A U.K. regulator is proposing a new way of verifying your age before accessing pornography that may make you more than blush.
Ofcom, an online safety regulator, proposed new age verification checks in the UK that scan a person’s face to prevent minors from accessing pornography.
The Online Safety Act outlines several techniques that pornographic sites must implement to prevent children from accessing explicit content or face fines. Most sites currently only request a user enter their birthdate to confirm they are over 18 years old, which is easily circumvented. The proposal takes things quite a bit further.
The new regulations will require such sites to run verification checks using a person’s personal information, such as scanning a user’s face and comparing it to their driver’s license or passport. Sites can also use a facial age estimation tool. Another method is to have members upload their banking information, credit cards, digital wallets, or verify their age through their mobile carrier.
While the majority of adults are in favor of keeping mature content away from young children, many raise concerns over privacy in an era of frequent data breaches.
Although Ofcom says 87% of adults support regulations preventing children from accessing pornography, many are concerned over privacy protections. Aylo, the owner of Pornhub, supports age verification on its platform. However, the company also voiced concerns over user privacy.
“Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy,” said Aylo, according to BBC.
Instead, Pornhub suggests age verification should happen on a user’s device via parental controls, which could help contain sensitive information.
This could also cull a problem seen in Louisiana and Utah after strict age protections and user restrictions were put into place. Users were hesitant to disclose their identity and instead ventured to “dark corners” of the internet that don’t require age checks, while others used a virtual private network (VPN) to hide their identity and location, according to BBC.
Pornhub saw an 80% decline in traffic after Louisiana implemented age restrictions, while the demand for VPNs increased by 847% the following day, according to BBC.
Pornhub’s concerns are not unfounded. In 2016, Brazzers’ site had a data breach that compromised the privacy of 800,000 users, according to NBCNews. Data breaches are becoming increasingly commonplace, affecting 233.9 million people in 2023, an increase of 17% from 2022, according to Axios.
Abigail Burke of the Open Rights Group also said more emphasis needs to be placed on keeping data secure.
“The potential consequences of data being leaked are catastrophic and could include blackmail, fraud, relationship damage, and the outing of people’s sexual preferences in very vulnerable circumstances,” said Burke, according to BBC.
Still, preventing children from seeing explicit content remains a priority. Ofcom states that 27% of kids stumble across pornography at age 11, and nearly 79% have seen violent content. In 2020, Pornhub took down more than 10.5 million videos featuring abuse victims and minors. The company has since changed its upload policy so only verified content creators can publish videos and now bans amateur contributors.