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. […]
They will try to ban websites run by anonymous weirdos.
“Ban Website” sounds good in the news but those words together barely even parse to an idea.
A website is just a bunch of files hosted on a computer, put them behind some kind of access control and the outside world can’t even know that they exist. Unless ISPs decide to block all inbound traffic to subscribers you can always just
apt install apache2.I think some ISPs already do this, if they suspect you’re running any kind of server, to force you to subscribe to a more expensive “business” plan.
The shitty ones do this. Or you get stuck behind cNAT.
They can try. Bans require enforcement, and they catch a few of us weirdos from time to time, but the hydra always grows more heads.