Saw this in another privacy group and seems this hasn’t been discussed much lately, despite it continuing to make steady progress towards being enacted.
S-209 - age verification on adult sites - Passed the Senate and is now scheduled for second reading in House this Thursday (Sept 24). C-34 - age verification on adult content, social media, and AI chatbots. Currently in House.
S-209 in particular would allow the government to censor sites at the ISP level that refuse to do age verification. This is important since most adult sites are refusing to do age verification as data shows 90-99% of adult site users are unwilling to age verify. This is all the pretext the government needs to censor access to a site. Maybe you can work around it for a while with a VPN, but outlawing VPNs is the next step that legislators have been trying to take in other jurisdictions.
The right solution, as it has always been, is on-device parental controls which allows mature content to be blocked by parents without infringing on everyone else’s privacy and free speech. There is already a robust ecosystem powered by the free RTA Label meta tag, which all major adult sites already implement and already has on-device support from phones, browsers, and search engines. There is no need for data collection or tracking.
Anyway, now is a very good time to contact your member of Parliament if you want to oppose these bills.
Yep. If ever forced to do so on my Lemmy instance I’d sooner close down.