4 Apr 2015

Will Britons need a government-approved ‘porn pass’?

Age controls to stop underage kids looking at porn? Sounds like a good idea, but today’s Conservative proposal could have consequences you don’t expect.

It won’t just be children who’ll have to confirm their age. Everyone, including adult users, will have to do the same.

 

Just asking for a date of birth won’t work: it’s too easy for kids to get round it.

Culture Secretary Sajid Javad talks about systems used by betting sites. But unlike free porn websites, betting services require credit card payment, so they have an easy way to confirm age.

So how will a free porn site verify a user’s age? Here’s some options:

1. Ask users for a credit card. The problem is that the US tried this in the late 1990s and it led to a massive campaign of credit card fraud. Would you trust a porn site with your card details?

2. Ask users to enter an email address, which can then be linked up to a database of verified ages. But how do you link email to age? And even if you could, kids can just set up new email accounts and fake the age on the account.

3. Create some kind of online ID system, separate to the porn sites, by which age is verified. So for example, a credit check company like Experian might issue you with an online ID, which you can then use to access porn. There’s a couple of problems here: firstly the government would have to get porn sites to sign up to the scheme (because the porn site would have to check the IDs people were using to login). And secondly, it would instantly create a black market in age-verified IDs which kids could use to log in to watch porn.

Block the sites?

This last point ties into a much larger picture: the outgoing government is creating a system in which British citizens will have their identity confirmed by a private company, which will then allow people to log in to government services like benefits, tax, DVLA and so on.

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Perhaps the porn proposal will be tied into this, in which case you have the somewhat weird prospect of having a government-approved porn pass.

Fundamentally, unless it’s the porn site itself verifying your age, details of your porn browsing will end up being stored by a government-approved organisation. Sound good?

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will get dragged into this. The Conservatives say that if a porn website refuses to play ball, it will be blocked.

The ISPs have already been forced to introduce the option of filters which are supposed to block porn (although they struggle to do so as we’ve shown before). They will now have to block some sites outright.

And of course, whatever system the Conservatives propose, they’re open to a challenge from porn companies who may argue that this amounts to an unfair restraint of trade.

Like so many election proposals, there’s a lot of detail missing on this.

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