I bring to your attention; you are not able to search, find or buy sexy underwear any longer as a EU citizen, without showing your face and/or state issued ID to an Israeli or Chinese company - depending on which platform you want to order.
The walls are closing in, on all of us.
“to protect the minors”
It’s now only a question until you have to do the same here, or on discord.
I mean, that only applies to specific stores as of now. I was able to search one of the stores in my country (which is in the EU) and browse the sexy underwear category without any barrier. I tried browsing an international platform as well without need to prove my age.
For AliExpress as you’ve shown as an example, you can view a ton of sexy lingerie listings without verification so maybe the ones marked as adult have especially risqué model images?
For SHEIN I didn’t encounter barriers for sexy lingerie but I did when searching for more explicit products (like the search term “sex toy”).
What’s the Israeli company you’re referring to, or one of them if several?
Yoti is British, for context.
I am sorry rose, i can’t make myself clearer than that.
and of course, it will not be everywhere at the same time, it’s creep.
AU10TIX, is Israeli it seams
page 4:
“We are an Israeli-based company. However, we transfer Personal Information related to you outside of its
territory of origin to the following territories: Israel and US.”
Yoti seams to be British (Yoti Ltd)
Au10tix → aliexpress face recognition
Yoti → Shein
But really, i am not wanting to take apart each case. I do not need to justify why i am upset that i can’t buy the shiny underwear i just bought last year again.
if a measure imposes substantial privacy and liberty costs on the population, the authority deploying it should be able to demonstrate necessity, proportionality, and lack of a comparably effective less-intrusive alternative - not the other way around!
last time i checked, the legal guardian a.k.a. the parents where responsible for their kids.
So i can’t take care of my kids, that’s why i can’t buy my buttplug or my sexy underwear any longer?
it does not matter how risque it is. the mere fact that you can’t search anymore for “sexy” alone should tell you the whole story?
I do think the discussion remains unsolved for whether and how to age gate the internet.
It should be up to parents to make sure their children are safe.
Responsible parents could use tools to aid in this, and there have long been tools to do so.
A more difficult question is if we really should just accept that some children are at higher risk due to having irresponsible parents.
Especially as the technological landscape evolves, it’s not going to stay a matter of “millenial kids grew up fine despite being exposed to the untamed internet so kids nowadays will be fine too”.
Of course, I do take many issues with how age verification is mishandled and lack of anonymity taken advantage of. We’ve discussed how this might be solved, and it turned out that it’s possible to responsibly verify that the user is above the age of majority without compromising sensitive information beyond that.
So my baseline take is that it sucks that age verification is implemented before transparency and public trust is gained.
On top of that, the line of what is restricted could definitely use some actual explanation and guidelines. But I don’t think the concept as a whole is inherently garbage or unnecessary.
i’ve tried for over 20 minutes to find the right words, and i probably can’t.
“some parents fail” is not, by itself, a sufficient argument for imposing identity or age-gating infrastructure on every adult. there are already several barriers in place: credit card, internet access, shipping address. if all of those can be brushed aside with “some parents fail”, then a dildo or sexy underwear is probably the least of that child’s problems.
what worries me more is the normalization of these systems. you may not agree with them, but accepting and rationalizing them anyway is exactly how something intrusive becomes ordinary.
i suggest morton rhue/todd strasser “third wave” or in german: die welle - to understand why this is a problem
I’ve seen a synopsis of the film.
I certainly understand the worry. The systems are not in my view inherently intrusive and it would be a slippery slope fallacy to assume any and all approaches would lead to an acceptance of intrusive systems.
We need to oppose what makes these restrictions dangerous and intrusive without becoming superstitious. Vigilance is good, and as stated above I agree that we are being subjected to bad approaches to age verification.
I will stand with you in voicing my distrust and opposition until we are using non-intrusive systems. At that point, if we ever reach it, we can have our disagreements about whether it’s necessary to have age restrictions. And discussions about what sort of content needs to be restricted, if any.
you have seen a synopsis of the film.
right. enough said.
VPNs starting to become increasingly mandatory for even basic Internet usage, which is worrying.
I’m fortunate enough to live in a country that’s either slow or have not considered implementing this, but should this come to pass locally to me, I think my purchasing habits are more likely to change than me succumbing and providing my identity.
I don’t watch a lot of movies xD
I’ll be sure to watch it in the near future.
yes, vpn is a way to get around some of the restrictions, for now.
but don’t think this will be the new meta for long. also this will be patched, the question is not if, but when…
i suggest to read the book instead of the movie.
I’ll leave this here, as I just now got the time to watch it.
I know it’s long, but even a quick listen to the intro and the conclusion at the end… boy
Yikes.
(The part at 2 minutes is very relevant to this discussion)
A big part of the push for age verification is actually due to liability. There have been several cases where companies were sued and lost for, and I am paraphrasing here, “harming children by providing access to inappropriate content”. This sets a precedent, so now companies are adapting accordingly by filtering users.
It used to be sufficient to have a popup whereby the user would assert they were above the age of majority and willing to view potentially inappropriate content. Why is that no longer sufficient? I presume it is because the demographic has changed and now we have kids surfing the web by the age of 5 rather then 15. A 5 year old does not comprehend the popup.
Thus I propose a simple solution: “Rather than a yes/no, make the user answer a comprehension question to prove they understand (ie: captcha for age verification)”
Whew, another problem solved. Good thing I am such a genuis.
glad you at least consider re-thinking your sentence back from before when you said:
The systems are not in my view inherently intrusive and it would be a slippery slope fallacy to assume any and all approaches would lead to an acceptance of intrusive systems.
That sentence doesn’t contrast me being disappointed in this proposal and most current approaches.
It’s not an inherent issue, but as it is an actual current issue with age verification I am not a fan of the implementation broadening.
I would be surprised if this passes as it is. This will cripple a billion-dollar industry since a good chunk of people playing videogames are minors.
Even if you take out the 18+ games such as Call of Duty and the like (which have insane numbers of kids playing them).
Then you have the people who don’t feel like having all their personal information being publicized every other Friday because of some form of “leak” or “hack”.
I would be shocked if there won’t be aggressive lobbying against this by the Billion-dollar Companies such as Activision or EA.
The problem is that people seem to accept these measures based on a subjective feeling rather than doing their due diligence (in the best case). The worst case they begin to shift their argument after you come with facts instead of stepping back a bit and rethink their stance.
“Protecting minors is right, therefore this is good and nessesarry” seems to be the entire argument… But legislation needs evidence, justification and proportionality. When you point out the lack of evidence or the new problems it creates by these measures, people simply brush it aside rather than reconsidering their position or they outright ignore your arguments.
The classic escalation in the argument if you actually have somebody that agrees with the Agenda is they shift to “Kids should not see Porn” for example:
There is research on children and adolescents being exposed to pornography, but the evidence does not establish that exposure by itself causes developmental harm. Reviews repeatedly point out that the evidence is largely correlational, methodologically limited, heterogeneous, and insufficient to establish clear causal effects. Many studies cannot establish causality and state that outright.
Adolescents and Pornography: A Review of 20 Years of Research
Exposure to Pornography and Adolescent Sexual Behavior: Systematic Review
I was exposed to porn as a child. I found my late grandads magazine stash in a suitcase in the attic, and then I found my fathers Max Hardcore VHS tapes.
I came out just fine.
The biggest failure we have is the evolution of the thought-terminating cliche.
“Think of the children” became a mockery of what efforts the right wing was undertaking. But like any satire, once enough people failed to grasp the satire, it became real again.
Social media has been weaponized to short-circuit thinking processes. A mob can be whipped up in an instant, comments can be stripped of context and nuance to give them an opposite meaning and blasted, before the person can elaborate or correct. The encouragement of black and white thinking is not simply a function of conservatives, it extends to everyone - we are all susceptible once the “pain point” is discovered and exploited.
For politicians… in the US, it’s often said that those on the “left” (scare quotes because the US does not have a left wing, in global terms) have to be perfect and spotless, while the Right gets… well, we all can see. The need for this spotlessness drives a measure of caution, it’s a social/cultural handbrake on progess - and if the wholly-conservatively-owned media can seize on a blemish, it will hammer it. This means lawmakers cave to heavily broadcast “interests of safety”. Yes, these corporate-types have no spine and are part of the problem, I’m in no way going to defend a politico who advocates for identity verification online… however, lawmakers are under massive public pressure to Do Something^tm.
Because they are the only ones who CAN. We can take individual cautions, we can leave it to parents, we have been doing so… but the real problem is that we don’t allocate resources to or do enough to hit the bad-faith and just bad actors.
A metaphor: If a woman gets drunk/high and goes to a party and gets r@ped, it’s the fault of the r@pist, not the woman.
The push at politicians is to blame the woman, and it comes at them with a firehose. It’s bullshit of course, but at the end of the day they want to keep their jobs. And this is where the system fails.
We have to speak up and not let the bullshit hose go unchecked. Have you written and called your reps/MPs? More than once?
