United Kingdom’s forthcoming Online Safety Bill will once again try to introduce mandatory age verification to access online adult content. It’s the same plan that has been laid out back in 2015 but deemed unworkable and scrapped mid-2019 before it was implemented.
The Conservative party has included mandatory age verification in their 2015 manifesto. The Online Safety bill originally specify that only porn sites that allowed user-generated content (like OnlyFans) would have to go for age verification, but this has now been updated to cover all porn sites. In 2017, they have passed enabling laws and several deadlines are set to implement the system. It was said that by July 2019 it will finally begin the operation, but the then culture secretary scrapped it by mid-June. A new plan was to replace the earlier manifesto with a new set of rules under the umbrella of Online Harms.
“Parents deserve peace of mind that their children are protected online from seeing things no child should see,” according to digital minister Chris Philp in a statement. “We are now strengthening the online safety bill so it applies to all porn sites to ensure we achieve our aim of making the internet a safer place for children.”
The UK government said that the age verification could include “checking a user’s age against details that their mobile provider holds, verifying via a credit card check, and other database checks including government held data such as passport data.”
Apparently, these credentials could be used to verify age without also checking an individual’s identity, and later on, the security and privacy issue from tracking and profiling these porn users. The credentials used from these age verifications will be for sure a hot target for online hackers.
Now if you’re a porn site operator in the UK, those who will fail to implement age verification could be blacklisted through the country’s ISP and they could be fined with a hefty 10-percent of their annual global income.
