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.
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.