To think face scanning for age verification for porn is a great idea?

[AdamRyan]

The Government are considering how to prevent children from accessing porn and are looking into face scanning technology.

I think this is a good idea as we already use facial recognition for verification on banks etc and if people are adults they should not feel embarassed about their choice to watch porn so no problem.

Privacy campaigners are worried about potential for blackmail though. Wish they were as worried about men illegally uploading films of their OHs having sex with them....

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67615719

IABU - I think porn doesn't need age verification/existing verification is good enough

IANBU - this is a good idea

Not to mention the fact that a side effect is likely to be increasing the risk of children accessing porn as those responsible at the user end think things are safer.

The client-side software runs in your browser, not directly on your operating system. All modern browsers are effectively a virtual machine that can run programs (written in JavaScript). Most websites these days consist mostly of code that runs on your browser rather than static HTML. This is a solved problem.

Not sure about Israel, but with China the whole point is they aren’t able to do it. There’s a nice system where it’s done on paper, companies have access to the market and your average Chinese citizen is happily accessing whatever they want with relative ease.

Which is almost exactly what will happen with ISP or site based controls here. Except I’d imagine most teens will find it easier to access porn than adults.

As stated, someone has said your VPN isn't good, i still watch telly. Well, great, the folks who ban VPN are those involved with far more serious connections - finance, security, etc and they can stop VPNs, it can be done but it is difficult and more costly right now but that doesn't change teh fact now does it?

I'm fully aware of how these things run - I've been a developer for 25 years. The problem is that if it's JS, then it's trivially to decompile it (no matter how obfuscated it is)...and if it can be de-obfuscated that easily, it'll be broken just as easily.

And that's before you get into the problem of trying to do image classification inside a browser; running AI models of the complexity needed to correctly guess somebody's age, securely and reliably, inside a browser just isn't practical on the vast majority of devices.

They could also do this for self-scan alcohol purchases in the supermarket

It's nothing to do with their "far more serious connections". VPN detection is trivial, if the company running the site doesn't want anyone with a VPN to connect to it.

If, however, that company actively does want to allow VPNs to connect, and that company runs their services in another country, then they absolutely won't and nobody will be able to stop people with VPNs connecting to them.

Because, and remember this, it's not the companies who want to stop the VPNs, it's the government. And the government will never be able to outlaw VPNs and other tunnelling services, not least because their own services rely on them, but also because every serious business in the world does.

Honestly.
Google, facebook and amazon know more about you than the government ever will. Its not hard to link Internet activity to a person.

The Internet has moved on a lot since 2010 BTW. I'm not sure ID cards are relevant.

Thank you!

You don't fully sound like you understand VMs though tbh

Maybe you need to read up on cloud computing

I agree OP. I don't watch porn so it doesnt bother me. Might make some men embarrassed? Honestly they're probably better off consuming less porn so everyone's a winner

It gives some people a lot of pleasure and others a lot of money!

Google and Facebook can't impose legal sanctions on you, though. Remember when anti-terror legislation was used for surveillance on a family suspected of the horrific crime of applying for a school place for their child outside their catchment area? That's the problem with allowing the government that kind of capacity; the failures in the enforcement of law scale with the volume of invasive data they're allowed to hold on citizens.

And, of course, there's the security problem; the civil service has a long and documented history of being unable to follow even the most basic security procedures.

Would you want your sex toy purchase history or lingerie purchase history or sex life and preferences put out for all to see? Because that's what could happen with this should a hacker target a site (and they will because hackers gotta hack). You won't be able to hide behind "there are hundreds of Bob Bobbingtons out there it's not me!" Because there's your mug shot plain as day for all to see telling the world you had a wank to some extremely niche, but entirely legal, images/film/whatever the preference.

I don't like porn, I don't use porn, but we will never be rid of it and people are entitled to privacy.

LOL - do tell: what, precisely, is it about the JS VM used in various browsers that makes it particularly well-suited to the task of machine learning for the purposes of facial age determination, then? Hint: it's nothing to do with the fact that it's called a virtual machine...that's just a description of the platform-independent runtime.

JS within a browser is probably the least performant method of executing code on a computer, and this kind of machine-learning model inference with enough parameters to handle facial interpretation with minimal false positives needs a lot more than that to be remotely useful.

Well you probably wouldn't be using Java for AI/ML would you now?
But anyway. Didn't mean to hurt your tech bro feelings. I'm sure you are right, it's impossible to do anything about porn so let's just leave all the filmed rape/violence and degradation of women freely available, including to children.

If you shop online, then Google already has this info.
I'm not ashamed of my sex life, adults have sex. Literally couldn't care less if some hackers found I'd bought a bunny from Love Honey. Knock yourselves out doods!

I don't like cheese so it wouldn't bother me if it stopped existing. And most people would be better off not consuming all that saturated fat and salt anyway. Result! And come to think of it, I don't eat much sugar; I'd have no problem if the government imposed a socking great £50 a kilo tax on sugar, and on added sugar in products. And we could use the income for something I do like! Ooh, and I don't ride a motorbike, so it doesn't bother me if they're made much, much harder to get a licence for. Probably better if fewer people ride noisy two-wheeled death-machines anyway. For their own good, obviously.

It doesn't matter if you personally don't watch porn. Every time we lose some tiny part of what existing rights to privacy and freedom we have, it's extremely hard to ever get back. When the government is granted particular powers, or the ability to control or restrict something, in a way which impinges on everyone in the country, it will affect some more than others — but even if you're barely affected, you can still appreciate that a restriction is being imposed. And it rarely stops at just the one thing you're personally okay with, TBH, because it's so easy for governments to just extend things a little, and a little more, when they've softened us up a bit.

If we're to lose any part of the liberties which are recognised as foundational to a functioning and free society, it had better be for a really fucking good reason. And that includes the requirement that the restriction will actually achieve the thing we're told it will achieve. Which it won't, for all the reasons discussed above.

What does this have to do with Java? It's completely different to JavaSript, they're entirely unrelated apart from the name (JavaScript is just another name for ECMAScript, used to capitalise on the fad of using Java for everything back in the late 90s).

In other words: probably best not to keep trying to use words you don't understand, eh?

There are plenty of things that can be done about the porn industry, but this is absolutely the least practical and effective thing possible - which is why nobody would ever try it unless it was a handy way to get public support for something far more useful.

And...less of the "bro", please, unless you're trying to suggest that tech knowledge is exclusively the male domain.

😂

I think it's a big risk given the ability nowadays to auto match facial photos to your social media. Unscrupulous men could easily cross reference women's faces from LinkedIn against porn data repositories and post them online. I'd wager some men would love to shame female execs by publicly posting their identities alongside their porn preferences.

There are already websites where people track down the Facebook profiles of women from home videos (usually leaked by the boyfriend) and post their identity/Facebook page alongside their sex videos.

It just won't work. You'd jump on a VPN and bypass the facial recognition thing no problem.

A VPN just reroutes you through another IP address though to allow you to circumvent IP bans or access content from another region. You'd still need to log in though, much like when you access your Facebook through someone else's computer.

How many people do you know who log in to porn sites, as opposed to just wandering past watching the free videos?

The region change is important, because I very much doubt any porn sites who decide against their own interests and comply with facial scanning would do so globally.

Apologies! I think I misread your lost - I thought you were suggesting a vpn ban rather than not being able to access a pornsite whilst using one