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

I think credit card sign in is better

Never underestimate people’s ingenuity when it comes to accessing porn.

I’m not a techbro, but everyone arguing about how the current technology could or couldn’t stop access is wasting your breath…err keyboard strokes. The minute one door is closed someone will find a window. And nobody puttering around MN has that answer.

I don't know much about computers yet I seem to be able to beat the entirety of the very smart computer people at YouTube and Google to get round their adblock ban

I'm sure it would be easy enough to get round your crappy idea too.

Use a little bit of critical thinking, please. Here, I'll help you...

Whether it works or not, the government proclaims it a fantastic success, and says that it's now going to require it for other age-gated services - probably starting with gambling, "to save the children", along with a glut of headlines about how online gambling is a scourge amongst the young. Again, just like porn, Mumsnet and similar sites will erupt with support for this fantastic measure. They change the to let them hang on to the identity data "for security purposes only", requiring a warrant.

Then..."social media is harming our children!", they bring in laws to prevent anyone under 16 accessing social media, and...oh look, we've got this great way to verify people's ages, facial scanning! Now, the #1 primary use of the Internet amongst 16-24s also requires facial scanning, fully supported by sites like this because "save the children!". At the same time, they require a legal licence for the distribution of VPN software, and require all VPN providers to log and track site access against users with the same justification, and they have to report all users' traffic habits to the government.

Quietly, in the background, they slip a change to allow "limited sharing of identity data amongst government departments and secure partners" into an unrelated law (that kind of wording already exists in the statutes for identity data, by the way, but they have no way to collect it at scale). Now they have linked identity data on the majority of UK citizens in that age bracket, which (over time) will increase to cover the majority of the entire population, forever.

Now, since most people have got used to the idea, they add it to the authentication process for accessing government services online as a convenience measure, optional at first and then mandatory after a few years.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you go about removing an entire country's privacy and anonymity on the Internet.

Don't believe it could happen like that, because people aren't stupid enough? Look at Brexit - sold to the public (successfully) as a way to stop the immigration problem and our flagging economy, both of which have only got worse (with no improvement in sight) and turned out to be a massive act of national self-harm which is still supported by huge numbers of the population despite delivering none of the supposed benefits 7 years down the line.

Any person who thinks that anyone under 70 will not bypass this is naive and tech knowledge poor in the extreme. Doesn’t matter what your views are, it won’t work for the purpose it’s intended.

It is absolutely certain that there will always be a demand for and supply of porn, and even if no more was made there is almost infinite amounts already out there on hard drives and servers all across the world.

Given an 11 year old can make (illegal) porn using their own phone, and USB sticks exist to share porn even if the internet stopped working later today and was never restarted, this porn will always be distributed.

Weed and dodgy football streams are ubiquitous, and stopping physical things or a particular live match being shown live must be MASSIVELY EASIER than stopping all porn.

In my view it has to be all about the twin policies of monitoring kids access to the net, and making it absolutely clear to your 13 year old daughter that being fucked hard and fast from behind whilst being choked is NOT NORMAL, and that she NEEDS to make damn sure that before consenting to sex she knows that her potential partner also knows the same thing.

No-one wants to talk the birds and the bees with their kids, let alone go into detail about violent porn sex vs a gentle loving sensual and sexual relationship and how women reach orgasm... but sorry... there are far too many people on this thread willing to throw away our freedoms FOR ABSOLUTELY NO BENEFIT AT ALL, all to save themselves from having awkward conversations with their children.

But we havn't tackled pirating of films and illegal watching of football have we??

My son can watch any televised match by using a vpn and knowing which websites are showing which match. It's easy to google for them!

Same with films, concerts, etc. A few clicks and a bit of googling and you can watch whatever you want to watch.

There are people live-streaming live events from their own phones/webcams which others can readily and easily watch.

Teens know all this from their school friends, they pass around website links, etc.

How? Drugs are illegal but very widespread and easy to buy. Selling duty free booze and fags is illegal, but very widespread and easy to find. Before we start making more and more things illegal, we really need to think about how we're going to properly enforce the laws. Having laws that we don't enforce makes things worse as it sends a message that laws don't matter, which encourages more criminal behaviour in other ways too.

You think that anal sex is violence? Lots of people have anal sex, including gay men. How is it misogynistic?

I'm not familiar with the most popular forms of online pornography, I've looked at Japanese more than American. In Japanese videos there isn't a lot of anal or DP. There is a lot of 'bukkake' though, but it doesn't hurt them and it's not done out of hatred. So I don't know why you would call it violence or misogyny.

Not 100% sure what is the answer, don't think facial recognition is, and given VPNs etc credit card details I assume can be bypassed. Though making it a bit more difficult to access is a small step.

When I read about it, I just thought, thank God for that.
Young boys don’t need to be looking at vile stuff like that and then think that it is normal sex.
I hate everything about it….

Age gating is already used for gambling.

And it is also required under data protection rules (the Children's Code)

And video sharing platforms.

It's not new.

Our civil liberties have not crumbled.

Oh and government websites already share data eg when you renew your passport they use your driving licence data and vice versa.

Nobody cares if the under 70s circumvent it.

The idea is to prevent under 18s circumventing it.

Under 18's WILL circumvent it - the way to do that will be well known in the school yard and the kids will just tell each other and ping links etc to each other. In just the same way that they passed mucky magazines around the playground in the 70s, 80s and 90s!

Age gating for gambling is easy, because that's a regulated industry already, and everybody who uses a gambling site is going to be handing over their card and personal details so they can get paid anyway. The site in question has a vested interest in complying with the law, because it means more money. However, there are lots of foreign sites accessible from the UK which have no such requirements; in fact, a number of online casinos moved offshore precisely to avoid it.

Video sharing platforms like YouTube and Vimeo only ask for your DOB, they have no identity verification.

Contrast that with porn sites, which have a vested interest in not complying with this proposed legislation, because it will reduce their traffic. Therefore the most obvious solution is to move the company (and hosting, if need be) offshore and leave a landing page for UK visitors with instructions for installing a VPN on a variety of devices. Job done, billions spent on software and legislation by the government for precisely zero gain.

And the next step is...

Read that back to yourself.

I have a friend works for TikTok doing this. AI flags questionable face recognition for a human to check. It's unreliable at best. Not remotely defending porn of any sort. But this just strikes me as more government vote-grabbing headlines for stuff that will not work.

I think face and I'd verification for age like with banks is completely a good idea for porn websites. I think the black mailing argument is rediculous. Blackmailing for what? That you look at porn? So do a huge chunk of people, it's pretty normal on society, if you are so scared about people knowing you look at porn maybe don't look at it?

Apart from any other concern around privacy and getting around this using VPNs, presumably if the check is made on a picture of a face taken by a webcam, what's to stop someone just, y'know, printing off the face of an adult and holding that up to a webcam?

The idea is completely unworkable. The answer to this problem is the same as it's always been - proper parenting.

I really think it's up to parents to supervise their kids, not the world to become child friendly. Just another way in which parents want the government to parent their children for them.

Even if such a requirement would work perfectly and pose no broader concerns (a dubious presumption but parking that one), what if the situation changes? If you legislate requiring age verification specifically through facial recognition and e.g. technology shifts in a way which renders the verification pointless later then you are stuck with a completely ineffective law on the books which might take years to fix.

You just don't put such granular requirements in legislation.

Aside from the fact that it's completely unworkable...ever heard of this little thing called "privacy"?

Your argument is awfully close to "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" - and Blair's government put that one to bed quite soundly. This government is worse, and the next Labour government will be worse than that.

I think you over estimate how smart under 18s are. When I was under 18 I didn't know how to do things that were "techie" in the day like program the video recorder or transmit a pirate radio station. If they access bad things you can just turn the wifi off nowadays problem solved

If you turn off the wi fi they can use mobile data or simply look over their friends shoulder to look at their porn which their friends' parents haven't monitored. My son is much better at operating our (complicated) TV setup than we are, and he also knows a bit about coding, which we don't. He is a few years off teenage-hood and I suspect he is more representative of todays kids than your historic experience is.

I firmly believe that privacy matters and we need to resist china-style authoritarianism (which doesn't even work according to people upthread). I firmly believe that stopping porn is IMPOSSIBLE, COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE, AND it is ALL about doing what we can to minimize the massive harms it can do.

They don't all have to be smart. They just need one smart kid in their year to figure it out and tell everyone the easy way to do it.

As for turning the wifi off...yeah, that's not going to do it for obvious reasons. If the house is luddite enough to think that's going to work, then most kids will know how to set up an alternate network even if their cellular data doesn't do it. And if they haven't got a clue how to do that, downloading while they're out (or on another network) so they can look at it later isn't exactly a difficult job either.