These laws are designed to harm children
Blocking Access to Harmful Content Will Not Protect Children Online, No Matter How Many Times UK Politicians Say So
Submitted 4 days ago by schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de to technology@beehaw.org
Comments
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 4 days ago
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 4 days ago
How would they harm children exactly?
AceFuzzLord@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
Imagine you’re a teen dealing with a serious parental abuse issue. You don’t wanna give that info up to just anyone, so you rely on forums for people that are having or have had the same type of problem. Suddenly, under the new law, you are either geoblocked from the site entirely or you must provide some form of age verification.
Your options are either get a VPN ( which could very well be being blocked soon enough ) or you could find a free speech forum on the edge of the web that doesn’t require any of that. For people with even just slightly above average tech skills, a VPN wouldn’t be that hard to get.
For the forum, I can guarantee there are gonna be people looking to make you feel welcome, only to suddenly change once you’re comfortable and start demanding illicit content. Although this probably happens a lot on big platforms like ex-twitter, you have more options to deal with the people on there. The admins/mods of free speech sites probably aren’t gonna care as much if you’re getting abused on their free speech for all forums, so long as you don’t report their site to the government.
If neither of those are a good enough answer, imagine any company responsible for all the age verification stuff. Imagine they keep all the info they collect, whether that’s the verification for adults or minors. You know they aren’t getting rid of that data because it’s worth more kept and constantly being sold than if it was being deleted. What would happen if their repository of age verification data got hacked? A matter of when, not if, they get hacked, and suddenly every single person who submitted an ID, including the IDs of minors, gets stolen and suddenly any minor in their database is now a very likely victim of ID theft and fraud before they’re even considered a legal adult.
TehPers@beehaw.org 4 days ago
One way that comes to mind is encouraging the use of either sketchy sites that don’t verify, or potentially sketchy sites to download VPNs (there are good VPNs but finding them might prove difficult for a non-techy child).
The main question I’d have isn’t whether these laws harm children, but whether they do anything to “protect” children. It seems to me like the obvious answer would be no?
displaced_city_mouse@midwest.social 3 days ago
There’s a similar bill working it’s way through the Senate here in the US.
The Kid’s Online Safety Act has the same problems as the one in the UK, and people here like the EFF have been sounding the alarm. I’ve written to my Congresscritter about it, but sadly, they’re a bloody co-sponsor of the bill. Like the article said, they think the internet is made up of Facebook and Google, and they’re ignoring the impact it will have on the small players, like Lemmy server operators.
In this case, I don’t think just a VPN will help – I think Tor might, as long as the small operators don’t mind being borderline outlaws.
Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org 3 days ago
The Patriot Act wasn’t enough already?
Good grief. It makes me sad that the internet is becoming a major source for data harvesting. It goes against what I think it should be about. Free, open, knowledge sharing.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
Yes. People interested in news about that should consider subscribing to bad_internet_bills@lemmy.sdf.org where I regularly post news articles I can find about it. I don’t always crosspost them here.