We’ve spoken before about the lunacy that is the UK’s ‘porn pass’ – a unique number tied to your verifiable identity that you would purchase at the newsagent’s and input as age verification into any website deemed too ‘adult’ for you to look at all by yourself.
If that seems like a loopy Orwellian brainfart, well, it’s from the country that brought you this
Not only is it not satire (no, really), it’s the London Transport Museum’s poster of the week. Because that is how these people think.
Anyone with any idea how technology actually works can see a thing or two that might go wrong here (with the porn pass, not with Big Brother getting a bit part in On the Busses.)
Let’s violate privacy to create a massive target for hackers
For a start, it will create a giant data lake of people’s pornographic viewing habits, linked to a verifiable identifier like a passport. Meaning if you happen to like something unusual, bingo.
Suppose I’m a foreign government seeking Kompromat and I’m running out of pee tapes; or say I’m a terrorist organization that really wants access to your building; or again, perhaps I’m just interested in extorting money from you; or maybe I’m a nutter who wants to beat up gay people (or worse). All I need to do is hack that data lake.
(All of which is aside from the real, underlying point: free people see, read and hear what they want. It’s that simple. Don’t believe in free speech for people you hate, ideas you despise, or forms of entertainment and expression that just plain baffle you? You don’t believe in free speech.)
That shouldn’t sound too unlikely. Look at the size, scale and most importantly, the commonness of enormous data leaks in recent years. Government and big corporations are the least-likely candidates to keep your data safe, even assuming for a moment that it’s not them you’re trying to keep it safe from in the first place.
And then let’s hand the keys to… um…
But never fear. In between fielding walkouts from Winston Churchill LARPer Boris Johnson and wondering whether they can indeed deliver the electorate the square circle which so many – but not quite a majority – of them voted for, and evading the probing questions about the involvement of a hostile foreign power in that election, the UK government has come up with a solution.
Rather than hold the data themselves – clumsy old me, just don’t trust meself – they’re giving it to…
MindGeek.
Oh yeah. Dublin, Hamburg, Miami, Los Angeles… that’s a lot of jurisdictions, for one thing. I’m not sure that in their infinite wisdom HM government have thought thought through the regulatory compliance issues that could be at stake here.
But you can see why they’ve done it, in a way. After all, MindGeek owns…
Source
…porn. MindGeek basically owns porn. They control the production and distribution of a significant wedge of mainstream pornographic content worldwide. Should they really be in charge of administering a state-backed system of ID as well?
Forget the porn. Let’s talk about the money
Throw in ID verification and gatekeeping and you have an industry, all but owned by a single company, handling every stage of the production and consumption of a product. It might not matter much to you, but the porn industry is worth a penny or two.
About $90 billion in profit, not revenue. Of which MindGeek made $460 million revenue in 2015 – but, worryingly, not much of a profit. (Hey, how might they be hoping to ramp up their profits? Perhaps there’s someone out there who would pay for individuated data like that…)
Ignoring for a moment the third-rail, hot-button topic that people have genitals and like playing with them, this is serious economic and political corruption.
Take the example of oil. No, not that kind of oil. Get your MindGeek out of the gutter. I’m talking crude. The oil industry is worth $5 trillion globally; ExxonMobil made $231 billion globally in 2017. Imagine if we gave ExxonMobil the power to check driving licenses and the exclusive right to hold onto all your driving data, including where your vehicle had been sighted and when.
Sound crazy?
That’s what I thought.
Then imagine you gave them the right to just plain spy on you even when you weren’t in your car.
Because MindGeek won’t just have access to everything people do on their sites. If Facebook can track you across the entire web, do you really think MindGeek can’t and won’t? Get a MindGeek/Government ID and you’re handing over your entire web browsing history to a company that both publishes pornography and carries out surveillance.
Time to get yourself a VPN, my friend. Long past time.
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