As far as I can tell, adolescent exposure to porn has proved as meaningless as adolescent exposure to violent video games.

It dawned on me the other day that millennial men, being the first generation with access to seemingly unlimited amounts of porn from a young age, are not a bunch of sexually deranged rapists. In the same way we aren't a generation of murderers despite growing up on golden eye and counter strike.

You probably don't want your kids looking at porn, but I also think it's miles (kilometers?) from the point where we want a surveillance state in order to stop it.

Biometrics for age verification sounds awful. Really the problems with any sort of age verification system that uses your real name and ID are leaks, identity theft, and advertising. Imagine your unique ad id is your actual info. Or a leak and your name is tied to pornhub, looking at all the army guys who got exposed on Ashley Madison.

I remember having some sort of parent lock on my laptop I got when I was 11. Was the most annoying thing ever. Stopped me from seeing all sorts of totally useful information so I just hacked around it entirely. Instinctively not very on board with too much internet helicopter parenting.

Whenever this comes up, the focus is on simply opposing the idea. I think perhaps devoting energy to solutions that can address both the concern of safety and privacy is also worth considering.

The internet is going to be a fundamental part of human life I would argue indefinitely. The need for robust information verification is not something we're going to be able to do without.

The question is, would solutions end up being effective ones or ones that "work" but create all sorts of other problems? The worse outcome in my view would be that we all end up being required to use big tech companies as gate keepers for our digital lives.

Now for my pitch :). Cryptographic certificates are a solution option that CAN bridge this gap.

App: https://certisfy.com/

Demo: https://youtu.be/92gu4mxHmTY

Technical Doc: https://cipheredtrust.com/doc/#pki-overview

Between canada and the eu, they're taking away small slices of free internet at a time.. Let's not forget that the wild west internet is why all of us are here..

If it's not a zero knowledge system, it's a bad system. I know i will trigger the ancaps here, but this is typically a case where the government has to be on it, and _has_ to be great.

Like a secret, digital ID that will allow you to generate a code easily (with both an app for the ease of access, and a website where you just have to input your ID and a validation code that change every X years and that you receive with your voter ID or something).

This code is an auth token to an API that will just respond "OK" if the token is a valid token, but should have no idea who issued it.

The advantage is that if you extends it to be send before an online purchase, or to be send SM to limit some features before like, 16 yo, you can make it so that even if the government lies and tries to identify who generated the auth token, if multiple private companies use a third party SaaS to handle it, the government can't know why the token was used.

Sure let’s start with age verification and get the infra and social expectation in place for blacklists on *any* parameter they choose (for the sake of “safety”, of course).

While it's true that there's a correlation between age and maturity in childhood and adolescence, there's also some variability. Nevertheless, the law typically treats age as a proxy for maturity, because it's an objective, easily verifiable trait. If that disadvantages certain children and teens who are mature beyond their physical age, society is mostly OK with that drawback.

Yet over the past several decades, we've seen a change in society attitudes about another personal attribute, sex, which was previously treated as an objective characteristic but is now largely (both socially and in the law) treated as a subjective characteristic, meaning the only way to determine whether someone is male or female is through their own assertion.

I am curious whether we will see a similar shift in attitude toward age. The idea that "age is just a number" and "you're only as old as you feel" has been around forever, but I'd be interested to see if the law codifies that somehow.

Can one verify age without giving away identity?

The bigger concern for me is not the blocking/censorship angle to this bill (though that is a concern), it's the business angle. Jim Balsillie and his business lobby groups are pushing really hard on this because they smell an opportunity.

In Canada we have a hopeless addiction to bad regulations that strangle all the competition out of our markets through regulatory capture and government-created monopolies. Our wireless market is one of the least competitive and most expensive in the world. Our aviation sector is completely dominated by 2 airlines which are barely competitive at all. Our news media marketplace was recently devastated by Bill C-18 (the Online News Act), another ham-fisted cash grab designed to enrich the big Canadian media companies (PostMedia, Bell GlobeMedia, Rogers Media) which backfired and destroyed a lot of Canadian independent media outlets.

I think this bill, should it pass, will lead to the creation of another regulatory-enforced monopoly. Honestly, it feels like Canada is falling into some kind of neo-feudalism with all this nonsense.

Centralization like this is an unacceptable single point-of-failure, and a dangerous risk for a single point-of-capture.

The solution is technology coming loaded with the tools and features that make it easy for parents to monitor and regulate what their children see - and not by fear mongering by a government-state looking to have their fingers and eyes on everyone, integrated fully into our information channels.

Reminder that Trudeau has said on video that he admires China's - the CCP's dictatorship. Take that for what you will.

THB, these bills seems more interested in figuring out our interests more than actually keeping the young's away from porn!

Fyi, Canada has a history of leading change in internet standards (Facebook, 2008). Governments around the world are looking for solutions. When Canada gets a reasonable standard out first, its broad principals tend to be adopted by the larger countries/alliances that generally move more slowly.

As requested below:

https://www.cippic.ca/articles/facebook-may-2008-2010

https://www.denverpost.com/2008/05/31/canada-begins-investig...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/facebook-to-address-canadian...

To state the obvious: If you go there (or require diplomas and/or licenses to access material) the requirements won't be static enough to rule out obvious stupid shit being included.

My loose train of thought:

0: I have not seen any data to show this would work. Kids would just buy and sell usb sticks filled with porn.

1: Life is already good in Canada, except for the housing situation and low wages.

2: People have a need to feel special and politicians are people.

3: Some people meet their need to feel special by changing their surroundings.

4: Since Canada is already good, except for wages and housing, and politicians can't figure out a way to fix that, they're meeting their need to feel special by being controversial.

5: Debating controversial subjects makes politicians feel special and important.

Conclusion: The root cause of this is narcissism.

To me (a Canadian), there's been an implicit shift in the base expectation of privacy over the years — one might call this an "erosion of our un-formalized, but natural, right to privacy."

I don't think this is anything in the cultural zeitgeist. There's been no shift in the desire for privacy; the public hasn't become more concerned over time with snooping on their neighbours. We've just gradually had the privacy we wanted taken away. This is something the state has been doing to us, through the passage of law.

But, crucially, I also don't think that this has been the plan of any particular political party. "Eroding privacy" isn't on any party's platform; nor even is any benefit to which "eroding privacy" is the cost. This is not the effect of partisan politics. Privacy erosion has been happening just the same no matter who's been in charge.

Rather, I think what's been happening to privacy, has been happening almost by accident, by an inherent flaw in the "internal architecture" of our informal political institutions — not the executive/judiciary/etc, but the political parties, the "deep state", and so forth. This is what I think is happening:

• Politicians are in some ways "public figures" and have no privacy; but in other ways have already had their lives engineered systematically to ensure their privacy (coincidentally, in the name of national security) — down to being told what apps they can and can't install, using special secure phones, having meetings in special secure rooms, being driven around in the back of sound-proofed limousines, etc. Politicians have an entirely out-of-whack experience of "privacy" compared to anyone else, and so don't really understand that "privacy" is, for the average citizen, something maintained these days mostly by making market purchasing choices to use "privacy-preserving" technologies instead of "privacy-violating" ones; and that the existence of these privacy-preserving technology products/services are not enshrined in law, and can easily be annihilated by accident by bills that seek to do something else (e.g. protect children.)

• Along with this, those in the "deep state" that politicians speak to about technology and privacy issues, are themselves in the strange position of having been thoroughly picked over (security-cleared) as having absolutely nothing interesting about them that they would need to keep private. Departments entirely composed of such individuals, will have extremely skewed views on the need for privacy. (Thus why such departments elsewhere, had no internal revulsion to implementing e.g. PRISM — nobody in the room had anything to hide that PRISM would expose!)

• And also, the political parties, the "deep state", and any associated parts of government (e.g. an appointed judiciary) are all generally seniority-based systems. Which means that, inevitably, the people at the top who make most of the long-term decisions and "steer the ship" (not the Prime Minister, nor the MPs — but rather, party leaders, and the long-serving heads of departments working directly below cabinet ministers, etc) are all quite old. These "old hands" generally no longer attempt to keep up with the rapid pace of technological progress, and have fallen far-enough behind the curve that they have no sense for the current technological landscape having a major dividing axis of "privacy-violating" or "privacy-preserving" that a citizen might feel the need to care about. Instead, these "old hands" just feel a kind of Amish-like hesitance toward all technology — fear for what technology could do/enable. They hear reports from citizens about what some (usually privacy-violating) technologies have done; and rather than this moving them to opinions regarding privacy, this instead reinforces their beliefs about technology itself as being a modern boogeyman — with technology companies not serving the public good, and therefore technology-sector lobbyists and their pet issues being actively deprioritized vs other lobbies (esp in this case: the crime-reduction lobby.) Which means that these "old hands" are tuning out the words of Google and Meta (probably for the best!) but also tuning out the words of the EFF (very bad!)

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I'm sorry to say that I personally have no suggestions for what to do about any of these effects. They seem pretty inherent in the design of the informal institutions themselves.

We could perhaps formalize these institutions, such that they could be regulated? Reify "political parties" and "executive departments" as their own concepts in law, and legislate their leadership structure and selection processes, to prevent them from defaulting to seniority? But I feel like this would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater — there's a lot we gain by having short-serving elected politicians (who can say what the public wants these days), working together with long-serving public servants and appointees (who have seen all this before, and can keep long-term-project balls in the air.)

It seems somewhat obvious to me that even doing nothing, generational shift will help. Once the leaders of these institutions pass on, and are replaced by leaders who grew up in the current technological milieu, a concern for privacy might arise, with the government then seeking to backpedal on the erosion of privacy that has come before. This might take another 30 years, though. And although they'll then be conscious of privacy, something else — something that is only coming into the public consciousness as an issue today, and which likewise won't have an effect on the political class — will likely be left to erode in its place, due to those politicians having no foundational experience with it.

An entire generation learning how to bypass dumb restrictions sounds like a good thing, the youth need to learn how to use a computer. I support this.

Honestly, Bill C-63 is a bigger worry atm.

Where are all the Blockchain peeps at? That should be right down their alley... Oh wait maybe not enough surveillance potential or just straight up doesn't work

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So many people will put up with the most heinous and blatant rights violations in the name of safety or health but as soon as you start making it more difficult to get unlimited free pornography, that's when it suddenly becomes a problem.

Canada is turning into Totalitarian state with no freedoms or ability for privacy. As an expat I’m really sad to see how spineless my fellow Canadians are at standing up to Justin Trudeau and his fascism. I admired the truckers but the fact Trudeau used the War Measures Act or whatever it’s called now to trample their freedoms makes me sick. The fact a tribunal said they were wrong to use it is cold comfort years after the fact and no one was held accountable.

I’m anxious for Polivore but worries he will be exactly the same instead of rolling back the policies Trudeau put in place.