Comment by Grimeton
8 hours ago
>The analysis finds that age verification laws have serious human rights implications and ironically harm the very individuals they deem to protect.
I wonder how expensive the mental gymnastics are that bring you from "no access to pr0n for kids is good" to "no access to pr0n for kids harms them".
Or the line:
>Unfortunately, age verification systems foster unequal access to information and provide an asymmetric solution to find essential information, build community, and weigh in on public discourse. As governments and companies increasingly require users to prove their age before accessing online services, these individuals risk being excluded from large parts of the internet altogether.
Yeah, that's the whole purpose. You're under the age of 18, no pr0n information for you.
Nobody said no access to porn harms children. They said that mandatory age verification, primarily but not exclusively targeting porn, has side effects that harm children, which is honestly very predictable.
Go look at some of these laws around the world, or especially the proposals that didn't make it through the first round and their proponents are trying again. It's never just porn.
Anyone under 18-years-old cannot enter into a legally binding contract, so ISPs don't sell services to them. The adults providing internet access to minors are responsible for keeping them from accessing sites inappropriate for minors, and there's plenty of tools available to do so. There's no benefit to tracking users' identities.
> There's no benefit to tracking users' identities.
There's a good thread that's aligned to this going on right now about an open source voting system [0].
While there's benefit in the political sphere in tracking user identities and the underlying results, wouldn't the question here be: Is there any benefit in validating users' identities?
0 Source code of the Estonian online voting system (github.com/valimised) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50127586
Porn sites can be predatory to their adult users; that is all that needs to be said about why ID verification, run by porn sites, is a bad idea.
Or to put it another way, for someone who is apparently so hip to the creeps that run porn sites, you sure do like to trust them with IDs and face scans.
BEHOLD! A strawman!
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