By 25 July, all sites and apps that allow pornography – whether they are dedicated adult sites or social media, search or gaming services – must use highly effective age checks to ensure children are not normally able to encounter it. Online firms who publish their own pornography are already required to protect children from it, and thousands of sites have already introduced robust age checks in response.
Major porn providers operating in the UK have confirmed to Ofcom that they will introduce effective checks by next month’s deadline in order to comply with the new rules. They include PornHub, the most-visited pornographic service in the UK. Other services who are happy to be named at this stage include BoyfriendTV, Cam4, FrolicMe, inxxx, Jerkmate, LiveHDCams, MyDirtyHobby, RedTube, Streamate, Stripchat, Tube8, and YouPorn. This represents a broad range of pornography services accessed in the UK.
Monitoring compliance with these new duties is a priority for Ofcom. If any company fails to comply with its new duties, Ofcom can impose fines and – in very serious cases – apply for a court order to prevent the site or app from being available in the UK. As part of our work enforcing the Online Safety Act, we have already launched investigations into four porn providers and won’t hesitate to take further action from July.
And when this measure fails to protect children and, instead, becomes a data security nightmare, another scheme will be proposed to further erode the freedoms the web brings.
I look forward to hearing about the workarounds kids find.
Do we know how the age verification process is gonna work or is this gonna be one of those neoliberal dystopian spystate kinda deals where the means of data collection is left to corporations only to be subsequently tapped by the state when the want to target individuals?
You just have to scan the qr code they tattoo on your balls
I mean some people might be into that.
Well it’s been monitored by ofcom who we all know are the last word in inefficiency, corruption, and stupidity so I’m going to go ahead and guess that they’re just going to say they’re doing checks, and Ofcom just not going to check.
They’re probably going to add a second pop-up after the “are you 18” pop-up that says “are you lying”.
I would imagine they’ve at least talked about trying get people to enter credit card details. I know that’s been pushed before, as early as the 2000s, for age verification on some sites. Obviously it’s terrible for privacy, data breaches and flat-out fake sites just harvesting card numbers or taking all your cash at point of verification.
Not to mention that zillions of underage kids have their own legit cards nowadays.
Plus loads of adults don’t have a card. It’s not like when you turn 18 somebody from the government turns up and goes here’s a bank account.
This is why they keep going on about government ID cards. So they can track everyone reliably. Which is precisely why we shouldn’t do it.
I wonder what a fake beard or mustache does as far as fooling the machine goes?
So all of the mainstream porn will be blocked, leaving all of the niche and special-interest stuff available? Excellent, excellent…
Interestingly there are noticeable absences from that list.
Perhaps that’s by design, there’s no reason the politicians would make their own lives more difficult.
If UK really wanted to protect the kids, they would’ve jailed Transphobe JK Rowings for hate crime
The UK is transphobic too though.
You mean the land mass? Just a load of bigoted rocks.
Oh no. Some hackers hacked out database and released all the ID information on high profile people. Oh such whoopsie, we made.
- Adult Websites
I’m sure the most rigorous of data safety standards will be followed. After all they’re being forced to do this I’m sure they won’t take the cheapest possible route. Oh definitely not.
Depends entirely on how it’s implemented, because the website doesn’t need to know who you are, only verify that you are over 18. Which can be done reasonably securely - you generate a random ID on a secure service (e.g here in Finland, we use our online banking stuff for official verification purposes), give that ID to the website, and the only communication between the two of them is “Is id 123 valid and an adult? Yes/No”.
Now, if that “secure service”, most likely a government contract done as cheaply as possible turns out not to be, and they keep logs linking those IDs to the URLs requesting verification, then the entire thing goes belly up.
Zero Knowledge is more secure. Government signs a credential confirming date of birth and gives that to the citizen.
Citizen can then use that to create a proof they were born before date X. Verifier only sees the proof and the Government signature.
No need to trust 3rd party websites.
I was basically after that same concept - create that credential, and have the website only verify it’s legit and nothing else.
I think my example of how it’s currently done for basically everything in Finland just confused people, I wasn’t suggesting every country implements adult age checks with their banks.The problem there is that requires the government to do some of the work, and they don’t want to. They want to sell this to the public as them being tough, but they definitely don’t want it to cost any money.
This will be implemented in the most sketchy short-sighted way possible, I guarantee it
I would never touch any of these telemetry websites anymore because this is definitely going to be used to fingerprint you.
So your bank now knows you accessed certain websites. And likely one or more middleware services. And you are okay with that?
Was an example of the security, not who is running the service. But I mean, guess who knows if you pay for OnlyFans or stuff like that?
Your bank.And like I said, it’s only really secure if the service doesn’t keep a database of logs connecting the two.
The bank doesn’t know what people pay for, or who it goes to, they just know what account you paid into. They would have to go through and verify who owns the account and that’s not an automatic process. Finding out the actual person or company behind an account requires effort, so unless there’s some investigation that involves that bank account, they won’t have that information.
🤡🤡🤡Lmao what? The amount of men calling up for some transaction error and I need to bring their account up and we can see EVERYTHING, the tinder premium subscriptions, the balding pills, the only fans. There’s full access to the whole bank statements up until the account creation at the click of a button
There’s been countless cases of bank tellers being fired for looking up their friends and exes to look up what is in their banks
No, come on, don’t be disingenuous, you know that’s not what I meant.
If I pay something to, Acme financial services LLC, you have no idea what that really is. They could make boxes, sports equipment, that could be an escort agency, you don’t know. Pretty much every adult store is not going to have Sex Toys R Us, as their account name.
I seriously feel this. I’ve found a little site that dgaf what country or state you’re in. I use a VPN if I want a change.
Garbage. This info will be weaponized by anyone who is willing to buy it.
Absolutely. Super easy to use this in blackmail. Especially in a country as repressed as the UK.
“PrOtEcT ThE ChiLdReN! 👆🏻🥴”
I can not hear that anymore!
Children need awareness, rather than shielding, concealment and tabooing.
silver lining, the kinks of the future are gonna be sooo fucked up.
“I showed you my elbow, pls respond 🥺”
Amen. It’s like they think that somehow it is better to only encounter the world when you are in college and alone.
mastodon has porn and you don’t even need an account to use search. also, this will just drive people to use sketchy sites that won’t follow the rules.
You can literally find porn on search engines. Google images is a bit restrictive but Bing, Duckduckgo etc will straight up show porn in the image or video searches.
So much for being better than the US. Welcome to the downfall of modern society UK.
It’s been happening for decades.
Indeed, it has been the same here.
This feel strangely like it has little to do with actually protecting kids…
It’s more about penetrating your privacy but think of the children is the go-to argument to sugar-coat that.
Well they should at least give me a reach around if they are going to penetrate my privacy.
Someone should be asking what the sentence will be for kids who commit identity fraud and use someone else’s ID to set up an account. It may flip the narrative to point out they are intentionally creating more criminal acts that will get kids in trouble with the law and possibly ruin lives.
The act in question doesn’t create offences for children; it (mainly) creates offences for service providers.
A kid who went on the internet and clicked I’m 18+ and looked at porn doesn’t have a victim (outside of the perpetrator if one wants to argue that). I don’t know what the laws are in the U.K. but here (U.S.) identity fraud/theft is a federal crime. With a possible sentence up to 15 years.
With how it was, there was no incentive for a kid to take their parents/older friends ID when they weren’t looking, or share ID’s/information with their friends to access those sites. If a person gets notice that their information is being used on a site they weren’t using, the likelyhood of it being reported goes up.
Hopefully nothing would ever go as far as being reported as fraud/theft, but all it takes is one person who doesn’t like their kid hanging out with someone else.
So while they didn’t create any new offenses for kids, they created roadblocks that put kids in a situation that may make them break the law out of sheer curiosity.
Getting caught drinking a beer, or smoking cigarettes would be a godsend compared to getting charges brought up for something so stupid.
identity fraud/theft is a federal crime. With a possible sentence up to 15 years.
Yay! More clients!
Glad we can agree this is not about new offences.
In the UK there is no specific crime of identity theft, with offences generally being prosecuted as fraud. Fraud requires that the person committing the fraud intend to make a gain of money or property, or to cause someone else to make a loss of money or property.
There’s no real way to frame this as being bad for children except inasmuch as people over the age of consent (which is 16 in the UK) should be free to access as much porn as they please.
It’s about making LGBTQ content “adult only” and using this same mechanism to enforce ID law on that content. They’ve been doing it in some USA states for a few years now. No one wants to be the Porn Politician that votes against it.
Yep, ancap thought in terms of efficiency, to justify ancap, goes after the central controller just not having enough information to fully govern a society well enough.
These fuckers apparently think something changed, if you have one big honeypot of a web and mandate checks (as a justification) that yield said information to them.
BTW, they are right, until we find a way to decentralize services.
If your kid has half a brain he’ll do what we did as kids when porn sites were blocked on the home WiFi: He’ll just get a VPN.
And when VPN websites were blocked on the home WiFi, we’d just download their apps on mobile data.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Better to educate your kids on their natural urges and letting them use the more moderated sites than have them go down the more dodgy rabbitholes. No kink shaming but some of the things people do are nasty.
I’m disappointed that Pornhub is apparently capitulating instead of blocking access entirely in protest, like they’ve done in other jurisdictions.
I think they realized that they won’t get the jurisdiction to bend on this one, and the general response from UK government will be “good riddance to bad rubbish”.
They only really block access when there isn’t an official way to validate. Iirc, Louisiana did this over a year ago and pornhub is doing age verification there now.
VPN subs will be up and UK viewership will be nonexistent
So people too young or too privacy conscious to use those major platforms will move to nicher porn sites. Doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all… /s
