1132
Pornhub Sues Texas Over Age Verification Law
(www.vice.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I'm pretty disturbed by the attitude of lot of the comments on this thread. While this law is probably not going in the right direction, this knee jerk reaction of calling any regulation of porn "puritanical" and an infringement of your rights is crazy to me. I feel like access to internet porn is not a fundamental human right, and it's not puritanical to maybe want to prevent kids from being unwittingly exposed to a shitload of porn at a young age.
Regulations that require you to expose your personal data for no benefit are all those things and more.
Educating children about sex so they can consume porn in a healthy manner (because spoiler alert: these laws do nothing to stop them watching it) is 100 times more productive and positive than invading the privacy of law abiding adults. But that would actually require time and money which none of these law makers want.
It's never about protecting children or making the world a better place. It's about moral posturing and pretending you're doing something so you can get votes.
I'm all for educating children about sex, and I'm also sympathetic to the plight of data privacy.
However, I also feel like the internet right now is a pretty bad place for minors. Like, there's so much porn and other harmful content that's so easily accessible, to the point that it's easy to find yourself stumbling into it on complete accident. And with the speed that the internet evolves, it seems pretty unreasonable to me to just kinda expect parents just to be able to fully keep up with it.
I don't think I support this law in particular, but I also don't know what could possibly be done to any real effect.