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. […]
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.