The Spanish government has a plan to prevent kids from watching porn online: Meet the porn passport.
Officially (and drily) called the Digital Wallet Beta (Cartera Digital Beta), the app Madrid unveiled on Monday would allow internet platforms to check whether a prospective smut-watcher is over 18. Porn-viewers will be asked to use the app to verify their age. Once verified, they’ll receive 30 generated “porn credits” with a one-month validity granting them access to adult content. Enthusiasts will be able to request extra credits.
You have to request more porn credits from the government if you need more? Don’t want the government to be tracking this data of you. This is a privacy issue
What a ridiculous system. For some reason I expected that their efforts to offer an illusion of privacy would be better than the obfuscatory bullshit they’ve leaned on here in order to enable “traceability.”
I hope it goes down so badly in Spain that the rest of Europe is once and for all convinced that such schemes to restrict and monitor the web browsing habits of every citizen are ineffective for their stated purpose, needlessly invasive of privacy and freedom, destructive of democracy, and can serve only as a prelude to totalitarianism.
Having read the actual description of the protocol, such as it is, I should add in the interest of fairness that those "30 generated porn credits” do get you 30 new key pairs each month. They are issued directly by the central authority which knows exactly who they’re issuing them to, and the public key is presented directly to web sites you visit. But they promise not to track how you use them.
That it’s so absurd and poorly designed is reassuring in a way. It’s difficult to imagine anyone using this.