Here’s how porn websites will prove users are over 18 from this summer
The lube’s warmed up, the lights are low and you’ve got the house to yourself… Time for a bit of porn.
But here comes the real boner killer – where’s your passport?
That’s the problem horny people will face when they log on to get off from this summer thanks to Ofcom.
The communications watchdog has revealed how it plans to prevent children from watching porn online, including credit card checks, facial recognition and passport checks.
The latest move comes off the back of the Online Safety Act 2023, passed while the Conservatives were in power, which required Ofcom to come up with suggestions.
Under the legislation, sites that provide pornographic content need to make sure children are ‘not normally able to encounter’ that content.
That should be ‘by the use of age verification or age estimation (or both)’, according to the text of the law.
But such measures are notoriously tricky, with many tools easily bypassed by internet-savvy kids.
Ofcom lists pop-ups asking users to input their date of birth without any further evidence and debit card checks among the measures that are next to useless at blocking under-18s.
According to the watchdog, the deadline for all services that allow pornography to introduce effective barriers is July this year.
User’s face
It might be understandable if people are reluctant to send over a picture of their face in order to access porn online.
But two of the methods recommended by Ofcom require just that.
One is ‘facial age estimation’, where the features of a user’s face are analysed to estimate how old they are.
And the other is photo-ID matching, a digital version of the age check that takes place when you buy booze or cigarettes in a shop.
The user sends over information from an ID document like a passport or driving licence along with an image of themselves, and the porn provider verifies they’re the same person.
Digital checks
Several of the methods suggested by Ofcom rely on checks involving the user’s digital life.
They include email-based age estimation. This involves the analysis of the other online services where a user’s email has been used.
‘This could include where an email address has been associated with financial institutions such as mortgage lenders,’ Ofcom said.
Alternatively, sites might ask for a user’s digital identity to verify their age, through a system rolled out by the government last November.
Or they might rely on age checks carried out by a mobile-network operator – the same ones that prevent people accessing certain sites if they’re using roaming data rather than WiFi.
Banking and credit cards
A couple of other possibilities involve accessing the details held by the user’s bank.
In the UK, you can only get a credit card if you’re aged 18 or over. So someone can prove they’re an adult by entering their credit card details, which a processor can then validate with the bank that issued it.
Then there’s the open banking technique, which works by ‘accessing the information a bank has on record regarding a user’s age, with the user’s consent’.
The provider will be given confirmation of whether the person in question is over 18, without any other information being given.
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