The Spanish government has a plan to prevent kids from watching porn online: Meet the porn passport.
Officially (and drily) called the Digital Wallet Beta (Cartera Digital Beta), the app Madrid unveiled on Monday would allow internet platforms to check whether a prospective smut-watcher is over 18. Porn-viewers will be asked to use the app to verify their age. Once verified, they’ll receive 30 generated “porn credits” with a one-month validity granting them access to adult content. Enthusiasts will be able to request extra credits.
You have to request more porn credits from the government if you need more? Don’t want the government to be tracking this data of you. This is a privacy issue
I wish they would just push all the big mainstream porn sites to remove the most abusive misogynistic content rather than slapping these checks on everything.
Also this will never be okay until there is a zero knowledge version that means neither the government, nor the sites, nor any other party can establish a given person’s habits which is probably not something they’ll ever do because tracking is probably part of the point.
I’m not a fan of the easy access to porn that kids have or the proliferation of the industry in general but I am worried that as part of this harmless things like erotic roleplaying websites will be swept up as part of it and well I use those. And their point is not porn though some people host and share porn as part of it (which is why it’d get swept up with it eventually probably), it’s about writing, smutty, erotic writing. And I’d rather not have to tie my identity to my desires to roleplay out an elf who ends up making “friends” with the wolf-men tribe to my real life identity (I’m not claiming that’s something I do there but it’s an example of something that would be kind of embarrassing for others to know and it’s far from the weirdest stuff that goes on in places like that).
Government having credits for how often I could say log in and continue a long-term erotic writing campaign with someone is just weird but that’s the end point of this kind of thing. Having credits seems not helpful anyways, the true porn addicts are just going to download stuff then share it in private forums, discords, p2p, etc. If the point is to stop kids from accessing this the credits thing seems odd.
Lol most porn is made in the US. How is Spain supposed to regulate US porn streaming companies showing content filmed and distributed by US companies?
Easy, they can set guidelines and block in the country sites that do not follow these guidelines.
I wonder how one would find an exhaustive list of porn sites. Using a blacklist seems like a hard problem because of discovery here.
Obviously, no censorship measure can reach all cases, especially when it comes to pornography, you can find it in every corner of the internet. But it can cover most cases if it targets the most popular sites. For example, there is a lot of child pornography on the surface web, despite it being banned in most countries, but the ban makes access difficult and guarantees punishment in any case that the law takes notice of. It is not a definitive strategy, as it aims at the effect and not the cause, but it is something.