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.
I look forward to hearing about the workarounds kids find.
Look no further, the workaround is the humble VPN. The kids that found that work around are 50+ now lmao
You don’t even need a VPN. Only the legit sites will play ball. Porn will still be there.
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.
So all of the mainstream porn will be blocked, leaving all of the niche and special-interest stuff available? Excellent, excellent…
Children will only have access to the illegal porn sites that don’t “protect children”.
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.
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.
The dob credential could verified and issued by anyone. But you may have more confidence in a government signature than a private company or known individual.
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.
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.
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.
“PrOtEcT ThE ChiLdReN! 👆🏻🥴”
I can not hear that anymore!
Children need awareness not 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
don’t the uk have a history of straight up putting porn in print magazines and on free television every day?
Page 3 of the sun newspaper was the famous one for just having a topless women emblazoned on it
Even having a girl as young as 16 on there, which I don’t think was legal (age of consent is 16 in the UK but I don’t think that extends to pornography).
The Sun only stopped it in the last 15 years.
To Americans, tits may be considered porn. To a good chunk of the rest of the world, it’s not as pornographic.
Nudity isn’t always pornographic or sexual depending on the context. But in this context it absolutely is. The Sun put tits there to sexually arouse readers, that was the point.
To Brits it is pornographic.
Say it with me folks! VPN!
V! P! N!
Are they going to add a box to enter your age like on Steam that you immediately roll back to 1st January 1901?
They did this in Florida. They want you to submit a picture of yourself and your photo ID to a porn website
6/9/1969…every time
