There are a lot of GOP-controller legislatures in the USA pushing through so-called “child protection” laws, but there’s a toll in the form of impacting people’s rights and data privacy. Most of these bills involve requiring adults to upload a copy of their photo ID.
It should be the sole responsibility of parents or guardians to control any restrictions like this. I’m not a parent myself, but if I were, I wouldn’t just let my child have a device with unrestricted access to everything on the internet. To me, it makes more sense to just have content restrictions on children’s devices than force all adults to go through extra verification steps to access porn.
I’m entirely of this opinion. Why put the pornographers in charge of who can see porn? Parents, do you job. Am I supposed to upload my driver’s license for them to store somewhere? that’s what some of these states are proposing. That sounds like a privacy and security disaster. And I agree also that this is not about protecting kids, but more about a grab for authoritarian power.
This makes absolute sense until they get to secondary school (ages 11-16). All the kids at school have mobiles. You might have put the best parental controls on your sprogs phone but someone else hasn’t and his son - he’s the one showing pictures and videos at playtime. The problem is that kids don’t live in a bubble.
I’m in the UK, don’t have a clue about what laws are coming in but am against this type of state intervention into private life of adults. Adults uploading id online is not something I am for.
But I am pretty much in favour of banning smartphones in schools with kids that age these days - I’m a very liberal guy but I’ve heard so many horror stories from friends that are teachers.
I actually think the main problem is the nature of the pornography itself. The stuff that comes up with choking and hair pulling and all that… There’s porn which is just people getting it on but it seems to be this violent stuff that gets to kids first and that’s the bit I don’t understand. I’m old. When I was their age it was magazines of naked people. A more innocent time.