The last Parliament featured debate over several contentious Internet-related bills, notably streaming and news laws (Bills C-11 and C-18), online harms (Bill C-63) and Internet age verification and website blocking (Bill S-210). Bill S-210 fell below the radar screen for many months as it started in the Senate and received only cursory review in the House. The bill faced only a final vote in the House but it died with the election call. This week, the bill’s sponsor, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, wasted no time in bringing it back. Now Bill S-209, the bill starts from scratch in the Senate with the same basic framework but with some notable changes that address at least some of the concerns raised by the prior bill (a fulsome review of those concerns can be heard in a Law Bytes podcast I conducted with Senator Miville-Dechêne).
Why are we ruining everything instead of telling parents who don’t set up parental controls the morons they are?
I’m not saying I want kids to look at adult content, I am saying that this technology, as is, is a massive fucking liability.
It can trivially leak, as we’ve seen with dozens of platforms including major ones. It can trivially be used for blackmail. It’s invasive.
It’s BAD technology and bad legislation.
This isn’t even better than nothing, this is creating entire new problems that didn’t exist before, while being trivial for motivated kids to bypass.
This is building the torment nexus.
Who in their right mind is saying giving third parties our verified info to link to porn and posting anything on the internet is a good idea, except absolute fucking fascists.
If you want this, make it so browsers have to send an age token in their request headers to access adult content, and require major browsers to support that. That’s basically adding child lock and doesn’t create issues.
Can kids get around it? Yes, but not on iOS or Android without side loading, and not on windows or macOS without disabling parental controls and code signing.
Besides, with this idea one kid will steal their parents account info and share it. You can’t prevent that.
Why are we ruining everything instead of telling parents who don’t set up parental controls the morons they are?
I’m not saying I want kids to look at adult content, I am saying that this technology, as is, is a massive fucking liability.
It can trivially leak, as we’ve seen with dozens of platforms including major ones. It can trivially be used for blackmail. It’s invasive.
It’s BAD technology and bad legislation.
This isn’t even better than nothing, this is creating entire new problems that didn’t exist before, while being trivial for motivated kids to bypass.
This is building the torment nexus.
Who in their right mind is saying giving third parties our verified info to link to porn and posting anything on the internet is a good idea, except absolute fucking fascists.
If you want this, make it so browsers have to send an age token in their request headers to access adult content, and require major browsers to support that. That’s basically adding child lock and doesn’t create issues.
Can kids get around it? Yes, but not on iOS or Android without side loading, and not on windows or macOS without disabling parental controls and code signing.
Besides, with this idea one kid will steal their parents account info and share it. You can’t prevent that.
You can’t get votes telling people to take responsibility for their children or that they’re morons.
Parenting takes effort. Kinda like getting out and voting. And we know how the Americans feel about the latter.
This article is about the Canadian senate