn perusers will soon have to prove their age by uploading an identity document like a passport, registering a credit card, presenting their face to AI-powered scanning technology, or using a handful of other methods outlined in draft guidance from the regime’s regulator, Ofcom.
Although initially missing from the U.K.’s next attempt at internet regulation, pressure from children’s charities, age verification providers and vocal parliamentarians persuaded the government to revamp the defunct regime through the Online Safety Act.
Many videos depict graphic and degrading abuse of women, sickening acts of rape and incest, and many underage participants,” Tory MP Miriam Cates, a strong advocate for the legislation, told the House of Commons in September.
Research indicates younger kids who stumble across porn accidentally can find it shocking and disturbing — although the majority of young people surveyed in a 2020 British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) report said this didn’t impact them in the long term.
But the issue is complicated: the BBFC report found that older teens said they watched porn for educational purposes, due to a lack of information about sex in schools, or for gratification, while half of the LGBTQ+ respondents said it had helped them understand and explore their sexual identity.
“The squeamishness associated with pornography has made it nearly impossible to have a mature discussion about the technical feasibility, trade-offs, and effectiveness of age verification mandates,” says Matthew Lesh, director of public policy and communications at the free-market think tank.
The original article contains 2,313 words, the summary contains 245 words. Saved 89%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Although initially missing from the U.K.’s next attempt at internet regulation, pressure from children’s charities, age verification providers and vocal parliamentarians persuaded the government to revamp the defunct regime through the Online Safety Act.
Ah, good ol' "think of the children," once again doing the heavy lifting for the morality police and state surveillance.
pressure from [...] age verification providers
I think this is the tell that it's much stupider than any of that. It's just another corrupt Tory handout to their mates.
I'm in the US so I've always needed a passport to watch porn (or anything else) in Britain.
