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. […]
If it happens I’ll bulk buy flash drives, fill em with useful tools to get around all this… Then just hand them out for free on the street corner next to a highschool.
Fuck age verification, may the people who push it die from a horrible rare cancer.
You won’t need to. Students find ways around content blocks and share it out themselves. Super sketchy free VPNs in mass use, tethering to phones, using ISP-based free wifi access points piggybacking on home connections from neighbours to the school—or, in one case, the school itself, logging in with guest accounts/incognito mode, running random executables from a (frequently virus-infested) Flash drive (aforementioned VPNs, web browser, or P2P web tunnel/Tor), torrenting, DNS swapping, and also old school “sneaker net” sharing contraband files directly. I’ve seen it all. The worse part is that they, largely, don’t know enough about computers to understand what they’re doing, so they end up sharing viruses and spyware with each other. Hell, I’ve told students to stop using their sketchy janky tools and taught them how to find safe/reputable ones (like ProtonVPN) or just use a different DNS to bypass the school filter entirely. They’re doing it anyway; at least teach them how to use a condom.
Kids will find a way past the blocks and share it out. Not to access porn—that’ll just be a byproduct—they’ll do it to chat with friends and play games.
This is a fool’s errand. A massive money pit that will inevitably lead to a massive data breach and resulting scandal. And it won’t prevent a single teenager from watching porn.
It’s ridiculous that this is still being talked about in 2025, let alone being implemented by clueless Boomer politicians around the world. Ask any computers teacher in Canada if their school has ever successfully blocked students from playing games on school computers—even without web access, lol. It doesn’t even take a computer expert to know this will never work.
What a pointless waste.
Not to be that guy, but teaching high school students to just plug a random flash drive into their PC probably isn’t the best security practice to be imparting…
Maybe a booth teaching them?
Other than USB killers a flash drives are no more dangerous than a CD. No OS autoruns any more and you can always inspect a file before opening it. Better to teach kids to think before they open any file from a source they don’t trust rather than to just avoid one type of media.
Hey, kids! Come in my booth and I’ll show you how to access porn!
Well… lol. You could make it hey kids learn how to access things in other countries that needs a VPN, and maybe they’d be smart enough to connect the dots, but ya that’s no longer as effective heh.
People already, incorrectly, assume that VPN == Safety thanks to a ridiculous volume of advertising, no need to make that worse.
A VPN only hides your traffic from the people running the equipment between you and the VPN. If your VPN provider is evil, or just lazy, it’s the same as not using one at all.
In this context it’s just about bypassing restrictions like age checks.