I remember kids in hs saying they were using VPN to bypass stuff.

You do it when they are cooking. To focused on not burning food or on toilet!

Haha dude what are you talking about? Parents not knowing this shit it how we got here. Parents are so exhausted from working they are not thinking about this stuff.

Yep. Corporeal punishment doesn't make good kids; it makes good liars and sneaks.

Conspiracy brain.

Read the debate about age-verification in the places where it's been implemented.

IF they find out.

My mom kept her purse by the door, mostly, not in her bedroom. If age verification had been an issue, I would have sneaked downstairs at night, slipped out her DL, taken a photo, and registered on whatever sites I needed.

If they sent some sort of verification to her email, I'd just log in, answer it, and delete the email. Of course I know her passwords, I showed her how to do it, and I'm always fixing some dumb thing she did.

Any kid is going to figure this out faster than me.

I still don't trust any of my relatives enough to open up properly. It eventually gets used against me in an argument anyway.

But what if the age verification system asks for your video verification + legal documentation? Like many platforms do these days? They need you to frame up your face in on-screen cutout and then provide your documents, then it goes through a review process.

100% this.

There's a smart mart where I grew up that was built in the late 90s.
https://www.yelp.com/biz/smartmart-memphis-2

Basically what it sounds like. A fully automated neighborhood convenience store before automation was really a common thing. Actually very similar in appearance and function to the automated Carl's JR. in Idiocracy.

When I was in highschool my friend's mom used to just give her ID and send her down to the smart mart to "buy my smokes." That was 20 years ago, but I'm really not sure how tf it would be any different with this tech?

I think they even had some kind of early frt that was supposed to scan the face of the purchaser and match it to the id. Funny thing about genetics, you often share similar facial features with the person who gave birth to you.

Also, this is a bit of a tangential point, but even if you weren't trying to "abuse" the automated system's safety features, there were still unintentional glitches that resulted in kids being exposed to things they weren't supposed to be exposed to. Like when I was 16, I was bored and went to smart mart one night to get a drink. Somehow ended up receiving a free pack of zigzags with my Yoohoo.

The network state tech already glitches all the fucking time. They've repeatedly exposed sensitive government data and put all of us at risk of identity theft while claiming to have some kind of technocratic elite status that makes them qualified to lead America and do the stupid shit they keep on doing. This age verification bullshit is just the latest very poorly disguised invasion of privacy in the name of safety, and it is so fucking obvious nothing good will come of this.

In reality, they don't know wtf they're doing other than gaining more control that will enable further exploitation. And it's not even like we have a say in whether we choose to use the enshitified tech. They're forcing it on us. Idiocracy has become mandatory reality thanks to the nanny network state full of "libertarians" who despise regulations, until it comes to regulating the private lives of citizens.

Since it's their shitty private monopoly being shoved down our throats, still paid for with our tax dollars but not government run in the traditional sense, it can't possibly be oppression, and we should thank these technocratic experts for steering us into the fucking ground.

And that's not even taking into consideration how creepy and concerning it should be to anyone with two fucking brain cells, that we're obviously enabling a network of wealthy pedophiles, (who have repeatedly proved themselves to be above justice), to have the ability to just create a database of children across the U.S. that they will then be able to track and locate every time they use a device or walk past a surveillance camera with live FRT. What a fucking nightmare.

Sounds like Shawshank Redemption.

excuse me i have a little class i'm using norman reedus and death stranding

No arguments from me there. I was saying when I was a kid if I had done something like that (and got caught) it wouldn't have been a gentle, loving conversation about why it was wrong I'd have gotten. I certainly wasn't advocating it.

Thank-you, you put it into words much better than I could.

No it isn't. No Labour MP (for example) put forward that argument in favour of it when it was implemented in the UK. The law in the UK is popular, because porn use among children is seen as a problem.

Corporeal punishment

What about spiritual punishment?

This is what they are OK with. As long as responsibility is out of their hands in any legal sense instead of actual solutions that don't undermine privacy. They are OK with it.

Imagine Keir Stamer telling the whole truth …

I understand this argument with US politicians, and especially the Republicans, who can all be assumed to be in the pocket of big business, but I don't think you've gone through any of the UK politicians in support of this to see what their business connections are, never mind the majority of them. For example, pulling the first MP I found speaking in favour of age verification on Hansard, what makes you think Iqbal Mohamed is in this for the benefit of data brokers? (He's not a Labour MP, I should say) Have you ever heard of him before today? What about Lewis Atkinson, who also supports age verification? His job before politics was in the NHS.

There is this extreme cognitive dissonance about this debate, where people are unable to deny the obvious truth that, unlike us, most people are in favour of age-verification regulations, yet insist that this simply does not feature in the motivations of politicians in implementing such regulations.

I'm not a troll. I'm not naïve. But I am also not so idiotically cynical as to believe that the motivations of politicians are wholly based on servitude to business, wholly divorced from the motivations of the general public even when those motivations align.

It's not even this. It never had anything to do with responsibility, or child safety, etc. It has everything to do with tracking users which makes collected information more valuable to data brokers. Secondly, it let's them justify advertisement fees in the age where where some traffic is from AI agents.

The law does nothing but push adults and underage users to unregulated platforms. They (the general public and the politicians) don't understand the internet. You don't understand the internet if you think this accomplishes anything. The only way for children to be safe on the internet is by educating their parents.

I think their motivations do matter. In part because they're the motivations of the general public in support of this, so it is those opinions that need to be swayed.

The strategy is completely different if this came about due to payoffs by big tech versus if it has real grassroots support!

This is binary thinking and is false. The law does do something by putting up an obstacle to seeing porn. Hundreds of thousands of children are seeing porn by accident, way before they are ready, not because they're horny little teenagers. Yes, those who are highly motivated will find it, but you should not be this absolute.

The cost of this law in privacy violation is not worth the benefit it brings to children. But it still does bring a benefit, and you're unlikely to convince anyone if you can't see where they're coming from on that.

it still does bring a benefit

If you think it's a benefit, pushing everyone to use less moderated platforms then sure. You clearly don't understand the internet. If you click a link and are exprected to show a video with your ID and face visible, what do you do? I say it is extremely dangerous and criminal for a government to demand this from their citizens. So many people will have their identity stolen, I guarantee it, it's already happening and will get much worse. https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/25-percent-of-kids-will-face-identity-theft-before-turning-18-age-verification-laws-will-make-this-worse/

This isn't really about the internet; it's about human psychology. If you make something more difficult, fewer people will do it. Especially people who are doing it by accident. Kids aren't going out and accidentally downloading a VPN client.

I made it clear that I don't think it's a benefit overall

If you click a link and are exprected to show a video with your ID and face visible, what do you do? I say it is extremely dangerous and criminal for a government to demand this from their citizens.

Ever applied for a bank account online? I am certainly used to handing over identifiable information. I do it carefully.

If you make something more difficult, fewer people will do it.

Yes, this is the Chilling effect, and it's not a good thing.
You don't need a VPN to watch porn online without ID verification, not even in the UK. I'm sure the great UK firewall will come eventually tho.

Ever applied for a bank account online?

Yes, I went to my local post office and showed them my ID, I'd never send my ID and face over video. This applies only to banks, what if a porn site asks you (and you want to visit it)? If you don't want to do it, your freedom is taken away from you.

Chilling effect has a different connotation. This is a directly desired effect.

Do you disagree that it's harmful for young children to see pornography and the distorted view it presents of sex and especially of women? If it were just a question of chilling adults who want to look at porn, rather than of privacy violation, it'd be an acceptable price to pay. For example, if they used zero-knowledge proofs, that'd be completely fine.

I, as an adult who wants to visit a site, circumvent such a requirement. As a child who does not, I obviously would not.

circumvent such requirement

Yes, and you'd probably do this by using unregulated sites, like many impacted by the UK law https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/unregulated-sites-porn-uk-age-verification-b2895231.html

A child with unregulated access to the internet will always see content not appropriate for them. Personally i'm much more concerned about violent and morbid content than porn. You'd never see that censored because it's part of the news and plastered all over the internet.

In the US, politicians are rarely in on the schemes themselves, they get money more indirectly from lobbyists, superPACs, or insider trading. Are politicians in the UK not able to profit from their votes?

Always? Bullshit.

There's the black and white thinking again. How often have you ended up looking at an unregulated adult site by accident? How much effort have you had to put in to find them over finding regulated ones?

Even among adults the substitution isn't perfect, as the article says. Even more so for children, who aren't, on average, as motivated nor as knowledgeable.

It is far more difficult. Campaign finance is far more restricted, and it's in the news if the regulator finds someone broke the rules.

The biggest problem is the revolving door, as it's hard to prove. That definitely still exists, but you can see by where politicians do end up after political life that most are not in such a scheme.

As in the US, direct money for votes schemes basically don't happen as they're too easy to detect and too obviously corrupt even to the morons in the party base. There have been some recent scandals about people being paid to give speeches on certain topics. Notably, these have all been right wing politicians, but the online safety act has cross-party support.