LONDON – As part of the UK’s upcoming age-verification scheme to prevent minors from accessing online porn, a 16-digit “porn pass” code will be made available for purchase by “newsagents or corner shops,” according to a report from the Telegraph published over the weekend.
Citing an anonymous source from the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), the Telegraph reported that while “visitors to pornographic sites will be able to show they are adults by using more traditional methods such as registering credit card details, a fully anonymous option would be to buy a proof of age card with a code at newsagents or corner shops.”
The report said the code would cost “around £10,” which translates to just over $13.50 USD at the current rate of exchange.
Porn isn’t the only thing the code would be used for, according to the report; it will also allow the purchaser to buy other age-restricted products, “like alcohol and knives.”
David Austin, the chief executive of the BBFC, suggested the privacy and security concerns voiced by critics of the UK’s plan to require age-verification on the part of adult sites are overblown, in part because of approaches like selling this sort of access card, which would not force consumers to register their personally-identifying information with a third-party.
In other words, age verification is “simpler than people think,” as Austin put it.
“People can expect to see a choice of age-verification options, typically from third party providers, so there’s no need to share any personal data with a pornography website,” Austin said. “An adult website need only receive a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to confirm the results of the age check. There is no need for the age-verification provider to pass on any personal details to a pornographic website nor to store personal data.”
This may be so, but critics of the age verification requirement aren’t concerned solely with the notion of providing sensitive information to the operators of adult websites, because any collection of such data is potentially vulnerable, particularly if a database of codes issues is cross-referenced with the identity of the purchaser.
There’s also the substantial question of what’s to prevent the pass-along to minors of these “porn pass” cards, once they’ve been acquired by adults – a sort of Digital Age equivalent of kids finding copies of Playboy stashed away in their fathers’ sock drawers.
There’s also plenty of skepticism about the efficacy of the blocking component of the UK’s plan, given the methods available to circumvent blocks based on the user’s location, as well as concern that to the extent that adults’ data is stored by any service or entity, it will be vulnerable to unauthorized access.
“This legislation is a digital white elephant,” said Alec Muffett of the Open Rights Group. “The kids will beat the technology, and adults could have their details hacked. Nobody is lined up to guarantee the trustworthiness of the companies which provide age verification and confirm someone’s age to a porn site.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport – the division of the UK government which introduced the legislation requiring age-verification by adult sites – said the public needn’t fret over privacy concerns, because of the stringent data-protection laws which will inform the development of the age-verification protocol.
“We are in the process of implementing some of the strictest data protection laws in the world,” the spokesperson said. “A wide variety of online age verification solutions exist, or are in development, and they will have to abide by these high standards. We expect data security to be a high priority in the BBFC’s guidance on age verification arrangements.”
