Blocking Pornhub access in Canada an option, owners say. Here’s why
Blocking Pornhub access in Canada an option, owners say. Here’s why
A House of Commons committee is set to study legislation proposed by Independent Sen. Julie Miville-Dechêne that would require Canadians to verify their age to access porn online.
A House of Commons committee is set to study legislation proposed by Independent Sen. Julie Miville-Dechêne that would require Canadians to verify their age to access porn online.
At this point there are people in their forties who had access to online porn as minors. Have any actual studies been done to show that a significant portion of the many, many people who've grown up in the last 20-30 years have been harmed by having access to online porn while they were younger, or are these laws just something that's trendy at the moment?
I'm in my 50's and never had issues finding porn/alcohol/drugs when I was under 18, even though I was in a religious area for part of it.
These people are sniffing glue if they actually think this bill will do anything other than erode privacy.
At best all it will do is lead kids away from normal sites and towards the sketchy parts of the web where things get even weirder.
There's a HUGE lobbying effort to convince the people in power that this is a good idea. Lots of tech-surveillance companies bidding for this to go through, so everyone is forced to use their services. You think identity theft is bad now? Wait until you need to put your ID on the internet and that gets leaked.
If age verification is really the intent then it ought to be possible to develop a service these websites can call into that gives some kind of zero-knowledge age check. The age check service doesn't need to know the identity of the service that's asking, and the requesting service doesn't need to know the identity of the person whose age they're checking. You'd authenticate on a site that only knows someone's doing an age check, and the verifying site would just get a token indicating that the age check was successful.
Am I missing some reason why this wouldn't be possible? It seems to be a problem ripe for zero-knowledge solutions.
If it is possible, there's really no need for an age check requirement to involve disclosing your identity to the site you're visiting, or to disclose your viewing habits to anyone. And if governments or lobbyists are pushing for everyone to upload their full identity to web sites, it suggests either they're ignorant or their motives aren't what they claim.
Equivalent of CRA now or as an implementation that you’re familiar with “sign in with google”
The worry security wise is less about it getting leaked as it is opening a new string of fake websites (because the government data getting leaked/attacked is already an issue)
"Sex harms the youth" has been established lore since the Victorian age, when hiding it in the first place was a new project driven by religious concerns. Nobody questions it because nobody wants to look like a pedophile (which, for the record, are bad).
Harms the youth isn't even the best anti-pornography argument. Sexual exploitation and sex trafficking are concerns. But that's more of an issue with unethical porn (always watch ethically sourced porn folks!)
On the other hand, since the age of internet porn, sexual irresponsibility, teen sex, rape, and divorce have all declined. (Correlation)
as a teen my buddy bought a penthouse collection off of two old ladies at a yardsale. Blocking Pornhub will do nothing unless they also block VPN and TOR use
Remember your high school friend that had porn mags in their locker?
In my fifties, saw porn as a minor. Paper was a thing for the last century, at least!
There are many studies that indicate porn use can negatively affect your brain, sexual performance, and pro-social behaviour.
Porn linked to decreased grey matter
Porn addiction linked to lower executive functioning
Porn linked to negative social behaviour
Meta analysis on research into adolescents porn use discusses a range of negative outcomes such as anxiety, suicidal ideation, social isolation, and academic disengagement
I'm not really sure this law will "solve" the problem, or if it's a good solution to the problem. But there are real, negative outcomes of internet porn
There seems to be a lot of issues with the methodology used in those studies.
For example, "...reported hours of pornography consumption per week....". Hours seems excessive. What's the average duration for all visitors?
And, "Women were excluded from the research, because men more easily encounter such problems due to their frequent contact with pornographic materials.". That's an assumption. Women can also have "frequent contact " with porn, so they should have included women.
And one of them seemed to suggest that men who watched more porn had ED. But maybe men with ED first, have had to use porn to help? Chicken and egg situation.
I'm not defending porn, and I tend to make data driven choices.
But I'm acutely aware that methodology can have averse effects on the conclusion, and I tend to be highly skeptical of studies that appear to manipulate the outcome with their selection bias.
It's the year 2024 and legislators STILL don't understand that the internet doesn't have borders. They can regulate PH because its a Canadian company, but good luck getting every other porn site on the internet to comply
Any law is only as effective as its level of enforcement. I have a hard time understanding how they think they can regulate access to porn on the Internet. If anything, if legitimate, more mainstream sites get more difficult to access, will our youngsters really stop their Google search there, or will they just click on the next link that just won't have age verification, with potentially much "worse" porn than what they'd have watched initially lol? Did any of the countries that implemented age verification already really see any significant impact?
Students figure out how to dodge any website blocking schools put into place. It just takes one kid to figure it out, then it spreads through the whole school, and pretty soon everyone is using a sketchy free VPN that might be doing man-in-the-middle attacks or running a crypto miner or whatever.
The only real solution is parental (and teacher, in the context of schools) training and supervision. Anything else and students will figure out Tor, or VPNs, or private trackers, or pirate streaming sites, or random sketchy websites (depending on what they're trying to block). It's futile, and encourages students to do unsafe things to get around the blocks.
This will be no different. There are hundreds of ways to avoid this. For a high-profile example, see "VPN" search trends in Utah after porn sites geoblocked the state of Utah.
At the same time determining how to regulate goods on a digital marketplace is important to figure out.
Your points are all valid but eventually we’ll need to figure out proper age verification and identification for some things.
Idk if porn is where it needs to start but just because it’s hard and not easy doesn’t mean it will stop.
Regulation invariably always brings “black markets” but it doesn’t mean it’s bad on that alone.
eventually we’ll need to figure out proper age verification and identification for some things
Don't we already have identity verification for many sites where our personal identity matters - banking, government stuff, etc? For the rest, it's like trying to change the color of the sky cause we don't like blue. Short of a fundamental protocol-level change of how the internet works (won't happen any time soon), or adding a centralized level of control like China's Great Firewall and/or forcing ISP-level censorship on top of outlawing VPNs (you'll probably be hard-pressed to make a good argument for this), controlling what one can access on the internet just won't happen.
Also not sure why anyone would think it's a good idea to hand over our personal information to random websites, even if just for "age verification". I can't even trust my bank with my data, giving it to random commercial sites that have all the incentives in the world to track my consumption habits and link them to my personal identity would be utterly idiotic, porn or not. Hell, we're already doing it with Facebook or Google tracking us across the web, now we want to be required by law to give them our ID as well?
It's a typical reactionary play to attack the surface of an issue without addressing the root problem. For this particular issue, blocking porn access on sites that will comply will just make it that they'll find their porn elsewhere, that's all, while ignoring the underlying education issue. It's a smoke show that literally doesn't address anything.
[...] eventually we’ll need to figure out proper age verification and identification for some things.
I don't mean to be a "specifics sam" but why? In nearly every case I can think of legitimately dangerous activities (like buying radium or a gun) already necessarily require the user to have access to a credit card or PayPal. Porn is weird specifically because the vast vast majority of porn is just advertising to find the few whales that spend massive amounts of money on it.
So, like, what's an example of some other kind of content that's free that we don't want children to look at but we're okay with adults looking at?
Key point in my opinion is the definition of « what things » should be so tightly regulated wrt to age for one thing. I doubt access to porn by minors is a proven societal problem and even more so that the proposal to solve via the verification mechanism is proportionate.
This reeks of puritan religious bullshit.
Anecdotally I didn’t turn out to be a psycho as much as my relatives that piously shy away from porn.
So who will be held accountable when fake ID verification pages start coming up everywhere and identity theft becomes even worse?
There's already a website selling Al generated fake IDs for digital age/kyc verification.
Is that not free yet? Huh
It's YOUR FAULT for being an immoral person and trying to access pornography when you should be working and paying taxes. This message brought to you by the federal government of Canada
There is Very Probably No way to get around this kind of thing. You know until GovCan allows Bell and Rogers to filter "hackers" traffic to protect Canadians.
And then you just upgrade your VPN software, and look for sketchier providers. We could switch to an intranet like Cuba, but then our economy might end up like Cuba because it will suck. And I would switch to pirate radio bursts to move content around, so I'm still going to be able to get my scientific papers without buying them. Or porn.
And theyre calling it ArriveCam
They should talk to YouTube to find out how successful their months long efforts to block at blockers have been. This is an effort by pearl clutchers to do the impossible in a domain that they know absolutely nothing about.
They seem to have gone off the deep end. Ban an opensource device that can't even do what they accuse it of doing, this bullshit, what's next, pi is now equal to 3?
People will just use XVideos though.
There is better porn than porn hub on almost every site that offers it. Unless you are a shareholder in porn hub this is a non issue.
Whoosh .