France, UK, EU, and some US states have pushed age verification on adult websites (porn), it will shortly be required for you to share your ID, phone number, or any legal documentation that shows you are an adult to access every adult website. We are told these new regulations are put in place to protect children, when in reality everyone will lose their freedom (and personal data security) in the process.
Here is the article: The Scam of Age Verification - PORNBIZ.COM
Please, do not ask me ho I found this article, we’re all human.
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That sounded even more suspicious lol
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I expect to see surge in usage of VPNs, torrents and pirated content.
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Yes, this is all about control of citizens.
Take a guess which tech will be outlawed next. VPN services in France are already ordered to censor access to certain sites (sports streaming for now).
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I can see why pushing age verification for pornography is important, recently internet pornography is a massive issue and I believe there should be reasonable measures to combat it, but I don’t see a reason why you will have to share all that information. This is kind of a huge overreach, especially on France, which has a history of being very strict about data protection.
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Not that sad. Maybe in this way, fewer kids will fall into the abyss of pornography 
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Today it’s porn, tomorrow it’ll be something else.
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can’t say no. They just look for reasons, actually 
One of the USA states tried this a year or two ago. Pornhub refused to load for any IP from that state. VPN usage went way up.
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Onion services don’t enforce age verification. Do major porn sites not use them? Do they block Tor? Tor sounds like an easy, legal, and free way to get around this issue.
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Fleeing from repressions is not a viable solution. While Tor is legal today, there is no guarantee that it will remain so in the future. See seuaaa’s post:
Moreover, the tumultuous history of darknet markets has shown that maintaining a popular hidden service in the long term is nearly impossible: eventually, your servers will be deanonymized. Traffic analysis, the longstanding issue for Tor, has become increasingly reliable and easier to perform over the past decade.
A Global Passive Adversary is no longer just a hypothetical threat. In fact, it is very real, with a name, a brand, and even a board of executives.
What’s needed are organizations dedicated to promoting online anonymity. We desperately need a movement akin to the Pirate Parties of the 2000s. I elaborate on this issue a bit here: What organizations are dedicated to promoting online anonymity? - #5 by rlogin
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That’s a great point. I think what we do on this website: protecting ourselves and implementing privacy-respecting services and apps in our lives is a good start. But at the end of the day, it is just fleeing from the main problem which is that new laws in the west are making us less safe and less private. You can be the smartest guy in china, you will still be subject to the law and have no privacy whatsoever. Because you live in that country, and society impacts you whether you like or not. Maybe the privacy people should try to take their cause up to the lawmakers instead of digging and hiding even deeper into the ground. That’s what Edward Snowden said in one of his many interviews: “the only thing that restricts the gov or companies are policies”, not the OS you install on your computer. Just saying, I’m just like you guys, just trying to get by.
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A few other posts here suggest taking up the cause of privacy to lawmakers. People have been doing this for decades, yet the situation has seemingly gotten much worse. I don’t wish to discourage people who do this, but how effective is this in practice?
My observations of bad laws (either malicious or just poorly considered) being forced through legislatures in disregard of civil society’s concerns time and time again tell me this is futile. States don’t act in the best interests of their people, they act to accumulate power and control.
Just as I thought, fleeing to friendlier jurisdictions is unviable in the long term. For now we have VPN services and Tor but these may eventually be taken away from us. New systems of control, and bans on solutions that circumvent them, will eventually spread worldwide. Additionally, migration is restricted by borders and is economically and socially costly, making it difficult at best for most people.
In summary, I don’t see what a good solution to “freedom is vanishing” is.
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Many porn sites stream video. Is that even possible over Tor?
Pornography ban 2.0: all non-party approved information is filthy degenerate smut. Submit identification card for accessing “Of Thee I Sing - Barack Obama”.
Pornography bans are never about protecting kids. You want kids snorting less porn then fucking talk to them about healthy relationships, treating partners nice, consent etc.
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Waiting 8 minutes for pixelated jpegs to improve as the ArpaNet creators intended
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Not just for adult websites, sadly. But also for dating apps, social media, and likely much more down the road. This is one of the biggest threat to privacy online.
Here are 2 Privacy Guides articles (and article section) that discuss this issue:
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But where’s the limit? I mean, small mastodon instance or forums like this one are social networks. If those are also required to implement age verification, it would go out of control, and will be used to get private data for malicious purposes and scams. If not, than I would expect bunch of distributed services as a workaround. I can host a forum or peertube instance and say adult content is forbidden. So it’s not adult site officialy, but maybe I have no resources to moderate it in real time, and users can upload whatever they want, until it’s reported though.
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They knew how to implement age verification properly in 1987 
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Pornhub posts child abuse and encourages child trafficking. It can go die in a hole. But the broader privacy concerns are valid. I’m waiting to see if I’ll still be on social media in Australia next year.