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. […]
I don’t care if it slows down the legislative process, I am firmly of the opinion that all politicians should be legally required to take a short exam designed by experts on the topic of any legislation they want to vote on (including things like basic understandings of the concept and potential consequences, both positive and negative, of the legislation), and any politician who fails isn’t allowed to vote on that legislation.
Politicians shouldn’t be allowed to vote on legislation that they demonstrably do not understand.
How i feel about voting in general
You have to answer a skill testing question to obtain any contest winnings, there should be one for your vote to count.
A skill testing question isn’t quite the same as a literacy test, but I get your point.
I’m not sure if it is a ‘slippery slope’. It sounds more like a fixed plan.
But what’s next, melsaskca, I ask of you?! What if we have to verify our identities to look at cat videos! Things could get dark, you have no idea!
When I buy weed online, I have to input my date of birth. But I always wonder, is anything stopping someone from lying?
Because kids won’t access porn from other countries websites where they don’t require age verification?
It’s like MAGIC!
If they were serious about privacy-preserving age verification, they’d be looking at zero-knowledge proofs. Since ZKP is not on the table, this is really about control and surveillance.
“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
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.
Its not "well intentioned”, the silpery slope is the point. Getting porn sites to essentially self censor by restricting what geographic regions have accesss until one day its the majority of places and suddenly banning porn sites in the remaining hold outs doesnt seem like such a hard sell, and then on to other subjects they dont like.
It’s always referred to as age verification, but it’s ID verification. It’s the introduction of a regime where you can’t use the internet without everyone knowing exactly who you are, and without the government being able to track your activity via your ID. Governments around the world are making what must surely be a coordinated effort to end anonymity, and thus privacy, online. In other countries this has gone along with a push to end encryption for phone calls and chat, and a push to outlaw VPNs. Canada’s government is embarking on a program that’s very hostile to its own population.
Looks like it’s time for a more self hosted and distributed web.
What’s the difference? I use ID verification to buy alcohol and marijuana. They have no idea I’m old enough for sure, they trust the license.
The scenario you describe about using the internet with a regime knowing everything, has been the default in North America for about a decade.
This slippery slope argument is nonsense. There is a problem, and this is the tool we have to attempt to fix it with. Half the people on here seem to want to argue that porn has no negative effects on developing children and teens.
You don’t store and track who buys alcohol by that ID when you go to a shop, you just show them it
They scan my ID and absolutely save it and sell the data.
Didn’t know the dude at the liquor store you flashed your ID to was rocking the meta raybands
I’m not going to keep explaining, believe me or dont.
It’s never about porn or children. It’s about control, money and a fear of ones own citizenry.
It’s also about scanning everyone’s faces for their databases, and probably to feed Palantir in the end.
For sure, only pure evil motives. Establishment needs to destroy Canada to pillage it. Wrap it up in war on China and Russia. Deliver Canadian slaves to Israel and US oligarchy.
mostly its for tracking political dissidents, once you have to “upload your id eventually”, control of the female body is just a side benefit.
I was never excited for Carney (and the Liberals’ continuation of power), but I really didn’t think they’d anger me as much as they have been*. Yes, I’m happy we don’t have PP in power, but at times it’s feeling like we may as well have reached the same outcome minus the culture war shit.
I really hope the NDP makes a strong comeback**
Edit (corrections):
*Apparently it was not a bill put forward by Liberal MPs
**The NDP actually supported the first bill of this kind so they’re not much help in this situation
I’m not one to glaze Carney, but for the benefit of factuality - this bill was proposed by a senator, not a Liberal MP under Carney. We’ll see whether it goes further.
Thank you for the correction, I’ll update my comment
Afaik this is a senate bill and similar to s210 from last parliament, the NDP voted in favour of that one last session which I’m extremely disappointed about, I recall the NDP being pro privacy in the past, which totally got some of my friends interested in them in the first place.
It’s even more disappointing that the liberals were the only party with Nay votes on that one. I realise that wasn’t passing this bill but still, unimpressed.
Edit. This showed up earlier too in s203 back a few parliaments ago. Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne is the sponsor on all of these.
Ah, you’re correct (sadly). Now that you mention it I remember the NDP voting in favour for that which is depressing to say the least
I was never excited for Carney
Politicians gonna politician. They will all will be in favour of this kind of citizen tracking because it makes enforcing policy easier, doesn’t matter if it is Liberal, Conservative, or NDP.
The dark web became known as the hideout of internet criminals. Once we’re all internet criminals, it will just be the hideout of everyone. Time to drop all these commercial services that we’ve let take over the internet and go back to being anonymous weirdos talking to other anonymous weirdos on websites run by anonymous weirdos. The web was ironically a nicer place. Also a shittier place, but at the same time a nicer place. This is why we can’t have nice things.
They will try to ban websites run by anonymous weirdos.
“Ban Website” sounds good in the news but those words together barely even parse to an idea.
A website is just a bunch of files hosted on a computer, put them behind some kind of access control and the outside world can’t even know that they exist. Unless ISPs decide to block all inbound traffic to subscribers you can always just
apt install apache2.Unless ISPs decide to block all inbound traffic to subscribers
I think some ISPs already do this, if they suspect you’re running any kind of server, to force you to subscribe to a more expensive “business” plan.
The shitty ones do this. Or you get stuck behind cNAT.
They can try. Bans require enforcement, and they catch a few of us weirdos from time to time, but the hydra always grows more heads.
It is not a slippery slope, it is the intended purpose, with a different implementation.
Anyone with a few braincells working knows that it is all bullshit this crusade against porn “for the kids” .
In the end the objective is just ever more identification, tracking and control of everyone .
It gets even worse when you think of how the improper access could be properly mitigated…
Anyone with a few braincells working knows that it is all bullshit this crusade against porn “for the kids” .
Normies think “for the kids” is a 100% reasonable excuse to restrict freedoms and install authoritarian policy. That’s why it works.
I know it’s bullshit, you know it’s bullshit. Go convince someone who doesn’t understand that it is bullshit.
Now we deal with this shit even here?
They’ve been pushing this for years now.
Well no child I know could’ve ever found porn if an adult had only blocked access…lol. The more forbidden it is, the bigger the thrill/reward of getting it.
When I was a kid, my parents always had big summer parties at our house and there was alcohol all over the place. I could try whatever I wanted (with lots of adults around - if not supervising, at least being nearby). I never cared about alcohol because casual “sampling” was never prohibited so who cares?
My kids (both under 10) have both tried mild alcoholic drinks.
When they get older into their teens, I’m making sure that as long as they are supervised, they can try any legal substance they want.
Developing children should never consume drugs or alcohol.
Nooooo, I thought Canada was very far from this bull shit
So did I 🥲
Why? We are, and have always been, an economic appendage to the USA.
Call or write to your MP. Let them know that no one wants this.
