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Australia Privacy Software Technology

Australia Wants To Use Face Recognition For Porn Age Verification (arstechnica.com) 89

Posted by BeauHD from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Lawmakers in Australia (like their counterparts in the United Kingdom) are looking for an effective way to limit kids' access to online pornography. Australia's Department of Home Affairs has a possible solution: face-recognition technology. "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 government agency wrote in a recent regulatory filing. "This could assist in age verification, for example by preventing a minor from using their parent's driver license to circumvent age verification controls."

Australia's government face-matching system has been years in the making. In 2016, the government announced that (in the words of CNET) "the first phase of its new biometric Face Verification Service (FVS) is up and running, giving a number of government departments and the Australian Federal Police the ability to share and match digital photos of faces." Initially, the system was fairly limited. It only included photos of people who had applied to become Australian citizens. And use of the database was supposed to be limited to a handful of government agencies with a compelling need for it. But since then, the government has steadily expanded the system. Photos from other sources were added to the database. And Australia has been trying to develop a more sophisticated Face Identification Service that can identify unknown persons. "The Face Verification Service is not yet fully operational," the government acknowledges. "Whilst it is intended to be made available to private sector organizations in future, this will be subject to the passage of the Identity-matching Services Bill 2019 which is currently before Parliament."
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Australia Wants To Use Face Recognition For Porn Age Verification More

Australia Wants To Use Face Recognition For Porn Age Verification

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  • Seriously, what's the worst that could happen?

    • Re:Why bother (Score:5, Insightful)

      by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @03:09PM (#59355776) Homepage

      Let's see....

      1) Data gets MITMed and used for blackmail
      2) Pictures of faces - like the actual one on the ID photo will probably work fine
      3) Giving any personal information to an untrusted web site period is a problem if you're required to match up info with the face
      4) Access would be limited only to devices with cameras, which is bizarre on its ow
      5) False positives could be associated with a different person
      6) Government has a database of this activity
      7) Yeah, I'll quit now - there are too many to name.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by 0dugo0 ( 735093 )

        I agree, I meant, what's the worst that could happen if you just let everyone run into online porn.

        • The worst scenario: kid is fascinated, but is more interested in imagery of similar aged people, kid generates demand for child porn

          • If the system uses AI that can actually happen. Take the racist twitter bot as an example. With the amount of people, not using AI would be very troublesome.
            What if they expanded the control so you can only watch porn that is in your age range?
            "With great power comes great abuse".
            As an example take the semi-global block-list. It is abused constantly.

            • Yes, I agree completely that this sort of mechanism is heinous to the core. I don't believe physical age has anything to do with love. Growing up, I knew teens who looked and acted in their 30s and dated accordingly. Today, I know people in their late 20s who still look like children. In fact, the latter appears to be a desirable feature in modern pornography. How will AI treat these folks?

              Adding to my previous remark, an underage person who habitually consumes such content might become interested in produ
          • If you have sex with a 15 year old and you are 14, does that make you a pedo?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tuidjy ( 321055 )

        Heh. The first thing that came to my mind is that it would be trivial to pretend being someone else. They are not going to give porn sites full data dumps of national ID databases, are they?

        So it will be trivial to make fake IDs snapshots, and manipulate a real video to manufacture a face that matches the eye-to-eye distance, etc. It won't fool a human, but it will fool most A.I. They can compute the length of a segment easily, but don't see anything wrong with a face looking like the digit 8.

        So, it wil

        • They could have a service like googles "Im a human" button. The site have nothing to do with it. The data is processed in google servers.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )
        I'll let you know what is going to happen.

        1. Conservative government announces plan to Do Something(TM) about Porn because sex and nudity is Evi(R).
        2. People who know what they're on about list reasons why the whole idea will fail.
        3. Conservative government wastes money faffing about. Comes up with impressive sounding name to make it look like they're Doing Something(TM).
        4. Conservative government gets into a completely different scandal and forgets about Operation Purity Defender(C).
        5. Conservative

    • But I saw both porn, kissing, and nude people as a kid.

      Since I had never seen it, and was curious I of course wanted to look at it until I had absorbed everything there was to *know* about it. I found people pretty ... ugly .. down there.
      But after I had seen enough, it just became ... "meh". The fat bellies and hanging skin at the nude beach were uglier to me.
      And the hairy bits (this was the 70s and 80s) looked sweaty and smelly to me.
      I concentrated more on swimming and playing and building sand castles. O

    • Re:Why bother (Score:5, Funny)

      by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @03:58PM (#59356018)

      Are these the same people that I get these emails about them having recorded me on my web-cam from and that want money? Maybe the Australian State needs an additional revenue source...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      The law would be consitutionlly tossed out because legal requirement of camera in you home, good luck with that. This is nothing but a gambit, toss this out to put people up in arms and the force credit card ID, ohh look children under 18 are too stupid to recite the parents cedit card or one borrowed. Still blocking off a children only internet secured and encrypted, all monitored and secured because corporate advertising psychologically targeted to manipulate children would be banned. Protect the children

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gl4ss ( 559668 )

        look, what kind of laws do you think the uk lawmakers were referring to when talking about that "eu is limiting their sovereignity" exactly ?

        I the ones eu has been bitchin(and limiting) to uk most over the decades have all been about surveillance or civil rights. not about the shapes of tomatoes or cucumbers or whatever or border controls or staying out of schengen, but about how much they can blanket spy on their citizens legally.

  • Children are not harmed by porn, and it's less emotionally and medically complex than going out and having sex. Age limits on this seem like a senseless hassle for an incomprehensible end. It's not like it was hard for people in earlier times to get access to porn anyhow.

    • Re:Children should have access to porn (Score:5, Informative)

      by Lucas123 ( 935744 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @03:18PM (#59355814) Homepage

      "Children are not harmed by porn..."

      Well, it's good to have the resident child psychologist chime in on this argument.

      "It's not like was hard for people in earlier times to get access to porn anyhow."

      I'm assuming you're either young or simply unaware that before the internet... way, way, waaay back in the 1990s, attaining porn meant either ordering it though the mail or traveling to a seedy part of town and buying it from a pornography video store.

      (and, no, I'm not an expert on the subject; it's common knowledge).

      • Re:Children should have access to porn (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @03:53PM (#59355988)

        "Children are not harmed by porn..."

        Well, it's good to have the resident child psychologist chime in on this argument.

        Real psychologists have mixed opinions about whether porn is harmful. Research is also mixed and often biased.

        But let us be clear about where the burden-of-proof lies: Squarely on those who want more government regulation of what the people can see and hear.

        Without strong and clear evidence that porn is harmful, government censorship should not even be considered.

        • Without strong and clear evidence that porn is harmful, government censorship should not even be considered.

          But what would Jesus think of the bible thumping politicians, to say nothing of what well funded the Christian lobby would think?

        • Professional porn gives kids a twisted view of what real sex is. Talking with young adults that become as obvious as a slap in the face.
          As long as they watch amateur porn it is perfectly fine as long as they stay away from the fetish section. BDSM on their first try may not go so well.
          Proper parents should take responsibility and provide the content. The schools suck at sex education on many places so teaching the kids about what the real thing is becomes the job of the parents. The facts and tips and trick

      • Re:Children should have access to porn (Score:4, Interesting)

        by lgw ( 121541 ) on Monday October 28, 2019 @04:08PM (#59356064) Journal

        Even growing up in the 70s, kids generally had access to some porn. Once Playboy and Penthouse existed, magazines were hand-me-downs from older friends, who got them from still older friends or dad's collection or whatever, but they were around for the curious. Hardcore stuff was admittedly more difficult to acquire, but by high school there were always a few going around.

        Tapes were a different matter, and very rare, except for taped cable porn.

        Of course, before porn magazines, people had postcards and books, and so on back to some of the oldest intact human artifacts.

      • way, way, waaay back in the 1990s, attaining porn meant either ordering it though the mail or traveling to a seedy part of town and buying it from a pornography video store.

        Don't know if this is just a UK thing, but I thought the traditional first porn was a 'jazz mag' found in the bushes. Many a happy ten year old pried open a sticky copy of 'Razzle', 'Fiesta' or 'Big Jugs Monthly' he found shoved into a garden privet hedge or down the park.

      • "I'm assuming you're either young or simply unaware that before the internet... way, way, waaay back in the 1990s, attaining porn meant either ordering it though the mail or traveling to a seedy part of town and buying it from a pornography video store."

        Or go to the barbershop. It was really the only reason for getting a haircut.

      • "Well, it's good to have the resident child psychologist chime in on this argument." There is no need to be a "child psychologist" for this. This is actually common knowledge and common experience from pretty much anyone who didn't grow up with brainless helicopter parents. Porn has never harmed anyone, unless you had some pre-existing mental conditions. I remember then when i was a child myself, in elementary school i believe, i found some porn magazines of my uncle hidden in a drawer, they were full of

      • kids don't pay for porn, so age/identity verification isn't much of a factor, regardless. And I am an expert in the matter, because I was a teenager once.

        We didn't pay for porn 35 years ago, either. We stole it - from older siblings, from convenience stores, from video stores, etc. Pretty much no teenager is putting $10 to I-don't-know-how-much on a credit card for a monthly subscription to porn, so verifying legitimate subscribers to porn sites is pretty much guaranteed to miss underage consumers, no ma

      • Why not just watch the parents or grandparents porn? I waited until I was alone in the house and picked a cassette at random. When I was young I really liked the ones with a good story. Like a movie with a little bit of sex thrown in. Actually watched it for the story. The sex was just interesting because it was something I had never seen before.

        We also had satellite tv so I stayed up late at night to watch the porn.

        FYI: Porn doesnt affect kids. Not in the way you think anyway. When I had caught my parents

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        "It's not like was hard for people in earlier times to get access to porn anyhow."

        I'm assuming you're either young or simply unaware that before the internet... way, way, waaay back in the 1990s, attaining porn meant either ordering it though the mail or traveling to a seedy part of town and buying it from a pornography video store.

        I'm assuming you're either very very young... or were an extremely unpopular teenager.

        I was born in the early 80's. When I entered puberty the internet was a very young thing. Broadband in homes wasn't a thing, in fact back then broadband was IDSN, which was 64k (or 128k if you paid for two lines) and cost a small fortune. In fact, a lot of people didn't even have dialup. There were dozens of ways of getting porn, most of it was magazines although some VCR. Mostly it revolved around knowing a dodgy perso

    • Finally, a legit mainstream child psychologist and likely a parent of 3 successful kids has weighed in, everyone!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by 0dugo0 ( 735093 )

      With that out of the way, what protections actually do make sense? You understand that porn sites don't operate from the goodness of their hearts, right!?

      • Always wear a condom whilst having sex. If you are having sex with yourself while looking at pictures then no condom or other protection is required.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Here are the pics of the guys coming up with the new surveillance infrastructure.
    Warning, graphic images. Not suitable for the faint hearted
    https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au... [homeaffairs.gov.au]

    • It proves my theory that the reason people become politicians is because they were bullied at school.

    • Neat!

      Cut out any of these pictures in photoshop... they're kind of small, probably going to need to resize them using Waifux2 a couple of times... print them out, and hold them up to the camera if/when you are required to present a face when signing up for this. Which will probably never happen.

      Every so often, some right-wing dingbat makes a ridiculous proposal along these lines... everyone goes "Harumph!" a lot, there's a media frenzy, everyone else in the world ridicules the Australians for being dumb e

  • Seeing nudity or porn does not harm children.
    Period.

    Unless they hit puberty and are supposed to be interested in it, kids don't want to see it, or kissing, by themselves. Other than that, it is simply uninteresting to them. Banning it only gives them a reason to want to see it (and be disappointed).

    The whole concept stems form the Catholic version of Shariah law (Victorians, Puritans & co), where nudity and sexuality were defined as "sins" unless the church allowed you to breed, so definitely *everyone

    • "Period", like the one in the Ph.D you most certainly have! This thread is bringing out the real educated, non-creepy-at-all experts in droves!

      Of course this face recognition scheme, like the failed plan in the UK for ID, is stupid but stop acting like kids seeing granny fisting porn online is "of course natural, and harmless", there, Richard Stallman Jr.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. Pretty much this.

      The reason why the Catholiban want porn suppressed is also clear: Masturbation does not produce more children that they can then exploit.

      The sad thing is that so many people fall for the scam.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lgw ( 121541 )

      Many governments these days seem to think they can stop people from using torrents to get whatever. Only China has had much luck with that. However, they don't actually care. The point of all such laws is mere posturing, results aren't even considered.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      Kids will just visit weirder websites that the boomers are the government don't know.
      And then when they get jack the fox kangaroo elected as a prime minister, and wonder how that could had happened.

    • https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Scott_Morrison_2014.jpg/220px-Scott_Morrison_2014.jpg

      I think it should pass most age tests..
      I doubt it will be in any of the database through, bugger.

  • So people are going to upload their picture to the government blackmail database every time they want to watch some porn?
    And kids aren't just going to use a pic of their parents or whoever to fool this?
    Or better yet, a VPN, proxy, or whatever else?

    • The best explanation I can come up with for this scheme is that the government hopes to selectively leak lists of porn sites which opposition politicians have face-logged into. It'd be a good way to win an election.

  • The number of things that can go wrong exceeds the stars in the visible sky.

  • This would be recording and probably storing the biometric information of minors since, well, eventually some kid is going to try to make it work anyway.

    If he is a minor he cannot consent to the company storing this data.

  • Identity for sexual purposes, is the biggest historical blackmail.

    This is nothing more than an massive invasion of privacy in the hopes of scaring people into not using porn.

    All for NO reasonable purpose. If you don't want your kids to access internet porn, then block it for your computer. Yes, it won't work 100%. Neither will your new method. Not even if you get done world wide (and that won't happen).

    I won't even talk about the absence of damage porn does to children, because the (mostly religious) n

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by 0dugo0 ( 735093 )

      Uh!? The reason I don't want my kids to go to porn sites is because the days they just left an apache log deleted after a week are over.

  • This is censorship. As a parent, I'll decide what my kids see online, not the govt.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by 0dugo0 ( 735093 )

      Suer, but what about the stuff they shared with these sites whilst being dumb childs?

  • ...should have their basements examined.

  • The UK just tried everything in the book to get that sort of thing through, and after spending an awful lot of money, they proved that it just wasn't feasible with current technology. You could spend an awful lot of money trying, and it'd be trivial to overcome.
    So they backed off, and the hardliners stopped making a fuss about it, and the government could get on with other stuff..

    Part of every project should be look at prior projects with the same resources and see how they fared, before pissing millions u

  • Though not technically a part of the law, in practice, they've banned a lot of porn because the women are small-breasted, giving them a sufficiently youthful appearance that it violates the ban on child porn. Banning underage porn is fine, but the women were verified or somehow demonstrably over 18, but the sites/content were banned anyway.

    Australia is also a place where the age of consent is LOWER than 18. A plausible scenario, then, is that you might not be able to post pictures of a model in her 20s who

  • Beside being a useless law, as they will just use VPNs or get porn from whatsapp, snapchat or other messaging tool, there is no real proof porn causes problems. Actually if anything, access to porn makes people LESS likely to have sex, not more, you get your fix and don't need to go after the opposite sex (or same sex) anymore. So if they are worried about sex violence and teen pregnancy, give people more porn, not less.

    Unless they are worried about who is going to pay for pensions 40 years from now, when

    • If men feel they don't really need female and don't crave n dance to their tunes, the feminists will lobby govt to ensure their power/control over men. So laws like this will pop up.

  • I think you under estimate the internet.

  • Gentlemen. [gamebanana.com]
  • This is probably the first time that being black in Australia was an advantage. [wired.com]
  • So are we suggesting that porn sites capture the images of people using them. Would that not mean that if children tried to use the site their image would now be held by a porn vender. I don't know about you but I'm sure someone hosting porn & also hosting a large number of images of children is a bit unsettling or possibly even illegal.
  • (1) Adult goes to porn websites.
    (2) Adult prints out porn on modern color printer.
    (3) Sells to kids.

    Or are people too old to remember wanking it to magazines? Kids will find a way to look at porn. I certainly did when I was a kid. I suspect almost everyone has and for a long, long time. People love to forget that we're animals and that's still what drives us. We should embrace it, not fear it.

  • "I'll take "Shit That Can't Be Done" for $500, Alex."

  • Let a ISP can collect years of VPN usage for the gov.

  • You are not allowed to access porn unless you demonstrate that you have a camera (suitable for hacking) that will allow the capture of video of you wanking to the aforementioned porn.

  • I'v seen people selfbeclown proudly claiming they don't need no stinking First Amendment, and democracy can wield censorship safely!

    Don't worry, folks. What could possibly go wrong with computers recording your access to this or that porn site? Gubbermint tells us it won't record it!

    This is porn leading high tech in yet another game-changer app, but not for the usual reason.

  • Yes, it's a stereotype. The funny thing here is everybody is thinking about the kids, but what about the adults? Now, if this was something to work on finding kidnapped/runaway kids that are underage and doing porn, sure. Otherwise there's better stuff to be doing with the money. Parents just need to turn off the internet and learn to say no to their brats if they actually care about this.
  • Porn for age verification
  • The next logical step would be for the government to require age verification before you're allowed to look at yourself naked in the mirror. You'd also need to apply for a government-issued license if you want to touch yourself below the waist. And, all consensual sex would have to be filmed by the government, to ensure you aren't breaking any laws against sodomy, etc.

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