Government puts forward proposals for ID-based age checks being needed to access porn

Britain is at the cutting-edge of censorship, it has been claimed, as government plans to implement ID-based age checks for pornography websites gather pace.

A scheme put forward by the porn industry would see users forced to verify their identity using banks, credit reference agencies or even the NHS, a move they were forced into by the Conservatives, for whom a law demanding age checks for online adult content is a key pledge.

"This is cutting-edge censorship," Myles Jackman, a lawyer specialising in obscenity law, told The Guardian. "We are now becoming the world leaders in censorship. And we are being watched very closely from abroad."

Not only have the draconian proposals been blasted for censorship, they also pose privacy concerns.

The plan is for checks to pass through an "anonymising hub" that removes identification in both directions on the request, meaning that in theory only the fact that the user is over 18 is out there, but there are always weak points in such systems.

"We know that privacy in such cases is often breached by accident, by hackers, or secretly by the police and intelligence services," said Jerry Barnett, a free-speech campaigner and author of the Sex & Censorship blog. "This is the state, yet again, intervening in people's private lives for no reason other than good old British prurience and control-freakery."

Would be interesting to see how things would end up working, will this only impact UK based sites, or do foreign based ones have to comply? Is this only for paid sites, or does every random free site have to do this, which they would unlikely have the resources to do. Is this going to apply to sites which can contain pornographic content but are not explicitly porn sites (various image boards).

I don't see any infringement on personal liberty(whatever that is) to be honest- you can easily choose to see it as tougher reinforcement of existing laws(i.e. needing to be 18 for adult-content viewership).

Personally, I think this is great . Anything that restrains hyper-sexualisation ought to be welcomed.

The age of consent is 16 though, so it is ridiculous to have a law that you need to be 18 to watch porn when you can have it at 16. Plus nobody has ever not watched a film just because it was rated 16+ or 18+ or whatever. It is just silly.

Raise the age of consent to 18 then.

Those westminster types already struggle with the current age of consent, why would they want to raise it.

Because the recognised age of adulthood is 18.

Often enough the government and a lot of people who want to censor porn just define any website with a naked woman on it as porn.


Posted from TSR Mobile

if they're going to go to the effort to force ISP's to block all free porn sites

I guess that answers the question of why the porn industry are so keen on it.

I guess that answers the question of why the porn industry are so keen on it.