See, there are a few ways this could go.

1. Age verification is as secure and private as promised, and it's left at that. I like to call this "the miracle", and we all know those don't happen.

2. Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but a government asks for "access to data to prevent crime" - things degenerate from there. This is the "systemic failure" scenario.

3. Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but new scams evolve around it to make it dangerous. This would be the "criminal element" scenario.

4. Age verification is not as secure and private as promised, and a leak occurs destroying lives and careers. This is the "system failure" scenario.

5. Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but a few companies start scraping and selling data, leading to widespread harms. This is the "unethical merchant" scenario, and the most likely outcome.

All in all, there is only one "ok" scenario, and a lot of horrific ones. The math says we're entirely boned ^_^

SMH

Fine, changed the search term to "sex." Fewer letters in fact. I was trying to just provide a subtle example, I didn't expect people to need to be hit over the head with it.

So you love the idea of young children seeing porn? Because studies and surveys routinely find that kids as young as 7 are seeing porn online, and many under age 12. Really? You think that's perfectly fine for a 12, 10, or 7 year old with granma's iPad doing an image search and getting even accidental porn?

And hey, I spent my teen years scouring the earth for playboys and staying up until 3 am to catch boobs in R rated movies. I get it. I'm not saying that any system or method will prevent anyome from seeing all adult content their whole life short of being Amish. But as a tender 13 year old, did I need to see all the porn in the universe? Probably not. Adding friction (pun not intended) to general access, without violating privacy, is all I'm saying might be a good idea.

That’s a kinda not true tho. There is a fuck ton of cp on the clear web. The only thing I can say, is that Twitter used to have a lot of spam posts with links to cp.

You don't use the internet on a laptop?

Anything you can do on a smartphone that would require Internet would also require Internet on a laptop no?

I suppose you could download offline installers to a thumb drive at the library or smth

Nah 7 year olds should not be using any internet without parental controls either way so the protection is absolutely moot here. Also your "sex" example returns absolutely zero sexual content on google, Bing or duckduckgo images while boob does.

Also tbh I'm not particularly convinced that seeing porn is all that damaging. Doing quick research it seems that there are no proven damages or development impacts and real actual danger of porn is teaching teens and young adults distorted views of sex and gender roles. Seems like kids in your example aren't even capable of such frameworks to begin with.

So despite how nasty it sounds there's no convincing evidence that its even a real danger. In fact, it seems like exposure to violent images like gore and freak accidents thats having real damage.

If you have some oposing evidence I'd gladly take a look but I'm really unconvinced here that googling boob could be in any way detrimental.

We would need politicians to be the victims. Then these fascist laws will suddenly be cancelled.

Sucks, because it's going global and we can't seem to stop it. I'm fine with laws to age gate in terms of a button you click. If some kid is willing to say they're 15... well, let's make sure people are treating them as a 15 year old. But... making everyone deal with real verification is at best going to further entrench big business, and at worst, destroy the internet we love. And it raises the question: are trans teenagers talking to each other now creating adult content because the UK hates trans people?

how do you know it's going to be global?

For porn and games etc. that should be enough yes, but for online gambling, opening stock market accounts etc we do need actual verification, but there are tons of methods of doing it so that the site only gets a true or false (18 or above) and the government gets obfuscated URL's so that the government doesn't know what you visited.

report, lol. what does that douchebag want to do? fine a foreign website for not serving content to his oh so precious country?

Canada currently has a bill looking to do the same thing. AFAIK, Australia's already passed one, many US states are looking at them individually. The EU is looking at frameworks for it. I suppose there will be some places that won't, but this is increasingly looking like what governments have decided to do, and rather than geofencing, once a large number of money-making territories want this, I think most corporations will do it globally, and smaller sites simply won't be able to run.

I mean, schools (k-12) pretty easily blacklist websites you can access, not sure why parents can't just do that if they want as well.

What is it with Neo-Liberal governments and implementing over-reaching state controls that will eventually grant a tyrant unprecedented levels of control over public life?