this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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All porn sites must 'robustly' verify UK user ages by July (www.bbc.com)
submitted 2 days ago by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/world@lemmy.world
68 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Summary

Under the UK's Online Safety Act, all websites hosting pornography, including social media platforms, must implement "robust" age verification methods, such as photo ID or credit card checks, for UK users by July.

Regulator Ofcom claims this is to prevent children from accessing explicit content, as research shows many are exposed as young as nine.

Critics, including privacy groups and porn sites, warn the measures could drive users to less-regulated parts of the internet, raising safety and privacy concerns.

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[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 10 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Thinking about this recently. Kids tend to find ways to abuse the technology for "naughty" purposes whatever the era. I remember the first kid I knew with residential internet back in the early 90s, the very first thing he wanted to show off about it was that you could get on some ancient bulletin board system and if you waited like 7 minutes you could eventually see a whole picture of a topless woman.

Trying to age gate all internet smut sounds like a losing battle. I think an unintended consequence might be young people hassling their peers for nudes at a higher rate. Either that or they will find alternative modes of distribution that adults didn't even think about.

Maybe instead of trying to deanonymize internet usage for literally everybody, there is an actual social solution such as, oh, I dunno, parenting?

[–] cheers_queers@lemm.ee 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

you're not wrong, but as the parent of a 7 year old, i find it impossible to keep them from things i didn't want them to absorb, because even one child at school can undo all the safeguards I've implemented at home. putting it all down to "parenting" is not the solution either.

[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 1 points 5 hours ago

I actually agree with you, in that I've been where you are and it is extremely difficult. There has been more pushback recently against the idea that very young kids are magically entitled to unfettered device access. The incentives are misaligned because big tech just wants more and more pairs of eyes. They don't really care about the underlying harms. However they have built better parental controls recently. I have to credit Apple (extremely reluctantly) because their controls and reporting seem to be better.

However you are right, there will always be some other kid at school with a completely unlocked device because his parents are idiots and pay zero attention.

[–] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 1 points 8 hours ago

Need to invest on VPNs

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 30 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Remember when the Snowden revelations came out?

Not only it showed that the UK was even more intrusive in their surveillance of their own citiziens than the US, but after those revelations, whilst the US walked back on some of the surveillance, the Government of the UK simply retroactivelly legalized all of it, the editor at The Guardian who published the Snowden revelations got kicked out and the entire British Press went quiet about it since then.

The chances of this being genuinelly about protecting children rather than about facilitating the identification of British internet users by the GCHQ, are pretty much zero.

Personally I lived in the UK back when the Snowden revelations came out, so switched to being behind an always on VPN and since then never lost that habit. (And yeah, it's of course not a foolproof mechanism, but it sure makes it way harder to be caught in the broad trawling done by the surveillance apparatus, plus it's also pretty useful for "sailing the high seas")

[–] undergroundoverground@lemmy.world 20 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Its estimated that this will stop underage people accessing porn for at least 30 seconds while they download tor browser

[–] ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 3 points 20 hours ago

Right? You can't stop the porn and these barriers is only to create an artificial market.

But whatever. The more people become anonymous on the internet, the better.

[–] LordWiggle@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Luckily kids don't know about VPN's otherwise this entire sharade would be completely usele....

Edit: I think this isn't enough though. Politicians should be forced to have a public porn history so you can vote by their porn preference. I wouldn't trust a politician who isn't into some weird kink stuff. Vanilla people are boring and shouldn't run a country.

[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 37 points 1 day ago (2 children)

How long do they calculate until personal porn information is leaked?

[–] Manifish_Destiny@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago

Id give a rough estimate of > 3 years until some DB gets rocked due to infostealers or some shit.

[–] ogmios@sh.itjust.works 103 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (15 children)

My problem with all this nonsense is that it doesn't actually solve the problem, while causing many more. You'd need to fundamentally rethink the basic design of the technology if you were to actually prevent children from accessing sexual material with it. That's something they don't want to do, however, presumably because they're addicted to the power it offers them to spy on everyone, and exploit the population for profit.

We're in this mess right now because the one absolute truth preempting every other decision made by those who wield power is that the solution must first increase their power. Literally everything else is an afterthought.

[–] wewbull@feddit.uk 31 points 2 days ago

Well you see... Despite what people say, the reasons behind these rules has very little to do with children. So they don't actually care if it solves the "problem".

[–] sleen@lemmy.zip 35 points 2 days ago

I agree, the country is delving deeper into authoritarianism by each second. The children and minors is just another exploitable class to them.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 9 points 2 days ago (2 children)

My problem with all this nonsense is that it doesn’t actually solve the problem, while causing many more. You’d need to fundamentally rethink the basic design of the technology if you were to actually prevent children from accessing sexual material with it.

Absolutely - this always happens with these "save the children" laws.

That’s something they don’t want to do, however, presumably because they’re addicted to the power it offers them to spy on everyone, and exploit the population for profit.

Jesus Christ... You ever hear the phrase "never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance?" Politicians do this sort of "make the people feel like we're doing something" shit all the time. They rarely consider the ramifications beside appeasing parents.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

The UK has a History of intrusive civil society surveillance which the Snowden revelations showed was even worse than in the US, and whilst the US actually walked back on some of it back then, the UK Government just retroactivelly made the whole thing legal.

Also, lets not forget how the UK has the highest density of CCTV cameras per inhabitant in the World (or maybe it's just London: it's been a while since I read about it).

Their track record on the subject heavilly indicates that this specific measure with the characteristics it has, is extremelly likely to have been purposefully crafted to extend civil society surveillance and information access control.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

So - the people abusing policies are often not the people writing policies. We're both making lots of assumptions but the way I see it is that the "well meaning but stupid MP" wants to make their constituency happy by passing laws to show "I'm listening to the needs of parents!". Later that law is then used by other agencies to do things with your data you would rather them not do. Government is "people" not a "person".

And for that matter there are laws passed to explicitly give agencies power. Government doesn't often need to hide it, they just say the magic words "national defense".

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

If by that you mean that some out of touch MPs can be easily swindled by members of the security apparatus working together with other MPs and higher level politicians who are smart enough to know what they're doing, I don't disagree with that.

What is less likely is that a majority of British MPs, repeatedly and over the course of 2 decades, have been deceived like that.

Maybe I'm wrong, but most British MPs don't come out as stupid (though some definitely do) - incompetent at anything but salesmanship and power-games, crooked, greedy, ethics-free, unprincipled salesmen types and people driven by objectives which do not at all match what they state, sure most of them come out as that, stupid, not most.

I mean, your point would make a lot of sense if this was some kind of one-off event rather than a repeating pattern of measure after measure increasing surveillance of Civil Society, for the last 2 decades, and if Civil Society (or at least the Media) had been silent about it or even supportive of it, but as things stand the theory that a majority of MPs are stupid as an explanation for this bill passing Parliament really stretches the laws of probability.

As the saying goes: "You can deceive some people all of the time or all people some of the time but you can't deceive all people all of the time".

PS: I accept that I might be wrong. I just don't think that given the Historical track record the odds favor the "they've been swindled" (a majority of them and again on a subject that has been steadily going in just this direction and with not so long ago exposés on the press of how previous legislation has been abused for surveillance) explanation over the explanation that at least the ones in leadership positions acted with full awareness and possibly the active intention and purpose of crafting and passing a bill that expands Civil Society Surveillance in Britain.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

It's fair - we're both coming from different starting assumptions.

[–] ogmios@sh.itjust.works 13 points 2 days ago (3 children)

You ever hear the phrase “never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance?”

Generalities like that can be useful when applied appropriately, but counter-productive when applied blindly. That positions of power are held primarily by those who are motivated primarily by power ought to be the most straight forward assertion possible.

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[–] janNatan@lemmy.ml 54 points 2 days ago (2 children)

This is why we need decentralized, open source porn websites.

So, head on over to LemmyNSFW.com and upload a pic of your junk.

[–] Zetta@mander.xyz 6 points 1 day ago

Visit pornhub in any state or country where its banned or censored via the Tor Network, Onion URL at http://pornhubthbh7ap3u.onion/.

[–] filcuk@lemmy.zip 22 points 2 days ago

I'm shy, I'll just dm you instead.

[–] Kyrgizion@lemmy.world 53 points 2 days ago

We're really globally going to return to the pre-WWII status quo, aren't we?

The past 50+ years were an anomaly in humanity's development, but we all collectively fell for the idea that it was, and would remain, the norm.

How wrong we were.

[–] TommySoda@lemmy.world 38 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Honestly I never understood this. I grew up with the internet so I've always had access to porn from a young age (If anything it was even easier back than). And pretty much everyone that's 35 years or younger did as well and I'd say generally we all turned out fine. At least not any worse off than any other generation. And honestly the only negative side effect it had on me was having unrealistic expectations the first time I actually had sex.

[–] lone_faerie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 1 day ago

It makes a lot more sense when you look at it in context, particularly in regards to trans and all LGBTQ+ people. These transphobic governments consider simply existing as trans to be pornographic, so they are trying to block access to educational information on us, while also compiling a list of anyone who does. It's the exact same shit America is trying to do with KOSA

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[–] Luckiesock@lemm.ee 33 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Okay chief. How bout you verify the ID'S of UK politicians who visit Asia for kids?

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[–] atro_city@fedia.io 19 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I thought this was a USAmerican headline, but it's the UK 🤣 There will be another spike in VPN purchases, won't there? (Probably Proton VPN if people haven't read about their pro-MAGA stance).

[–] GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The UK trots out legislation like this every few years.
So far, it's not gone through.
However, to paraphrase a parasomething, "You have to defeat the proposal every time, we just have to make it law once"

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 13 points 2 days ago

Germany had these kinds of laws since before the internet, that is, "are you 18?" questions simply weren't judged adequate to fulfil the pre-existing requirements.

Net result is that there's no German porn sites, and the big search engines filter their results. Which doesn't mean that you can't get porn everywhere, it just means that kids are learning a particular subset of the English lexicon quite early once they seek it out which is perfectly fine under German law as with anything youth protection it's not supposed to stop determined kids, once they're determined they're individually old enough, it's supposed to limit casual exposure.

The distinction Germany makes is "targeted at a German market/audience". So if your domain isn't on .de, if your payment options aren't Germany-specific, ideally if you don't even have a German UI translation, none of that stuff applies to you. Authorities will just ignore you.

Unless the UK is going down the Saudi route of blocking foreign sites, the exact same thing will happen. There's always going to be some jurisdiction with lax youth protection laws where porn sites can set up their legal headquarters.

[–] filcuk@lemmy.zip 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

UK may be taking a slightly different path, but we'll both end up in the same shithole at the end. Incredible.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Back when the Snowden revelations came out the UK was worse than the US when it came to civil society surveillance and unlike the US, the Government there just retroactivelly legalized all that their NSA-equivalent (the GCHQ) did with no restrictions.

Oh, and the UK Press has a censorship mechanism called D-Notices.

In this domain the UK is already worse than the US, probably because the idea that the populus should know their place and be led by "their betters" is pretty old in Britain and, at least for the elites, the thinking about the relation between power and the people never significativelly evolved away from the original thinking in Absolute Monarchies, since the political and power structures there are still anchored on a Monarchy.

[–] JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 26 points 2 days ago

Yay, more invasion of privacy and censorship

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 18 points 2 days ago

so....why the sudden pressure to track porn usage to IDs?

ohhh....the homosexuals.

this is good news. it means they don't already have a database of all the lgbtq+ communities.

I wonder if there's any crime committed if you sign up your local conservative politician for gay porn or monthly dildos. maybe even abortion drugs while you're at it.

[–] LNRDrone@sopuli.xyz 19 points 2 days ago

I expect this to go just as well as for the US states that implemented similar laws. So basically anyone in the UK is blocked access and will just have to use a VPN for porn. Any kind of recording of IDs is obviously a huge security risk for everyone involved, and it doesn't really make sense for porn sites to open themselves for that.

[–] chaosppe@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago

Every site is going to turn into a porn site, isn't it?

[–] kirbowo808@kbin.melroy.org 18 points 2 days ago (2 children)

uses vpn, lies about age and manages to access porn site, despite claims otherwise

Mission failed successfully

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[–] RangerJosie@lemmy.world 14 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What is it with western countries thinking they can bureaucracy their way through any issue.

This won't stop anything. Won't even slow it down. Just teach people how to navigate the net better.

[–] random_character_a@lemmy.world 13 points 2 days ago

Does this mean Brits need to through their bank to get a wank?

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