this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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[OPINION] Canada’s age-verification bill for porn is a slippery slope to a restrictive internet (www.theglobeandmail.com)
submitted 2 days ago by NotSteve_@piefed.ca to c/canada@lemmy.ca
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Canada’s proposed Bill S-209, which addresses online age verification, is currently making its way through the Senate, and its passage would be yet another mistake in tech policy.

The bill is intended to restrict young peoples’ access to online pornography and to hold providers to account for making it available to anyone under 18. It may be well-intentioned, but the manner of its proposed enforcement – mandating age verification or what is being called “age-estimation technologies” – is troubling.

Globally, age-verification tools are a popular business, and many companies are in favour of S-209, particularly because it requires that websites and organizations rely on third parties for these tools. However, they bring up long-standing concerns over privacy, especially when you consider potential leaks or hacks of this information, which in some cases include biometrics that can identify us by our faces or fingerprints. [...]

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[–] Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Your code would still be unchanging and unique to you, which would be easy to correlate activity with. It's basically a government-issued ID number.

And if it could somehow be anonymous, there's nothing to stop people from sharing it. It just becomes a password you need to access the internet, except all sotes must accept any of 20 million passwords, and you definitely know a bunch of people who will share.

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

I know, and as I said, it's something that I was writing as a quick idea, there are better ways, for sure

My point was though that social media is ruining kids, and that is something that needs a fix.

I'm not saying my way is perfect (still better than what governments are trying), I'm saying we need something

[–] Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 1 points 14 hours ago

I can't think of any method of restricting content from children that couldn't be leveraged to restrict content in general, or collect personal information.

The dangerous parts of social media affect adults too. Maybe we need to regulate social media platforms in some way.

Or just have better and more widely available local parental control systems. I can block specifically all social media without affecting other sites, but that's because I know how. Perhaps DNS blockers need to be government recommended?