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The Spanish government has a plan to prevent kids from watching porn online: Meet the porn passport.
Officially (and drily) called the Digital Wallet Beta (Cartera Digital Beta), the app Madrid unveiled on Monday would allow internet platforms to check whether a prospective smut-watcher is over 18. Porn-viewers will be asked to use the app to verify their age. Once verified, they’ll receive 30 generated “porn credits” with a one-month validity granting them access to adult content. Enthusiasts will be able to request extra credits.
You have to request more porn credits from the government if you need more? Don’t want the government to be tracking this data of you. This is a privacy issue
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Government giving you porn credits sounds hilarious.
This ensures traceability through the public key as content providers will consistently receive the same public key when the credential is presented
What a ridiculous system. For some reason I expected that their efforts to offer an illusion of privacy would be better than the obfuscatory bullshit they’ve leaned on here in order to enable “traceability.”
I hope it goes down so badly in Spain that the rest of Europe is once and for all convinced that such schemes to restrict and monitor the web browsing habits of every citizen are ineffective for their stated purpose, needlessly invasive of privacy and freedom, destructive of democracy, and can serve only as a prelude to totalitarianism.
Having read the actual description of the protocol, such as it is, I should add in the interest of fairness that those "30 generated porn credits” do get you 30 new key pairs each month. They are issued directly by the central authority which knows exactly who they’re issuing them to, and the public key is presented directly to web sites you visit. But they promise not to track how you use them.
That it’s so absurd and poorly designed is reassuring in a way. It’s difficult to imagine anyone using this.
Surely this will work.
I don’t think this is that bad compared to the alternatives I’ve seen (it doesn’t tie your identity to the content you’re viewing, only the use of your credits) but I would be curious to know if the government is also reexamining its sex education curriculum and delivery at the same time. Banning porn won’t magically improve the attitudes of young people (particularly men) towards their sexual partners.
I think this is bad because it doesn’t solve any problems (efficacy of age verification systems is questionable at best) and introduces new problems (token system violates privacy). Censorship under governments creates black markets and reduces privacy at taxpayer expense. If they are concerned about child safety maybe they should start with what studies show are the most effective ways to accomplish that goal as opposed to ineffective, expensive wastes of time.
(it doesn’t tie your identity to the content you’re viewing, only the use of your credits)
The website can’t know this, but the government can easily (and I bet will) link an identity to a token, and know where and when it is used. It can also request metadata on usage of a token, which websites will no doubt want to store.
That the government can track this sort of thing is bad enough, but I’m especially concerned that it or both parties will leak/share/sell their databases, allowing anyone to do the same.
Why do you assume they will? From the design document it sounds like that’s not how it will work. You mentioned data leaks but it sounds like there is no history log to leak.
Hmm. Driving porn viewers who value their privacy underground couldn’t possibly have any negative consequences I can think of.
When you are out of porn credits before the end of the month, you can go to the good ol’ simulator:
Wait, what are the credits for? You spend them to watch porn or what? So when you’re out of credits you’re locked out? Sorry but… wtf?
I wonder if threesomes burn through the credits faster. Group kinks are going to be expensive.
Then again, maybe there’ll be discounts for partial nudity.
And then when it doesn’t work because of the laws of nature, they can block filesharing sites on account of porning kids up without requiring porn credits.
The harder a law is to enforce, the more that law is a boon for an expanding surveillance state.
On behalf of teen me and adult me, fuck off
Aren’t teens adults?
Aren’t hotdogs hamburgers?
This is the one. Right here, officer.
Drake uses an owl for his logo. Are you Drake?
Depends on legislature.
18 year olds and above are considered basically adults in terms of rights in a lot of countries. Technically, they are teenagers, if we refer to the age group 10 to 19 as teens. It’s obvious though that everyone below that “adult-age” limit is not considered an adult.
Usually I think teens are 13+
In Judaism that’s an adult. Also people that age can produce children. I don’t know about other cultures.
To libertarians, yes.
It’s always porn, isn’t it? We don’t need to protect children from misinformation, fascism, violence, racism, discrimination or exploitation on the internet, it’s always just porn for some reason…
Yes, porn and not giving away all of their data to keep them safe
Iirc Spain is one of those countries that makes you install a cert to use some of their government services, which they can then use to MITM all your https connections
remind me never to go to Spain
Yeah this is not true. First the cert is only used on some government sites, no mitm anywhere. Also if you don’t like the cert there are other ways to authenticate yourself, for example using your Id on a electronic reader or normal auth with user name pass and 2fa.
No one expects the Spanish Imposition.
The Spanish Inhibition
Spanish (limited) Exhibition
The Spanish Intermission
The Spanish Invasion (of privacy)?
On the plus side Spains teenagers are about to become extremely computer literate.
In other news, Spain sees a surge in VPN services subscription.
Wouldn’t it be more effective to just grant each user a way to pass verification with age with a token tied to some system and simply use a Ring signature so that user privacy is preserved and no need for limits?
Is “effective” really the word you want to use?
Of course engineers are going to design the simplest system that meets the requirements. It seems like “privacy” wasn’t on the list of requirements here.
I feel like a browser API that just gives info to the site when request of either “is under age, is of age to create an account, is adult” might be an easy way to establish something like this too
This way the site can voluntarily check if they’re illegally collecting data on minors, if they’re showing adult content to adults, and automatically display age appropriate content of applicable
Maybe an NSFW flag as well that sites can check to automatically show/hide NSFW content, for example on work machines or shared computers, but that’s probably getting a little too finegrained
The real question is how is the age flag determined? Is it determined by the browser? The OS? Browser seems the safest bet, since Google can base it off of the Google Account, Microsoft can base it off the Microsoft account and Mozilla can shove it in the settings and potentially base it on the Mozilla account
For those in Spain I suggest protonVpn
So the reason they give you multiple credits instead of just a 30 day cookie when you sign into a website is that it’s anonymised right? You generate them and save them offline and the government doesn’t know which token belongs to who?
