Spanish porn passport - NoFap-anon/NoFap_russian-manual GitHub Wiki

A two or three days ago some strange news from Spain came to your humble servant's attention. The Spanish government is planning to introduce something strange - limited in time and number of uses network passes for viewing porn sites.

When studying this topic it turned out that talks about such bills in Spain have been going on for years, but about something clear and concrete news appeared in Spanish on July 2, 2024 (good and detailed article from El Mundo [1]), on July 3 news in English (Politico [2], Spanish News Today [3], The Olive Press [4]). A good thread can be found off Reddit at r/privacy [5].

What's the point?

It would seem that the original goal was to keep children and teenagers (people under the age of 18) away from porn sites. But! For some reason, the Spanish government decided to introduce such a strange thing as a "porn passport" (officially Digital Wallet Beta, but Spaniards jokingly called it as "porn passport") with 30 accesses/sessions that have a 30-day usage limit. That is, 30 days pass, all unused sessions are burned off and the man applies for a new version of the digital card.

The most surprising thing is that this "porn passport" will be issued to adults (!!!), although it seems that the original goal was to protect children and teenagers.

How will this work technically?

Access to porn sites will be managed by the Spanish Digital Wallet Beta (mobile application), which also stores other citizen documents, such as registration certificates or university diplomas. Perhaps in the future this service will also be used for transactions within the "digital money" system or CBDC, as its name hints at (subjective assumption).

Digital Wallet Beta of an adult user will be labeled with the letter K (details are not described). Apparently, the whole system looks like servers on the government side, a mobile app on the citizen side, and verification forms on the side of porn sites (and browsers), that will ask a person to scan a QR code inside the Digital Wallet Beta app in order for the person to access porn videos on the target porn site.

Initially, the Spanish government is proposing to include only porn sites that are located (probably referring to hosting services inside the country) in Spain itself, but they want to expand the application of their law to most of the world's porn sites.

Is there something similar in other countries?

Yes. This is the saddest and funniest thing at the same time. Here are a few examples:

  1. Canada and the Bill S-210, or the "Act to restrict young persons’ online access to sexually explicit material" [6]. It's a complete mincemeat of sending biometrics to unreliable government databases, blocking all sites that won't implement the necessary verification methods, expanding the wording of the law to potential include all UGC sites (any site where ordinary users can write articles or comments, post pictures, videos, etc.).

  2. The United States and the laws H.B. 311 and S.B. 152 [7]. These laws started in Utah and Texas, but by 2024, age verification should ideally be required for porn sites in 1/3 of all US states [8], and such verification applies not only to porn sites, but also to social networks. "Curfews" for minors (blocking social networking sites from 10:30 pm to 6:30 am), age verification of anyone who creates a profile on social networks in these states, entry to porn sites only after confirming age with a government document (digital driver's license, etc.) - all the most delicious things in one package.

  3. UK and Online Safety Act [9]. It turns out that in 2022 Nofap-wiki already published a small article about this law, which was then still called Online Safety Bill [10]. The Act goes into effect in Q4 2023, but will be rolled out until Q3 2026. It's pretty big, and involves not only "protecting" children from pornography, but also forcing platforms to control content about terrorism, suicide, sex crimes and fraud, and increasing transparency of services. Failure to comply could result in fines and even criminal prosecutions against corporate heads. But it is not yet clear how exactly the age of the user will be checked when entering a porn site (something more concrete will appear at the end of 2025 - beginning of 2026).

Is all this really about protecting children from online porn?

Politicians are trying to push various controls through under the most plausible of pretexts. If not protecting children, then fighting terrorism, if not fighting terrorism, then "the enemy is at the gate", if not "the enemy is at the gate", then fighting climate change, if not fighting climate change, then... You get the picture.

Unfortunately, the above initiatives are not particularly credible given the following points:

  1. They do nothing to prevent the spread of porn through slower and inconvenient (torrents, usb flash drives) or older (paper magazines, books) media.

  2. In the countries above, teens can begin their gender transition (hormone therapy and then surgery) as early as 12-16 years old [11][12]. The laws being promoted attempt to "keep" children and teens under the age of 18 away from porn. While the decision to start taking hormones and then go under a surgeon's scalpel subjectively looks like something more serious, responsible and irreversible than the decision to watch porn for the first time.

  3. If the governments of these countries were really concerned about the harm of pornography to children and adolescents, they would have included sections on the harm of pornography in school courses on sex education. But your humble servant has not seen such news yet. There is only one US teacher's post on the subject [13], where he says that the course he teaches describes "the pros and cons of pornography, based on evidence-based information", but he is "not aware of any 'dangers' that would be directly attributed to pornography, except for the dangers to the health and well-being of porn actors" (the classic "what they tell us from above is what we reproduce, and your Pubmed is nothing"). That is, if there is anywhere where teachers talk about the dangers of pornography, it's more likely to be in Christian-oriented homeschooling, or in select private schools and colleges. And we're only talking about the United States.

Critics of Spain's "porn passport" law, Canada's Bill S-210, and the UK's Online Safety Act rightly point out that this sets a precedent where people, under the pretext of increasing safety for children, surrender their own rights and freedoms (the right to privacy of correspondence, for example) to the state, in ways that in the future may be expanded (from porn sites and criminal content to regular sites and regular content - e.g., about politics, economics, society, philosophy, etc.) and deepened (more tracking and control tools on the side of sites, providers, hosting, user end devices, etc.).

I don't know what other nofaper communities think about this and similar laws, but I want to repeat that the first and most important line of defense against pornography for every person should take place within the borders of their own brain. If this line of defense is not there, then all external bans, all external help and all external advices will be meaningless and will have no effect. Or they will have a minimal and time-limited effect.

If medical officials in the same countries have been refusing to acknowledge the reality of porn addiction and masturbation addiction for years (shamefully packing these two addictions and a bunch of other abnormalities into an obscure term called "compulsive sexual behavior"), why have other officials in the same countries so zealously taken up the task of protecting children and adolescents from porn sites? And have they done so in such a way that this protection forces adults to bow to the state to create control and subjugation where until recently there was complete freedom?

Such initiatives are reminiscent of a late 18th- and early 19th-century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham's project called the Panopticon [14], a cylindrical prison in which the prisoners' cells adjoin the outer wall of the building and in the center is a guard's observation tower, that allows him to watch the prisoner in such a way, that prisoners do not know at any given moment whether they are being watched or not. According to the philosopher's idea, this could create ideal conditions for the re-education of criminals.

Only, of course, adjusted for modern technology and using the bait in the form of "protection" for children and adolescents.

Such laws have minimal relevance to Nofap.

P.s. The translation was done with the help of DeepL with minor edits.

Links

  1. Article Los adultos que quieran entrar en webs porno deberán tener un 'carnet digital' de 30 accesos válido durante 30 días, 2024 on site El Mundo – https://www.elmundo.es/espana/2024/07/01/6682a6e7fc6c8382428b45a2.html

  2. Article Spain introduces porn passport to stop kids from watching smut, 2024 on site Politico – https://www.politico.eu/article/spain-builds-porn-passport-to-stop-kids-watching-smut/

  3. Article Spain introduce app to restrict access to online porn, 2024 on site Spanish News Today – https://spanishnewstoday.com/spain_introduces_app_to_restrict_access_to_online_porn_1000088502-a.html

  4. Article PLAN TO RESTRICT EXPLICIT CONTENT FOR MINORS SUFFERS MAJOR SETBACK IN SPAIN: GOVERNMENT APP ALLOWS ACCESS TO TOP 10 PORN WEBSITES, 2024 on site The Olive Press – https://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2024/07/03/plan-to-restrict-explicit-content-for-minors-suffers-major-setback-in-spain-government-app-allows-access-to-top-10-porn-websites/

  5. Thread Spain is working on a law regarding pornography we should all be worried about, 2024 on site Reddit, subreddit r/privacy – https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1dt6dk1/spain_is_working_on_a_law_regarding_pornography/

  6. Article What’s wrong with Bill S-210? An OpenMedia FAQ, 2024 on site OpenMedia – https://openmedia.org/article/item/whats-wrong-with-bill-s-210-an-openmedia-faq

  7. Article Utah governor signs laws requiring parents' consent for minors to use social media, 2023 on site NBC News – https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/social-media-law-utah-parent-consent-age-verification-curfew-rcna76178

  8. Article Nearly one-third of U.S. states now require age verification for porn sites, 2024 on site Catholic News Agency – https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/257731/nearly-one-third-of-us-states-now-require-age-verification-for-porn-sites

  9. Article The UK’s controversial Online Safety Bill finally becomes law, 2023 on site The Verge – https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23922397/uk-online-safety-bill-law-passed-royal-assent-moderation-regulation

  10. Article "Online Safety Bill and restricting UK children and young people's access to online pornography. 11.02.2022", 2022 on NoFap-Wiki – https://github.com/NoFap-anon/NoFap_russian-manual/wiki/Online-Safety-Bill-и-ограничение-доступа-детей-и-подростков-из-Великобритании-к-онлайн-порнографии.-11.02.2022

  11. Guideline Endocrine Treatment of Gender-Dysphoric/Gender-Incongruent Persons: An Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline, 2017 – https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/102/11/3869/4157558

  12. Scientific article Transgender medicine: long-term outcomes from ‘the Dutch model’, 2014 – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4349440/

  13. Question Does sex education at schools teach students about the dangers of online pornography?, 2017 on service Quora, response of user David Freiman – https://www.quora.com/Does-sex-education-at-schools-teach-students-about-the-dangers-of-online-pornography

  14. Article The Panopticon, 2023 on site of University College London – https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/about-jeremy-bentham/panopticon