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Comment by FerretFred | Hacker News Reader

For me personally, I agree that wanting non-adults to be able get at online porn is commendable, and the fact that the tech industry is scrambling over itself to comply is evidence that this Act has teeth. However, what bugs me personally is that 1) The Government had nearly 2 years head start to set up a centralised ID repository, hopefully basing it on the same model as the DVLA and Passport Office sharing photo and other data. They did not. 2) Verification sites are not UK based, and therefore subject to the same mistrust with handling PII - which obviously can't be replaced. 3) There are no Goverment-created apps that can/should handle ID verification despite the fact that these would probably solve 95% of the problem. 4) Feature overreach: if you want to surveil your citizens, be honest for once and don't use the knee-jerk carrot of it "being for the kids" - we're not as stupid as you think (unfortunately).

That is all.

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Everyone who is currently an adult and not geriatric could have had access to porn when they were a child. Is everyone fucked up? No? Why are you advocating for eliminating privacy for a made up problem?

This is my main frustration. Every teenager who wants to get porn will get porn regardless. VPN companies saw the writing on the wall years ago, and have been paying any YouTuber that will accept a sponsorship to shill for them.

I think the Online Safety Act is just setting a precedent that will be used further down the line to ban personal VPN usage.

"Children are using encrypted VPN tunnels to see porn online! Criminals also use those same VPN networks!"

Let me guess... There will be a law requiring ISPs to block VPN traffic if the VPN server's hostname isn't registered to a business and approved by the government.

UK: "Do you have a license for that VPN?!"

Anyway, download i2p, or Hyphanet/freenet

China has been trying for decades to ban VPNs and they have failed. It's just an infinite cat and mouse game. There's no reason to think that the UK could succeed where China has failed.

Yes, I agree with you. But the average person would no longer use a VPN if VPNs were outlawed. The people who are clever enough to evade detection like you and I are a tiny percentage of the population, and we don't really matter.

People like you and I don't truly matter in the grand scheme of things, because if the government ban VPNs, we will use i2p or TOR, or Hyphanet/freenet.

Surveillance states care about numbers. The more people who lose VPN access, the better (from their POV).

My real frustration is that it's just not a real problem. If it was we'd be seeing the negative effects of children having had access to porn today.

Instead it's clearly about control and being able to tiptoe their way to a totalitarian state.

I'm not! I know how easy it is to "discover" porn, but if sites adopted the RTA labelling system (https://rtalabel.net/?content=howto) and browsers obeyed that would go a long way to preventing those "accidental" discoveries. What my privacy concerns are were as per my post - no accountability from various global third parties and indiscriminate use of my PII.

What is the actual problem being solved here? The only problem I see this solving is that people who wish to exert control upon others can do so.

There is no possible way to achieve this goal without 4 happening though: or moreover, without it being possible.

Your prior 3 ideas all end up at "potential government surveillance of the people".

There is no way to implement verification like this without surveiling everyone, even if you don't plan to use the data - the possibility will always be there.

Yes, and this is one reason why we (Brits) have resisted Government ID cards for so long.

Those are separate issues though frankly. Unified government ID is efficient. You have it anyway, just as a morass of other forms of ID which contribute to the expense to administrate.

That's quite separate to "verify with your government ID" to visit a website having nothing to do with government services.

And it should be apparent that the lack of the former did not stop people asking for the latter. And they did ask for it.

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