How will restricting some pornography affect your freedom?
It's not about having my access to pornography restricted. In fact, as I stated earlier (perhaps not very well) this won't actually restrict my access - nor the access of anyone but those that can't use Google. What it does do is open the door for further profiling and tracking of anyone accessing the internet.
I do accept that mild pornography is probably pretty tame compared to what I'm sure exists on there (i.e. violent sexual scenes, exploitation, "revenge porn", as well as violent videos showing death and horrific life altering events) - and I get that people should be free - but this newfound freedom of the internet has proven that humans have no self control. Now that all this information is so readily available people seek out more and more extreme things - I don't know if it is entirely healthy. I had the unfortunate experience of watching a real death on the internet (African militia casually shooting villagers, it was graphic, and so offhand in their execution of men and women) - it really has stuck with me and made me wish I had never seen it (this was over 10 years ago when all this stuff was still relatively novel). Having seen death in real life, somehow seeing it on the internet made it so casual and easy, I can see how this can be very emotionally scarring for some people. We never had access to this extreme level of graphic detail before. Now, this does not have to be a bad thing too I accept, but humans are poor at controlling themselves, and we sometimes are too carefree for our own good. Some people have no self control either and keep seeking out the next worse thing.
I agree that there are lots of harmful things out there - on the internet and off it. There are also restrictions placed on some of that stuff (e.g. age verification to buy alcohol and cigarettes, though once you "look old enough" that is no longer the case). Unfortunately the restrictions and laws placed on things are often not based on evidence and instead politically or ideologically motivated.
Data privacy laws do exist, but surely with a warrant and relevant permissions they would be overturned regardless of terrorism no? Surely you wouldn't mind a bad guy, or a gang be apprehended with all this evidence available?
I actually have no issue with my phone lines being tapped, internet snooped, etc etc if it is a targeted response/investigation. I accept that is required for the authorities to do their jobs. My issue is with blanket surveillance with little or no safeguards on the gathered data - which is exactly what the Snooper's Charter brought in. This is another step in further profiling users and generating huge datasets with little or no provision for protecting that data.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to live in a world where we all don't need to be profiled, or have data protection laws, and so on. What's the answer if we don't do this? Also, how is your life directly being impacted by what is being proposed? I'm not saying you're wrong, and I clearly have missed something, so apologies for being a bit slow, but I'm quite happy to admit I'm clueless about this. However, all I need is some pros/cons or a list of things that will explain why chasing this agenda will lead to something really bad. I understand people want to have privacy, because they don't want some of their private thoughts, emails, activities or parts of their lives recorded (whether legitimate or not, legal or not etc...). If you're an average Joe then surely all this will hardly or not even impact you, unless I've missed something (which I think I clearly have). This is more significant if you're a person of influence/celebrity or whatever.
The impact on me is that I'm looking at the recent trends with regards to data privacy and predicting what looks to be a future trend - i.e. our rights and liberties are going to be further eroded. It isn't about this (fairly minor if looked at in isolation) change but it's about the direction things are moving in.
To break things down a little bit about this particular change, see below. I've tried to remove my own subjective bias by not including points about eroding rights/etc/etc.
Pros (including refutation)
Children are protected from seeing sex/extreme porn (refutation: like any of the current internet safeguards that are put in place, it is a trivial job to bypass them if you simply search on google for 5 seconds)
Cons
Encourages users to hand over payment details to sites, i.e. increasing likelihood of fraud.
Creates large unprotected databases of people's personal pornography and sexual interests, which could easily be breached or leaked.
The internet is not always a good tool, look at the photo leaks of celebrities sending private messages to their loved ones (be they "sexy" poses or not). Hence my distancing from social media - not that I send naked selfies (that didn't exist at the time I would have done it!), but the internet is uncontrolled and is a free for all - maybe it needs a bit of it? I don't know. I still see it as a tool and a distraction. I'm quite happy when I go somewhere where there is no internet - doesn't bother me in the slightest.
Like virtually any tool, it can be misused. I'm not against more policing of certain aspects of it but I don't believe that this change is a positive one on that front - or at the very least any extremely minor benefit is massively outweighed by the negative aspects. The internet most certainly is not a free for all as there are plenty of legitimate measures in place already that protect people (IWF for example, until what seemed like an innocuous and effective tool to protect people was re-purposed for something else).
It's interesting that you mentioned the leaked celebrity pictures (and related blackmail) as an example actually. These large, likely unsecured, databases of pornography viewing habits are going to be massive targets for being hacked, leaked and then used to blackmail or embarrass people and intrude into their private lives.
I don't think that whether or not anyone can take or leave social media or the internet has any bearing on the point at hand though. I definitely can't say I'm a big fan of social media and I'm not completely addicted to the internet but everyone is an individual and many people younger than us have grown up having not known anything but the internet to be a massive part of their lives.
