A controversial bill in the UK requires porn sites to verify the age of their visitors through passports, credit cards and other media.
To celebrate Secure Internet Day, the Minister for Digital Services of the United Kingdom, Chris Philip, has announced that The cybersecurity bill will be updated with a section that will require all sites that publish pornographic material to make "strong" checks to ensure that visitors are over 18.
Instead of using one emerging window that asks “are you over 18?” suggests using “secure age verification technology” to confirm whether visitors have a credit card.
A user's age could also be confirmed by checking his / her data with the mobile service provider. Another suggestion is to use a third party service that will check someone's date of birth in relation to government data such as passport details. "The burden will be on the companies themselves to decide how to comply with their new legal duty," the government said.
Websites that do not apply age verification checks could be fined up to 10% of their annual worldwide turnover or blocked in the UK. .
As with all such efforts, the law is designed primarily to protect children from accessing pornography online, but it is accompanied by many privacy and security concerns.
Age verification is necessarily accompanied by its verification identity of the user, which reduces privacy in case of hacking. This reason, along with technical challenges, was the main reason the government abandoned these plans three years ago.
It was not clear why they came to the surface again, but if implemented we would expect that VPN usage would suddenly increase in the country.
