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. […]
I was never excited for Carney (and the Liberals’ continuation of power), but I really didn’t think they’d anger me as much as they have been*. Yes, I’m happy we don’t have PP in power, but at times it’s feeling like we may as well have reached the same outcome minus the culture war shit.
I really hope the NDP makes a strong comeback**
Edit (corrections):
*Apparently it was not a bill put forward by Liberal MPs
**The NDP actually supported the first bill of this kind so they’re not much help in this situation
Afaik this is a senate bill and similar to s210 from last parliament, the NDP voted in favour of that one last session which I’m extremely disappointed about, I recall the NDP being pro privacy in the past, which totally got some of my friends interested in them in the first place.
It’s even more disappointing that the liberals were the only party with Nay votes on that one. I realise that wasn’t passing this bill but still, unimpressed.
Edit. This showed up earlier too in s203 back a few parliaments ago. Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne is the sponsor on all of these.
Ah, you’re correct (sadly). Now that you mention it I remember the NDP voting in favour for that which is depressing to say the least
I’m not one to glaze Carney, but for the benefit of factuality - this bill was proposed by a senator, not a Liberal MP under Carney. We’ll see whether it goes further.
Thank you for the correction, I’ll update my comment
I was never excited for Carney
Politicians gonna politician. They will all will be in favour of this kind of citizen tracking because it makes enforcing policy easier, doesn’t matter if it is Liberal, Conservative, or NDP.
It’s never about porn or children. It’s about control, money and a fear of ones own citizenry.
It’s also about scanning everyone’s faces for their databases, and probably to feed Palantir in the end.
For sure, only pure evil motives. Establishment needs to destroy Canada to pillage it. Wrap it up in war on China and Russia. Deliver Canadian slaves to Israel and US oligarchy.
mostly its for tracking political dissidents, once you have to “upload your id eventually”, control of the female body is just a side benefit.
The only way this would be acceptable is if they built a trustless authenticator. Until then they can fuck the hell off.
The tech exists and has for decades and is battle hardened. It is called zero proof knowledge but Centralized power wants nothing to do with it as it is a decentralized technology. It is ok, as we will be forced to move towards decentralized services the more we wade into the new AI/Quantum Age as anything Centralized is a sitting duck for being hacked and hacked often to the point that they become useless.
“Those that trade privacy for security deserve neither.”
How about they start addressing the actual problem rather than half-measures from think tanks. If it was truly about children, they should be passing policies from a macro standpoint that encourage people to have a family and kids. Right now, it’s economically grim and has been sliding that way for many decades. The rise of fascist and surveillance state policies is only going to make it worse. Say bye-bye to your birthrate and we’re right back where we started again with the gov trying to pump the numbers via mass immigration.
What does all this have to do with this bill? The intent may be framed as protecting/preventing kids from adult material, but it’s also about making it desirable to have kids because “big brother is watching you/protecting you” (SMH here on how stupid this all is). These legislators are out of touch. We as a society need to address the root of the problem - why do we have a CSAM problem in the first place? It’s a horrific thing to have, and to be honest, those that turn to it likely have a mental illness.
As for kids accessing adult material online - why is the government being a nanny state? This is the parent’s job.
I have zero confidence that they can keep everyone’s data private and safe given how many breaches there are.
Yes and no
Call it a nanny state but companies have been abusing kids to help and back with social media which, IMHO is a much, MUCH bigger problem than porn. I’m all for a ban on social media for kids under 18 at least.
I fully agree that we need privacy and a system should be put in place that does t spy on the citizens bu at the same time we do need protections for the citizens
The entire “he who sacrifices privacy for security” is a bad faith argument. Tell that to a 70yo granny who just lost all of her life savings to scammers. Tell that to the 15 year old that just committed suicide due to some social media bullshit. Tell that to the countless teenagers wrestling with anxiety and can’t get themselves away from social media anymore because companies refined their algorithms so far that they’re addicting as fuck.
That is where governments are supposed to step in. Not everything should be legal or else we should also permit owning weapons grade plutonium. Yes, that is an extreme, but its to show that we need limits and the question is where
Yes, government can be abusive and very much on the wrong side, like with the marijuana prohibition that broke and ended countless lives. Now Europe wants to spy in all chats FFS.
Those are great examples.of bad government control but just because these bad examples exist doesn’t meant hat any government control is bad
I would favor an age verification system that is guaranteed anonymous. That shouldn’t be too hard to setup if the government gives out codes to the citizens, and they can give independent non profit foundations a list of the codes with only the birthdate. Citizen supplies the anonymous code to website, website requests age at foundation, that’s it.
Foundation can’t legally reveal to government (or anyone for that matter) what code visited what, and the foundation doesn’t know what code is what citizen
It’s just a random idea written on the toilet, I’m sure there are better algorithms out there to do this, but the point is that it can be done in a fair, dependable and anonymous way.
We need SOME control, no control just doesn’t work.
At least apply the controls to all the big players for starters
If they were serious about privacy-preserving age verification, they’d be looking at zero-knowledge proofs. Since ZKP is not on the table, this is really about control and surveillance.
Now we deal with this shit even here?
They’ve been pushing this for years now.
Manwin is based out of Montreal, i.e. Pornhub. I can’t see this passing. Canada is quite literally the porn capital of the world, trust me I know I worked for 3 separate porn companies here in Canada. I just don’t see it happening.
You think business wont just pick up and move to a part of the world with less regulation?
I’d rather this type of legislation not even be entertained in Parliament and treated the same way as if someone tried to propose banning oxygen. I’ll be writing to my MP tomorrow and I encourage everyone reading this to do the same. If you let them take a centimetre of our privacy, they’ll take an entire kilometre.
The dark web became known as the hideout of internet criminals. Once we’re all internet criminals, it will just be the hideout of everyone. Time to drop all these commercial services that we’ve let take over the internet and go back to being anonymous weirdos talking to other anonymous weirdos on websites run by anonymous weirdos. The web was ironically a nicer place. Also a shittier place, but at the same time a nicer place. This is why we can’t have nice things.
They will try to ban websites run by anonymous weirdos.
They can try. Bans require enforcement, and they catch a few of us weirdos from time to time, but the hydra always grows more heads.
“Ban Website” sounds good in the news but those words together barely even parse to an idea.
A website is just a bunch of files hosted on a computer, put them behind some kind of access control and the outside world can’t even know that they exist. Unless ISPs decide to block all inbound traffic to subscribers you can always just
apt install apache2.Unless ISPs decide to block all inbound traffic to subscribers
I think some ISPs already do this, if they suspect you’re running any kind of server, to force you to subscribe to a more expensive “business” plan.
The shitty ones do this. Or you get stuck behind cNAT.
It may be well-intentioned
It may, but it is not.
Stop that garbage bill that will expose your data to criminals in data breaches.
Criminals? What about politicians, advertisers and law enforcement?
synonyms
Yeah, criminals.
How about instead we ban propaganda and bots?
But that would be impossible, you know. And we can’t just go around controlling what people say and think and consume, you know. Because free speech and such and so forth and so on.
collects lobbyist payment
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.
Maybe a booth teaching them?
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.
its not by accident that all the porn verification are happening in multiple countries all at the same time.
Nooooo, I thought Canada was very far from this bull shit
Why? We are, and have always been, an economic appendage to the USA.
So did I 🥲
Call or write to your MP. Let them know that no one wants this.
That’s always been the point.
