Tuesday, August 13, 2013

So how's that going to work then?

Imagine you're a young teen, or even younger and you suddenly have unlimited access to the sweetie jar that is the internet either because your parents don't give a damn, or that you know how the home computer works far better than they do. Suddenly you're faced with a decision...
A little notification comes up asking to know if you're old enough to watch this content...
Decisions, decisions eh?
Telegraph.
Ministers want parents and teenagers themselves to be able to assign age-ratings to videos and other content which has been uploaded by internet users onto websites.
The government is working with internet service companies and media regulators to test how “crowd sourcing” such age ratings can work, The Telegraph has learnt.
The move follows concerns over the widespread availability of legal pornography and violent videos which ministers believe are corrupting children’s minds.
David Cameron said last month that he feared for his own children’s exposure to inappropriate material on the internet and lamented the lack of “rules” on age controls that apply to websites.
Cameron by name Camoron by nature. How the fucking hell (pardon my French) is any website going to know how old the people are watching their content? God alone knows I get nearly a thousand lookin's a day (most I suspect are spammers or googlebots) and to be honest I haven't a clue as to who they are, or indeed who you are looking at this.
What you'll get is a little notification pops up saying you must be over (pick an age) to view this content. Then a little button saying 'I'm over' and a button saying 'I'm under' followed by a quick check to see if mum's dozing on the sofa then clickety click no doubt.
Either that or government tries to get people to opt in to self censorship (ha ha) or forces us to opt in and so has statistics on everyone opting in. Anyone here feeling any levels of trust as to those statistics staying private? Perhaps one day it will come to a trial and the prosecution will wave a sheet of paper from your ISP proving you're a pervert, it's called mission creep and what a government of today says is not binding on the government of tomorrow.
Why won't they leave us alone and simply get on with running the country rather than trying to run our lives?

4 annotations:

Mark Wadsworth said...

"I haven't a clue as to who they are, or indeed who you are looking at this."

Well I'm me and who I say I am, you can Google me and track me down if you are so minded.

Not that you care, but apart from that, agreed. Self-censorship my arse.

Quiet_Man said...

Well your word is indeed good enough for me. Assuming this isn't someone using your account...

Barman said...

I'm sure that the checking will be much, much more sophisticated that you imagine....

It will prolly ask your date of birth or something....

Woman on a Raft said...

I'm me and I pop over regularly.

I don't think it makes any difference but I'm not a spammer or a robot.