Your days of porn are numbered. No seriously! Websites dealing with adult-rated smut videos and photos will soon be implementing age verification checks, despite the warning that your history of all your naughty searches could be leaked online in case of breaches. This is not deliberately being done, but it is a compulsory move by the government.
The UK government has taken a step further into enforcing age verification for consumption of online pornography. This means that you would have to enter your mobile phone details and your passport details to verify your age, in order to watch porn online. The use of credit cards as an age verification process does not help verify the user’s age since a kid can get hold of his father’s credit card and browse online.
‘Under new powers contained in the Digital Economy Act, which passed through Parliament earlier this year, a regulator will be able to block porn websites that fail to show that they are denying access to under-18s. Digital economy minister Matt Hancock has now signed an order allowing the designation of the regulator, expected to be the British Board of Film Classification, to put the new protections into effect from April next year,’ reported the Telegraph, UK.
The move was welcomed by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), which claims that pornography content could damage young people. They also mentioned that the new measures are not enough and today’s social media needs additional protection.
As for previously, the easy mode for verifying the age was a simple tick of the ‘I am over 18’ would work. Presently credit card details are required, but that isn’t enough.
Steps for age verification, though required, could also cause further issues. Remember the Ashley Madison website hack?
However, to make this even more worrisome, the Open rights Group has further pointed out that age verifications could allow porn websites to build up a huge database of users’ browsing habits, which can put them in a vulnerable space with data theft by hackers.
Age verification could lead to porn companies building databases of the UK's porn habits, which could be vulnerable to Ashley Madison style hacks," said Jim Killock, exec director of Open Tights Group.
"The Government has repeatedly refused to ensure that there is a legal duty for age verification providers to protect the privacy of web users.
"There is also nothing to ensure a free and fair market for age verification. We are concerned that the porn company MindGeek will become the Facebook of age verification, dominating the UK market. They would then decide what privacy risks or profiling take place for the vast majority of UK citizens,” he added
