A Senate bill that would require Canadians to verify their age online before accessing porn is moving through the House of Commons without the support of the Liberal government.
This cannot work safely in the current legal and regulatory environment.
In principle, there seem to be ways to securely, anonymously, and privately handle age verification. To the best of my knowledge, no such system has been deployed or mandated.
Thus, we are left with only the requirement to hand over critical documents to those who have no “standards of care” that make it safe to do so.
Have none of these people ever heard of any company or government agency losing control of personal information? How about they put some effort into fixing that first.
Louisiana’s system sounds pretty sophisticated, although I haven’t looked into the exact implementation. Some sort of cryptographic protocol happens through the porn site between the DMV and your device, which returns a go-ahead or not, and nothing else. The “only” data leaked is your exact porn preferences to the government.
Shockingly, everyone in the state just moved to seedier sites anyway. Who would have thought? /s
Which would be the only reasonable way to do it. Do people actually think they give their drivers license to pornhub? Is it fucking 1988 still?
The letter I’m sending to my MP:
I urge you to fight against this proposal on moral grounds. That might sound like an odd point of view, but hear me out.
One of the greatest challenges facing us with online activities is not what we or our children have access to, but how companies are handling critical permanent identification. Every day there is a new report of some entity that has lost control of information that has a major negative impact on those whose information was exposed.
There are ways to effectively manage such information and there are companies and government departments deploying those systems. However, there is currently no legal or regulatory framework making those systems and methods mandatory. Until that legal and regulatory environment exists, it is not just a bad idea to expand data collection requirements, but immoral.
To be clear, I’m not talking about the possibility that some person is exposed as a consumer of pornography. I’m talking about those whose incompetence and/or low standards of care allow criminals to gain access to the identifying data for use in criminal activity.
I don’t know about you, but the porn industry is the last industry I would ever trust to properly secure and manage identifying information.
Thanks for your time and consideration.
I wrote my MP once in 2021 regarding the reversal of the wholesale broadband rates. Specifically, about how the Vice-Chair of Telecommunications sat down with the President of Bell Media for some beers at a sports game to discuss things after the 2019 court rulings upheld the existing rules set by the Commission.
The result, of course, was a change to the rules.
You’re not going to get a real answer from your MPP, just a staffer tasked with boilerplating out an email that could conceivably be construed as an answer to your question/complaint.
The staffer has two jobs. Their first job is to send a useless mollifying email. Their second job is to make a tally mark next to the words “PORN AGE GATE – OPPOSED”. (Or these days, probably they click a button on a spreadsheet.)
Writing your MP is like voting. It’s useless individually, but in aggregate it will change their behaviour.
Yeah no thanks.
Banning stuff has always worked 👍👍 let’s keep doing it 👍👍👍 surely no minor will be able to access porn after this regulation 👍👍
More seriously though that probably won’t pass because I would imagine if just one of the politicians wanted to see some kinky stuff and it got leaked the party and person would be in for a great time in the news
The fucking NDP supported this bill with the conservatives. There goes any future support I have for them.
My NDP MP is having a community winter party next week. I’ll mention this to him. Something like “I really love the work you’re doing to get healthcare for all Canadians, but I’m deeply troubled that you supported a bill that depends on porn companies to secure people’s personal information. I can’t think of many companies I’d trust less to safeguard Canadians against identity theft. I thought it was below the NDP to stoop to Conservative fear mongering tactics politically.”
