Widespread mass government censorship continues to be out of control and Australia is now targeting search engines.
Throughout the age verification debates, supporters have long insisted that this is simply about blocking pornography access for minors. If you believe that argument, however, I have a bridge to sell you.
The reality is that age verification for pornographic material has nothing to do with pornography at all. Instead, it is the government’s way of trying to create a whole new standard for how to silence speech and crack down on the broader open internet. Pornography is little more than a soft target for speech because the government believes that the fewest people possible would defend. The whole point of targeting that form of legal speech is to set the precedent that the government can target legally protected speech in their efforts to censor the broader internet. This so the government can move into other types of content and see how much speech they can censor.
None of this is paranoid delusions, either. There have been efforts to implement age verification on video games, app stores, and even social media in general. These moves happened as momentum had built that age verification checks on pornography. Simply put, the government immediately began floating trial balloons to censor other forms of content along the way to see what they can get away with.
Disturbingly, that list of targets for government has recently expanded. Reports suggest that Australia is moving ahead with new plans to start mandating age verification onto search engines on top of it all. From ABC News:
Australians will soon be subjected to mandatory age checks across the internet landscape, in what has been described as a huge and unprecedented change.
Search engines are next in line for the same controversial age-assurance technology behind the teen social media ban, and other parts of the internet are likely to follow suit.
At the end of June, Australia quietly introduced rules forcing companies such as Google and Microsoft to check the ages of logged-in users, in an effort to limit children’s access to harmful content such as pornography.
But experts have warned the move could compromise Australians’ privacy online and may not do much to protect young people.
“I have not seen anything like this anywhere else in the world,” said Lisa Given, professor of Information Sciences from RMIT, who specialises in age-assurance technology.
“As people learn about the implications of this, we will likely see people stepping up and saying, ‘Wait a minute, why wasn’t I told that this was going to happen?'”
The privacy invading internet censorship is only going to continue to get further out of control. At this rate, it’s going to be easier to simply list the services that have not been censored by the government. What’s more, it wouldn’t be a surprise if other countries take notice and start floating similar censorial laws and policies in their own countries as well. The fact that the Australian government simply did a hand wave of ‘there could be porn there too’ was just the asinine icing on the cake. It underscores just how incredibly stupid this whole thing has gotten. It’s also sad that some people might actually believe that quick throw away talking point to justify the censorship as well.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
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How is the age verification being implemented? Just waiting for data breaches to get so much worse.
yeah didnt they have a major news story about loss of over a million people’s personal information days after implementing age verification tech before?
I believe that was their age verification database for bars and pub goers from last year: https://www.freezenet.ca/australian-age-verification-system-suffers-data-breach-1-million-compromised/
In many cases, companies are relying on shady third party to implement a system so they can say they are compliant with the laws. How that information is being protected is anyone’s guess. I’m willing to bet that in a lot of cases, it’s not, but all the companies care about is not being the ones liable for any such incident. So, they happily throw their users under the bus and dust their hands of it after before continuing on with business as usual.
Either way, it’s a data breach waiting to happen. We should be moving away from putting so much personal information on the wider open internet. Instead, these policies push us in the opposite direction. It’s only going to end badly sooner or later.
yeah. as this is pushed more and more is VPNs gonna be a viable option to avoid these policies for long? I mean, VPN is only a solution when you can switch to a area where these intrusive laws are not implemented. which…is slowly becoming less and less of a pool.
The good news is that it does take time for laws to be passed and run through various court systems (generally speaking, anyway). I can imagine that there will be a few holdout countries somewhere that are willing to allow a VPN industry to thrive given that the benefits to the economy can be quite tempting. If there are countries out there willing to take on ultra wealthy people trying to evade taxes in their respective countries, I can imagine there will be a few countries out there willing to allow businesses to anonymize internet traffic. There aren’t that many countries out there willing to help with tax evasion and I can see the same being said for internet traffic, but I can imagine a few countries becoming world famous for being privacy safe havens.
If not, well, there’s always TOR. Who knows? Maybe there will be the development of some popular p2p communication network out there that will also do the job. Either way, there’s going to be demand for anonymous access to the internet. As censorship becomes more prevalent in western societies, there are going to be those who will fulfill that demand. It’s happened in the file-sharing community many times over. I would be surprised if the same sort of thing didn’t happen for evading government internet censorship.
fair enough. one thing about these laws is they are pretty self destructive. Ether by lawsuit from loss of secure data and privacy, ineffectiveness, etc they should eventually die out. mostly. I suspect there will be some stubborn holdouts. but eventually things will return to the status quo so to speak. Hopefully. That being said, according to a bloomberg law article Alyo may be giving in and considering turning back on in texas with age verification due to the supreme court loss.
Im all for protecting kids from the dangers of the internet but they have to use privacy and data protecting ways to do it.