30 years ago, getting your hands on porn as a teenager meant wandering into the woods and just hoping that you found a discarded copy of Hustler that someone had inexplicably tried to light on fire. These days, it’s as easy as opening up the browser on your iPhone and typing in the words “big bobs (sic) please”. The only thing standing between a prospective underaged porn viewer and the porn they so desperately crave is a few drop-down boxes and their own moral compunctions about lying to a drop-down box. Since, as we all know, teens have no moral compunctions about anything, it is basically impossible to stop them.
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So how do you solve this seemingly unsolvable problem? The Department of Home Affairs has a few ideas about that, and one of them is facial recognition. That fucking terrifying sentence is a result of the parliamentary inquiry into age verification for online wagering and online pornography, being conducted by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs.
During the submissions period of the inquiry, Home Affairs decided to weigh in, suggesting the implementation of document verification services that require people to provide ID to verify their age. Going further, they suggested this could be tied to facial recognition to, say, stop kids from stealing their dad’s ID to look at some tiddies:
In addition, Home Affairs is developing a Face Verification Service which matches a person’s photo against images used on one of their evidence of identity documents to help verify their identity. The Face Verification Service complements the Document Verification Service by preventing the use of stolen as well as fake identity information. This could assist in age verification, for example by preventing a minor from using their parent’s driver licence to circumvent age verification controls.
Home Affairs notes that giving facial identification data to private businesses hinges on the passage of the Identity-matching Services Bill 2019 (another fucking terrifying thought) and the availability of face data from identification documents provided by the states and territories.
I for one am looking forward to a wonderful, not-at-all dystopian future where I am required to upload a photo of my licence and a selfie to be able to look at Insane bisexual threesome (Very Hot!!), and other things of that nature.
