UK porn watchers could have faces scanned
3 years ago by CrypticCoffee to c/privacy
Looks like UK is going the same way as a few states. Spare a thought for us. So messed up this increasing surveillance state.
@CrypticCoffee
As for me, I will never, ever use any site that demands a drivers license or a face scan to get on. I'd sooner totally disconnect from the open Internet and move all my work to the darknet only.
Zero voluntary cooperation!
Torrents are always waiting with open arms
For those you'd need to scan your dick in UK.
Y'see, back in the day parents were not technically literate because the world was mid-societal shift. "Protect the children" (because parents are unable to) had some justification.
Today, basic computer literacy is a survival skill in the UK. The level of literacy needed to track your own kid is not that high (or expensive to rent).
If you are letting kids use tech you don't understand, and are not willing to invest the time/money to track yourself, that's a you problem. It shouldn't become a me problem.
As for "yeah but what about smart kids", I've got some bad news for you. They will always find a way around ANYTHING you set up.
Bush Porn!
Exactly. I was 17 teaching my parents about internet shit. I wasn't smart, I still aren't, but I also wasn't. Anyway, the amount ov viruses I had to fix because of them downloading kenny_chesney.exe is.. baffling.
I really feel very uncomfortable with the notion of tracking the kids anyway. Arming them with knowledge as best as possible, and as usual showing interest in their behaviour to try and look as best as possible for signs of problems but ultimately kids are still people with their own lives even if people in development. Yes you need to protect them, to a certain extent, but ultimately some of this is no business but their own. You can try to educate and forewarn and hope some of it sticks but the tendency from my memory of being a kid is that that tends to be met with an eye-roll, this is probably where the temptation comes from to track children or drastically restrict the choices they're able to make so they can't ignore you but this is hardly a great way for that person in development to ultimately... develop.
This is dicey though, not least because as yet another random person on the internet offering their unsolicited opinion, I don't even have kids, and if you follow my logic to extremis, you basically have, "let the kids just figure it out on their own they'll be fine" which definitely won't apply to everything and can have disastrous consequences in some contexts. But nevertheless I think this concept of tracking, either covertly, or overtly with the intention of making a kind of panopticon effect for the kids, is likely ineffective but even if effective, is indicative of something going wrong with the intent of the surveillance.
It's a tricky one because of the nature of the net. Let's say we have three kids: Timmy, Jimmy and Harry.
Timmy starts looking up "tits", because Timmy loves titties. He's curious, and you probably want to have a talk about acting and how porn isn't reality.
Jimmy, well, Jimmy saw a videogame character tied up and it made him feel good, so he starts looking for that online. He's about to explore the BDSM scene. He's going to need the "safe sane consensual" talk, otherwise his explorations might get him, or someone else, hurt. He'll need more of a talk than Timmy!
Harry loves hentai; he found some when looking for pictures of his favourite cartoon character. Harry is going to need a long talk about fantasy Vs reality, otherwise he's going to disappoint a lot of women! Wait a moment, most of the things he's looking at involve animals and women... Might be time to get some therapy!
In all three of these cases a different style and level of parental intervention was required. You watch your kids because they're kids, and kids are experts at getting themselves (and others) hurt. Parents need to watch their kids because it's their job to intervene, and to decide the method of intervention.
However, we've not gone over the case of Lizzy, a girl cursed with religious fundamentalist parents. When they find out she's more interested in girls than boys, she'll be subjected to inhumane treatment to "fix" her. So there is a grey area here - not all parents should be parents.
@CrypticCoffee Counter to that is obvious: DO NOT USE legal access modes, use Tor instead and access only sites that "block" the UK instead of complying.
Hopefully most porn sites will do exactly that, like Pornhub already did to US states that demand driver's license uploads (including Utah and Arkansa). When they attempted to comply with such a demand from Louisiana, open traffic from there dropped 80% and presumably VPN and Tor access jumped.
This told all porn sites that it's not worth the programmer time to even attempt to service legal traffic from such jurisdictions. Block non-Tor/non-VPN connections and enjoy immunity.
Best of all, it only takes ONE jurisdiction on the whole planet that won't censor porn to make these measures globally ineffective. Crack anywhere, play everywhere. This gives new meaning to saying "fuck you" to the government.
Any attempt by the UK to block Tor will fail: China can't reliably block it, and the Great Firewall of China has far more resources than "Hadrian's Firewall." Trying to jail people for using Tor would be nearly as difficult and would also face the legal obstacle of jury nullification. This will go the way of the failed 21 drinking age and 55 mph speed limits in the US.
As governments try to crack down on porn, on dissent, and on criticism of their Great Leaders, the clearnet will be of declining importance (possibly used only for shopping) and the darknet will become more important. Embrace the power of the darknet...
Tor can be compromised though, you just need someone watching a good portion of the end nodes and hosting the fastest intermediate nodes, then run a viterbi trace back to a source. Tor is also very slow.
I'm looking at IPFS and FreeNet as viable alternatives
@tetris11 Slow yes, but if you download videos rather than stream them, slow is much less of an issue.
Even the US is not capable of watching all Tor exit and guard nodes. The UK sure as hell is not. The Torproject by the way is always looking for and decommissioning malicious Tor nodes, so the risk to any one user is low.
The usual way to attack a Tor user is to get them to connect to Tor to destination site you have compromised with javascript ON, then send a malware installer to the real target's computer. The installer then downloads a rather standard payload that tells the computer to phone home on a non-Tor connection. The widely reported 2013 incident used a Windows-only payload, today they probably add iOS and Android. Stock android that is. If it was reasonably practical for cops to see through Tor they would not put so much effort in seeing around it instead.
Things like the Silk Road takedown were very time consuming and labor-intensive, and required a lot of old fashioned exploits and unskilled admins at the targets. In other words, Tor, Signal, anything else running on an untrusted device also become untrusted. Silk Road was still brutally difficult for the cops, and that was a major, motivated investigation that unlike UK or Utah porn cops wasn't going to run into a stone wall of non-extraditability or lack of jurisidiction on someone with zero local "business presence."
BTW, do not use Google Fiber to connect to Tor to use Google privately, because if you do, Google can see your device directly(being your ISP), and see the one exit node they are talking to, allowing a confirmation attack.
wear a mask of prince andrew. you can do fuck all and not get in trouble.
But if they catch you sweating, you're busted. Isn't it public record that the guy cannot sweat?
Just get a paper cutout of a PM for the camera, no?
Oi! You got a license for that pornography?
How about giving all of our money to Russia and nuking ourselves
If you sell it right that could be a hit with all those brexit voters
Good, might stop the creepy fuckers watching it in parliament..
https://www.independent.co.uk/... (I also remember and was going to link an earlier and unrelated report that was done about MPs watching porn in parliament, but that one story has drowned out all other results and it's too early for me to dig deeper)
In all seriousness, this is obviously a terrible idea for many reasons.
They would just exempt themselves from it as they did with both reporting on people accessing porn using the HoP network and with the investigatory powers bill.
When they did report on it, it was a shockingly high number for a place of work: https://www.theregister.com/...
Oh, of course they will, was mostly just pointing out the hypocrisy..
And I think the report I was thinking of was more recent, but yeah, the gist is exactly the same.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Young adults involved in sex education told the BBC they believed having these kinds of protections in place would help prevent children being exposed to pornography.
Jack Liepa, director of the charity Sexpression, which sends university students into schools to run workshops about sex and relationships, said the Online Safety Act was a positive step, but not a complete solution.
"Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy", it said.
Simon Migliano, head of research at VPN comparison site Top10VPN.com said "In Louisiana demand for VPNs more than tripled while in Utah it surged by 847% the day after the new age checks came into effect.
"The potential consequences of data being leaked are catastrophic and could include blackmail, fraud, relationship damage, and the outing of people's sexual preferences in very vulnerable circumstances," she said.
Ofcom chief executive Dame Melanie Dawes, talking to Women's Hour on BBC Radio 4, said operators of explicit sites would need to "balance getting the verification highly effective with preserving data privacy, which is a legal requirement."
The original article contains 891 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
The headline is very misleading. Porn companies are considering facial recognition as an option for validating age. Governments are putting more pressure on porn websites to keep minors away from the content, but it's very hard to thoroughly prove your identity online. A government issued photo ID is useless if you have nothing to compare it to visually. That's why many websites use bank/credit card info as opposed to an ID.
It is definitely a privacy concern if you worry about it being known that you watch porn, but I don't think it's right to fault the company.
Company? It's the UK communications regulator, Ofcom.
They found that many on low incomes don't have photocard ID when they rolled out voter ID despite opposition.
Considering no one seems capable of withholding data from motivated hackers, this could be quite horrific.
Like mid bust or before pre bust nutting?
No they need to match your ID
Inb4 it says "you already have an account, here enter your existing password"
This is how it starts. How it ends im guessing is every online identity will need to be linked to a real identity.
Spending money on giving kids school meals, hell no way. Spending millions on data collection under the pretext of protecting kids. hell yeah!
These shithouses do not give a damn about the people of the country. How long do you think it is going to be before someone gets blackmailed for voting for the wrong party and being a porn watcher.
Source? Do the UK even have a Sears Catalogue?
@lemmy.ml
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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@lemmy.ml
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
go to feed...
You got a loicense to fap mate?!
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