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 bill for the Internet safety will be updated with a section that will require all websites posting pornographic material to make "robust" checks to ensure visitors are over 18.
Instead of using a pop-up that asks "are you over 18?", it's suggested using "secure age verification technology" to confirm whether visitors have 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 was the case in all such endeavors, Mr law is primarily designed to protect children from accessing pornography online, but comes with many privacy and security concerns.
Age verification is necessarily accompanied by user identity verification, which reduces privacy in case of hacking. This reason, together with the techniques ofcalls, 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.
