Please also fight mandatory age verification with prison sentences. The European Parliament has already voted in favor of a law that mandates age verification for pornography with a one year prison sentence. It was included as a last minute amendment into this bill [1]. See "Amendment 186". It has been completely missed by news organizations and even interest groups.
The full accepted article reads: "Disseminating pornographic content online without putting in place robust and effective age verification tools to effectively prevent children from accessing pornographic content online shall be punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of at least 1 year."
It's not law yet, as the first reading is now sent back to the Council of the European Union, but I don't think it's very likely it will get a second reading.
We will protect your sensitive personal documents so that only trusted government institutions and ones held to the highest standards of privacy (such as banks) may have access to it.
This is to prevent abuse and identity theft.
Also please upload them to BigBootyXXX.com if you want to have a wank
Also, public officials like to be exempt because of professional requirements. They delivered the argument for it to be declared illegal violating a few constitutions.
Also because it is an undemocratic technocracy (warranted polemic) and the average citizen cannot sue before the EU judiciary, the national courts have to kill it. Of course such a process will take years...
"The European Commission is developing a harmonized, EU-wide approach to age verification, accompanied by a comprehensive age verification blueprint that is intended to facilitate practical adoption across all Member States and can be customised to the national context. Built upon the robust European Digital Identity Wallet framework, this user-friendly and privacy-preserving age verification solution enables individuals to demonstrate their eligibility for age-restricted online services, such as those restricted to adults, without disclosing more personal information than absolutely necessary"
So basically, the intention is to provide a solution where users do not need an account or to provide their passports to BigBootyXXX.com. The site just asks if this session or user is of legal age and the age verification system will respond with a TRUE/FALSE
At the end of the day, "think of the children" has been an ancient rallying cry that’s used to justify all kinds of bad behavior. Often ironic, as you say.
Also banks were one of the most vulnerable. I’ve often wondered why. My first reaction is "because their code comes from coders who only want to work at a bank," but I don’t want to be unfair. Perhaps it’s "from people comfortable with lots of bureaucracy". Either way, when I was a pentester, banks were one of our main types of clients, and their code was often bad. So it’s doubly ironic to claim banks are exemplars of how to do privacy.
I consulted with several big banks, and while there are some great developers there, on the whole, the devs were largely passionless and were just there for the job. Many of them actively dislike coding, and it really felt like they were just there for the high pay. I think that type of developer really thrives in a move slow, heavy bureuacracy environment where velocity is not something people care about. The high security can be annoying, but everywhere I went they had enough processes and out-sourcing of security to experts and tools that the average dev didn't really have to think about it. On many teams there would be one person or so who (mostly) understood the area they were responsible for and could deliver quickly, but not every team had somebody like that. One thing that I did think was a positive is that (perhaps because of all these things) is that it was a very low-ego environment, and people were generally open-minded about learning new stuff and/or better ways to do things. Overall I really enjoyed working with the people at banks, despite everything taking longer than you would think it should :-)
What I dislike about these large bureaucracies is that it's not only impersonal to the developers who have to work on it, but also for the customers. Even though software is difficult, I think it's a net positive for society to have 10 to 100 banks with poorer software than a few big banks with great software. I think we often overestimate the benefits of economies of scale. A small bank in a town run by a few locals could handle the town's finances perfectly well without much software if there wouldn't be a whole morass of regulations.
Just wanted to say, thanks for the very interesting comment. I consulted at Thompson Reuters, and while they aren’t a bank, your story brought up all kinds of memories. The passionless part really resonated with me, since it was all too obvious whenever the one good developer (who I was thankfully paired with) and I had meetings with the rest of them. There was one guy in charge of the database, which in practice meant any time you wanted to interface with the database you had to ask this guy to do it instead of write any code yourself that even interacts with the database in any way, including just getting data. It meant hours of delays, routinely. During most meetings it would devolve into random tangents about cars. (The good dev was also a car enthusiast, so everyone came to him with all their car issues, much to his annoyance.) And yes, to be fair, it was a little fun and I enjoyed working with most of them. Very low ego, as you say.
News organization welcome any barrier to social media networks, they are heavily biased on these topics. The "modern" journalist of today doesn't really care about freedom of information either.
Speaking of which, the EU is also working on a "free speech" law for journalists and against them being arbitrarily banned by platforms. One would think this law could easily be extended to everyone since it is not at all trivial to determine who gets these benefits and who doesn't.
Most outlets today are some form of court reporter in one way or another. That trust in media is sinking is quite expected and in many cases reasonable too.
We have this issue massively in Australia too - literally almost 100% of the push to implement a social media ban (where ‘social media’ is anything that an unelected bureaucrat called the ‘eSafety commissioner’ feels like, which, for example, wasn’t going to include YouTube until they changed their mind) came from a single Murdoch newspaper campaign. It just wasn’t a thing anybody else was talking about, and then suddenly it was apparently the most important thing the federal Government could be doing that apparently had to be rushed through in about two weeks with almost no oversight (normally here it can take years to get reform that normal people have been long calling for into Parliament) - honestly it was absolutely bizarre.
I have no hesitation saying that the newspaper that pushed it doesn’t give a single damn about the kids - they have a serious hatred of Meta in particular but also Google. The whole thing was concern trolling because they were angry that they are going to get cut off from the last shakedown they lobbied for (called the media bargaining code).
Member states will implement this into national law. So in the case they will need to implement a maximum of one year or more (but not less). The final law as applied by a judge will just read "punishable by a maximum of [i.e.] fourteen months".
It sounds like it's "the maximum penalty must be at least 1 year", as in "your member state can't enact a law where the maximum penalty is less than 1 year".
At least that's how I read it, but it's confusing.
That larger point deserves its own thread. My newest pet peeve is someone jumping into the middle of a conversation with the equivalent of "I don't care about what you're talking about. What I want to talk about is more important".
You might not like this law (and I'm agnostic on it) but I think the principle that individuals should be held accountable when laws are broken is important. Otherwise we just have token fines and corporate non-compliance because the risks don't outweigh the potential financial benefits.
I think people at Experian should have gone to jail, for example, for their incompetence and negligence in regards data breaches.
The person nominated by that company as their age verification guardian? Or the CEO. Or both. The defence for either could be that they took reasonable steps to know what was going on in their companies or were actively mislead.
This isn’t complicated. If it’s the law companies should comply. Fines won’t make a difference to corporate behaviour but this
Might.
I think that person's title is Designated Patsy. If your idea of justice is them finding someone who's willing to gamble that they won't be called out before their term is up in return for fat paychecks until it happens or they can "move on", I don't think we have compatible senses of justice.
>This isn’t complicated.
Not only is it complicated, it is deliberately complicated expressly for the purpose of making it impossible for justice to occur.
Not sure what exact sentence you're thinking of, but I'd have read the same sentence without "or more" to mean "each member's law should have a max sentence be 1 year" (since the context is describing what each member's law should look like).
I don't think their confusion was on how numerical comparisons work, it was on how a "maximum term of imprisonment" could also come with a minimum duration. In other words, what does a "maximum term" mean if it's not the actual longest time someone could be imprisoned for? Are there lesser terms?
Right. The confusion here is that this document isn't setting some maximum term, it's providing a constraints for multiple implementations of the law - it mandates that whatever maximum term any given country chooses, it must be no less than one year.
Yes, I think we all understand this. The thing which is confusing is why bother specifying a minimum length of one year if you're allowed to have lesser sentences?
As a citizen of an EU country, I am really piss* off that the EU Parliament just gets to set the law in all countries. Do we have independent countries anymore? It does not seem that much different between federal government and states. It feels like occupation.
While this is a specifically awful article, for obvious reasons, I find the idea of encoding specifics on carceral terms into any EU-level directive a bizarre overstep.
In principle, not at all. But there is no way to do this properly at all. No matter how secure the companies that do this say it is, it's another possible vulnerability.
You can't play whack a mole with the internet. People will always find a way to move smut or whatever on the internet. It takes no time at all to spin up more and more sites, and there's a million ways around them (vpns, etc).
All it does it just push people to more and more fringe sites, when moderation is likely to be lax and the content more extreme. Ideally it wouldn't be viewed at all, but it's just how the internet is.
It also sets a terrible precedent for censorship- in the UK, we've already seen, on Reddit for example, subreddits dedicated to quitting addictions being age gated, and it'll only get worse.
The European Commission's proposed interim solution for age verification (ageverification.dev) is actually pretty good vs the shitshow of the US and UK.
It works like this:
1. You contact an age verification provider (e.g., national eID schemes, banks, or mobile operators) and provide proof of identity, which they will verify possibly against government databases or whatever, etc. Once they confirm your age they will issue you with a bunch of Age attestations. At this point you don't even know where you will use these, so that info literally cannot be sent to the provider. The attestations are a JWT-like envelope with a payload conceptually equivalent to `{"nonce": "LARGE_RANDOM_HEX_STRING", "age_over_18":true}`, signed with the provider's public key. (The actual implementation is more complex).
2. This is stored in a local app, which will guarantee each attestation only gets used once (to avoid linking user across relying sites). There is no special authentication of the app in the protocol with the replying site, so you can write your own. The Commission provides an open source reference app. There is a standard protocol for communicating with verification providers, however it is not mandatory, so using the reference app might not support all verification providers, but should support a variety.
3. When you want to visit some site needing age verification, and you already have a verified account, you just sign in, otherwise, that site will use a standardized protocol to request proof from the app. The app will provide just the attestation token. The relying site does not get any info about your identity, other than the attestation token. Plus of course, the relying party must accept any age verification provider approved by the commission, not just its preferred one. The EC's solution also supports the app providing the relying site a Zero-Knowledge Proof of having such a token, which makes it possible for the relying site to learn the user's identity even if colluding with the age verification provider.
Try what exactly? Its illegal to stream movies for free, but there are hundreds if not thousands of illegal streaming sites. How would porn access fair any better at being regulated away?
The standard for robust and effective age verification is extremely low, given how I’ve seen anyone do age verification. It’s also pointless if we’re talking about the internet, you are essentially outsourcing your porn production to foreign countries
A little more context: that article 3 paragraph 2.a. was added by parliament (not proposed by the Commission). But paragraph 1 (same article) was altered to this text:
> Member States shall take the necessary measures to ensure that the intentional conduct referred to in paragraphs 2 to 8 is punishable.
(Emphasis being the change.)
So they only mean the intentional act of putting up pornography without age verification? Just feign forgetfulness, I guess. How is a negative act an intentional one? Or moreover; how do you prove it? I know neglect and gross neglect are things, so I assume they mean if you don't do it after being asked to.
The positive intentional act, I guess, is disseminating the material. Proving intent and various ancillary concepts like knowledge, etc, are the bread and butter of prosecutors, so I don't think the act would be as difficult to enforce as you suggest. Sure, there might be corner cases where you can say "oops I forgot to password protect that Dropbox link" but certainly porn websites that don't do age verification will have a hard time arguing their conduct was not intentional.
Which leads to my next questions: What is pornography material? Do drawings qualify? What about text? What about softcore pornography? What about a non-profit outfit? What is the amount of pornography material I need to have for it to be considered disseminating? Someone uploads a few suggestive fan art drawings to my niche bulletin board and now I am liable for a year in jail?
Also, what what methods of sharing? If a 16 year old shares some porn with some friends and it happens to be on a digital system somewhere, can that kids now go to jail for over a year?
Don’t you find it somewhat ironic that you created a throwaway to preserve your privacy in stating this opinion against privacy in browsing?
I agree with you that people should avoid using it, but I agree that the state should but out here. If you want to enforce this sort of thing, make it at the parental level.
You would be naive to think this is after porn, it’s just for public consumption and justification, the whole idea is more control and surveillance, once the infrastructure is there, the laws and resources too, it will be just some quick small amendment to expand it further for something else, that’s how always it works, one step at a time, boil the frog slowly.
Yes. And the next step will be to ensure that these censorship laws can be enforced on international websites which will be a great excuse to firewall international communications.
All developed countries, plus the USA, already do this. They all have international firewalls but they are implemented by pressuring ISPs rather than by forcing all traffic to go through an actual firewall.
What's so bad about it? Production if often unethical and that's a problem but is there more? (and if production was the problem they wouldn't just put an age limit)
And they can be subpoena'd just like every other company. I believe they keep copies of everyone's driver's license so enforcement is trivially straightforward.
Just because it is bad for you doesn't mean it should be illegal, adults should be able to do what they please even if it hurts them.
So this is a pretty practical solution to protect the kids without infringing on adults freedom per se, because even if some adults lose access, as I said, nothing of value is lost.
Until more and more things are deemed as requiring age verification and full ID to access. Always starts with the things that enough people are happy to ban to get people like you onboard, then encroaches until there is full mass surveillance.
We're already seeing the massive over-blocking and encroachment starting, just weeks into the age blocking in UK's Online Safety law coming into effect.
Yeah, I guess it started with alcohol to under 18s? or was it before that with prostitution? or access to brothels? no one is stopping you to go a buy porn or access it.
Please stop this. We don't mind what your opinion is, but you need to express it in a way that avoids attacking other users and perpetuating flamewars. HN is for curious conversation. Pease read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to keep participating here.
After something you don't like gets banned, how will you feel when some type of expression you DO like gets banned? Rock and roll music is next, then any words criticizing the state. As long as you agree with the flavor of fascism its okay, right?
By your logic, any laws that restricts or controls the supply, sale, or advertisement of any kind of material or content to children is against freedom of speech.
Its properly worded, as it is an EU law declaring atandards for national laws and the implementing national law must specify a penalty range where the maximum is at least one year (but can be more).
It seems worded poorly if you think of it as if the phrase was from a criminal law and not a law mandating and setting parameters for criminal laws.
Yeah I think you have it backwards. I don't think anyone has demonstrated any actual harms from porn, but social networks regularly fuck teenagers up.
I definitely would prefer my children to watch porn than get bullied - or worse - on social media.
There's also the fact that I vaguely trust Facebook or Reddit to do a credit card-based age check or whatever. No way I'm giving any of my details to porn sites.
I keep seeing people mentioning credit cards as a mean to verify one's age. My daughter is 11, but she have her own card with her own name since at least one year.
Yes, my bad. It is actually a debit card. She uses it only for roblox right now. My point was to unwrap the secret of where these mystical roblox points came from and also make her feel empowered and independent.
> I don't think anyone has demonstrated any actual harms from porn
That's disingenuous and false. It's pretty common knowledge that pornography is not representative of real relationships, and because it's not actually emotionally satisfying, it takes regular consumers down a rabbit hole of increasingly extreme, vile and obscure content. Take a guess what that does to a developing teenager, essentially being educated by pornography. Not to say that it's not harmful to adults too, because it is.
But yes, government control, censorship and centralization of the internet is not the solution. Mandatory ID checks will not protect any kids, it will destroy the free and open internet.
That's a weird spin on it. Young people are curious. They watch weird porn out of curiosity, the same way they watch gore. Hiding it isn't going to do them any favours. They'll get it from sketchier places instead. I know the generation before mine often went to trashy hookers way underage, with group collected money, to lose their V card, for example.
Where I'm from, it's a pretty common saying that sex is for prestige and a wank is for joy. Of course, a relationship doesn't primarily consist of your stepsister getting stuck in the dryer, running a 10-man train on your loved one, or whatever else. Even kids aren't that stupid.
It can lead to issues with your thing not being attracted to people you don't find attractive, since you're not desperate, but the opposite is, in my opinion, worse. Many good men and women have fallen for dogshit relationships with mediocre sex out of fear of no sex(ual outlet).
> government control, censorship and centralization of the internet is not the solution
Why? Porn in magazine or movie form used to be age-restricted. Assume for a moment that was the correct, or at least a reasonable and permissible policy.
Why should it suddenly not be the appropriate policy, only because it's on the internet? Why do you say that laws do not or should not apply when you sprinkle a bit of "internet" over it?
It reminds me of the crypto-bro argument that, don't know, money laundering and tax evasion and offering securities without appropriate disclosure is illegal and tightly regulated, but if you do it with "blockchain", then it is perfectly fine. What sort of mindset is that?
Its the mindset of neckbeards who don't realize its not the 1990’s anymore, that the landscape has changed significantly and people cannot protect themselves let alone their children from it.
Implementation obviously matters and it is indeed a delicate situation, but that does not negate the need for solutions.
> It's pretty common knowledge that pornography is not representative of real relationships, and because it's not actually emotionally satisfying, it takes regular consumers down a rabbit hole of increasingly extreme, vile and obscure content.
That's not common knowledge or true. Most of the population watches porn. Where's the harm?
> pornography is not representative of real relationships
No shit. Next you'll be telling me that Batman isn't representative of real billionaires.
Love it when you make a statement that porn isnt harmful without referencing any studies, and then demand studies for people to prove it is harmful.
You are the one who made the original claim that its not harmful, the burden of proof is on you.
Their side isn't the one trying to ban things. If you want to ban something you have to prove it's harmful. If you don't want to ban something you just have to call out that the other side has to prove it's harmful before they can ban it. It's like how you don't have to prove your innocence against a criminal conviction, merely provoke reasonable doubt (in theory).
"In talking to the subjects, researchers discovered that high exposure to pornography videos apparently resulted in lower responsivity and an increased need for more extreme, specialized or “k+++y” material to become aroused."[1]
This effect can be clearly seen in that pornography websites promote this extreme, vile and obscure content, such as incest, exhibitionism, and even depictions of non-consensual interaction and physical abuse.[2] Obviously, these matters have no place in a healthy relationship, and it's pretty basic psychology that regular consumption of this content causes the normalization of such practices, especially in impressionable teenagers whom do not yet have legitimate experience in healthy, normal relationships.
A majority of adults watches pornography.[3] And we're dealing with a massive loneliness epidemic under younger generations, together with a significant rise in "hook-up culture" over forming serious relationships. Coincidence?
Regarding [1], the study itself mentions that stopping watching porn reverses the effect. In layman's terms: watch enough of it and the novelty wears off, but the sexual drive returns. Hardly a harm, it's what happens with every human activity.
[2] makes the big logic jump of assuming that someone who watches kinky porn fails to separate between fantasy and reality. It is the same line of reasoning as the disproven "videogames cause violence" paradigm and it is pushed by the same sort of people (personal hypothesis: they might be projecting). This could ironically point to a problem limited to at least some individuals failing to differentiate the two, but studies find that at the population level, a higher availability of porn correlates with lower rates of sexual assault. My personal reading is that it provides a safe outlet for sexual frustration and moderate desensitization reduces the chance that someone will, so to speak, get aroused over an exposed ankle.
On [3]... you're linking to a single data point, not a series nor a correlation; additionally, even if the correlation actually existed held, people's propension to form stable relationships is a preference, not a harm. It is also not related to minors, and it is not something that the state has any business sanctioning, much less with incarceration.
Featuring, and promoting, are different things. There's a big difference between Lolita and CSAM, or between Damals war es Friedrich and Mein Kampf.
But, I care about reality, not moral outrage about taboo violations*, so I'd only advocate "do something about [2]" if I believed [2] actually did contribute to a real problem. Combatting ineffective promotion is not on my priorities list. As far as I can tell, [2] is a real problem: though I'm always open to new evidence. (And when people like me take over the world, and it turns out our interventions don't make the problem go away, I like to think I'd have the integrity to reconsider my views in light of that evidence.)
*: That's not to say I don't feel outrage about taboo violations. Some taboos exist for a reason, even if that reason is not immediately obvious. (Of course, some need discarding with prejudice, but Chesterton's Fence applies.)
Even better, do a Google image search for “porn” and turn off filters. You will see pornography hosted by Google’s servers! I can’t understand why, at least in the spirit of these new laws, Google is exempt from age verification.
(In practice, sections 80 and 81 in the Online Safety Act carve out exemptions for “search” and “user-to-user” sites. For the former, presumably the exemption is because the actual porn is served from machines other than Google’s.)
If the parents want they can restrict their usage. I prefer to monitor and teach my children how to use technology properly, and that also includes of course sex education because it's not by banning porn sites till they are 18+ that you solve the issue to me, but by educating.
Unfortunately we have among sex and other things still the mentality of 1900, except that today most 18 year old already lost their virginity, and he can't watch porn? Well...
> Unfortunately we have among sex and other things still the mentality of 1900, except that today most 18 year old already lost their virginity, and he can't watch porn?
I think there are good arguments for claiming porn is more harmful than actual sex at that age, or at least some types or porn.
I agree that if the aim of the legislation was really to stop kids watching porn it would be better served by making it mandatory for ISPs to provide filtered connections for households with minors and filtered SIM cards for minors.
> I agree that if the aim of the legislation was really to stop kids watching porn it would be better served by making it mandatory for ISPs to provide filtered connections for households with minors and filtered SIM cards for minors.
Without thinking about it too deeply, that does sound reasonable. Was that ever discussed? Why was it not, or was rejected?
It was discussed many years ago. ISPs used to offer it. EE, at least, still offers filtered SIM cards.
Its not in wide use, and I think most people do not know its an option and it has no lobby group pushing for it so I am sure politicians do not know about it.
Most parents do not have the technical skills to effectively limit that usage. The vast majority may not even be aware that software tools and features exist that could limit it. For that matter, I am aware, and the features on most products are insufficient... I shouldn't have to block Youtube at the router-level, but that's about the only thing I can do. Works for the Xbox, which is plugged into ethernet, but it won't work for the iPhone since it just does fallback to cell service. What's to stop the kid from buying some cheap Android device and swapping in their sim, so they can get around Apple's parental controls?
>except that today most 18 year old already lost their virginity,
True when we were kids. But bizarrely less true today.
I agree. If we have to have age verification laws I'd rather they be applied to social media networks over some size than to porn sites.
That said, I think requiring ID is generally a bad idea regardless. Much better would be some standardized way for websites to tag the type of content in a header coupled with third party filtering solutions that could be applied at the network (ie firewall) or device level.
What seem to lack is the will power to use them. Or after seeing in the linked site:
*EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy. You and your family do not. Demand fairness.
they really want mass surveillance for the plebs even by creating a weak point for enemies. To hell not just with rights but also defence. So any excuse will do.
Well don't I feel like an uninformed dumbass. Talk of standards aside, pornhub apparently includes the following header if you visit it.
rating: RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA
RTA stands for "restricted to adults". So the large websites, ie the entities that would actually be bound by any proposed legislation, are already proactively facilitating network operators and parents filtering them out. And apparently have been all along. Wild.
Yes, many sites already have it, RTA is nearly 3 decades old. It seems new proposed laws always ignore such systems are not just a theory but in a reality in use.
What happens over and over only reinforces they idea that they really want "everyone, empty your pockets and show your papers, NOW!" laws and just hide it with "it's the only way, trust us; for the children!". A pretty telling proof is they want to be exempt.
Please don't berate other community members on HN, no matter how right you are or feel you are. HN is for curious conversation, not battle. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines in future.
The full accepted article reads: "Disseminating pornographic content online without putting in place robust and effective age verification tools to effectively prevent children from accessing pornographic content online shall be punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of at least 1 year."
It's not law yet, as the first reading is now sent back to the Council of the European Union, but I don't think it's very likely it will get a second reading.
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-10-2025-011...