3w ago

UK’s Porn Providers Agree to Age Checks by July 25; Aylo, Owner of Pornhub, YouPorn, and RedTube, Will Add Age Assurance Checks.

www.ofcom.org.uk

Just a moment...

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.

91 comments

This feel strangely like it has little to do with actually protecting kids...
- It's more about penetrating your privacy but think of the children is the go-to argument to sugar-coat that.
  
  Someone should be asking what the sentence will be for kids who commit identity fraud and use someone else's ID to set up an account. It may flip the narrative to point out they are intentionally creating more criminal acts that will get kids in trouble with the law and possibly ruin lives.
  
  Well they should at least give me a reach around if they are going to penetrate my privacy.
- It's about making LGBTQ content "adult only" and using this same mechanism to enforce ID law on that content. They've been doing it in some USA states for a few years now. No one wants to be the Porn Politician that votes against it.
- Yep, ancap thought in terms of efficiency, to justify ancap, goes after the central controller just not having enough information to fully govern a society well enough.
  These fuckers apparently think something changed, if you have one big honeypot of a web and mandate checks (as a justification) that yield said information to them.
  BTW, they are right, until we find a way to decentralize services.
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.
I'm disappointed that Pornhub is apparently capitulating instead of blocking access entirely in protest, like they've done in other jurisdictions.
- 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.
“PrOtEcT ThE ChiLdReN! 👆🏻🥴”
I can not hear that anymore!
Children need awareness, rather than 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.
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.
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.
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
Oh no. Some hackers hacked out database and released all the ID information on high profile people. Oh such whoopsie, we made.
Adult Websites
- 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.
  
  So your bank now knows you accessed certain websites. And likely one or more middleware services. And you are okay with that?
  
  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.
- 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.
- 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.
VPN subs will be up and UK viewership will be nonexistent
So much for being better than the US. Welcome to the downfall of modern society UK.
- It's been happening for decades.
  
  Indeed, it has been the same here.
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?
- 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.
- You just have to scan the qr code they tattoo on your balls
  
  I mean some people might be into that.
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
  
  To Americans, tits may be considered porn. To a good chunk of the rest of the world, it’s not as pornographic.
  
  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.
Say it with me folks! VPN!
- V! P! N!
So all of the mainstream porn will be blocked, leaving all of the niche and special-interest stuff available? Excellent, excellent...
- 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.
- Children will only have access to the illegal porn sites that don't "protect children".
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.
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
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.
So what privacy will I have to give up?
Actually I'm in Canada so I'm probably safe anyway.
I mean... I don't watch porn so this doesn't affect my anyway...
- It’s tied to your account on the website. So it’s tied to all of your viewing activity. It could be leaked or compromised. It could be subpoenaed. It could be purchased.
- Some of these ham fisted age verification checks ask you to upload photos of your government ID
So this will affect Reddit and Lemmy too, presumably?
- It already has. Lemmy.zip if unavailable to users (of the admins own volition as they don’t have the capability to comply) in the Uk because of the law
I wonder what a fake beard or mustache does as far as fooling the machine goes?
Time to invest in a VPN company
Headline should have been: porn sites have no spunk. Screw the government and just plug the whole country. Though we'll no longer have easy access various VPNs will still allow us to reach around the block with IP protection (just like consuming BBC service without a license).
- I thought this commented would have gone down better. It's a banger.
People are not gonna agree with me but, it makes sense to have age verification just like you have to verify your age for tobacco or alcohol.
- Is there a paper linking gooning to cancer, why would you compare those things
  
  I love this comment. Thank you!
- Would it make sense for alcohol age verification if every household had beer taps installed? Because thats what internet is.
  
  Its certainly the parents responsibility to make sure those kids dont drink. And if they do, there should be repercussions just like we have the same expectations with Gun use.
  But it's disanalgous anyways. We make stores and establishments check for IDs. These websites are no different from these establishments, therefore they should also verify the age.

91 comments