On the face of it, I don't have a problem with this being implemented. I know I was under 16 when I first saw pornography back in the 1980s, but it was different then... you had one VHS tape that you borrowed from someone and you had to wait until your parents went out so that you could access the one VHS player in the house. You then spent the next half hour jerking off with one ear on the door in case your parents came back sooner than expected. The porn was way different as well. By today's standards it was pretty tame, anal was a rarity for example... and of course the quality of the videos (copied over and over again) wasn't that great either.
Contrast that with today's online content and it's night and day.
There's is some nasty shit out there, and I'm not even talking about the things that we might like... that's bad enough, but there's way worse and I agree under 18s shouldn't be seeing that stuff. Whether this will be effective I don't know, especially since porn seems to be freely posted on large sites like X/Twitter. I personally am not on Twitter, but I have a friend who is and I see him scrolling past stuff that appears in his Twitter feed. I asked him about it and he told me it's just 'there', it's not something he's following.
I read today that X is going to use AI to gauge the age of the person holding the phone... so just hold up a photo of your Dad and presumably you'll be fine? I don't know...
Anyway, my primary concern with all this is that to verify your age you either have to give your credit card details or your driving licence or something to a third party who then verifies you and lets you access the site. I mean, seriously. Who wants to do that? Who trusts some third party to do that and not sell your data? And where are they holding this data, how safe is it from being hacked and leaked?
To be honest, I wouldn't be worried about that particularly, because I am my own boss, and I really don't give a shit if other people found out that I looked at porn. But a lot of people would be horrified. Apparently part of the Government's legislation requires that age verification procedures don't jeopardise the visitors privacy or deny people access to lawful content... but that really just mean's the Govt can fine the websites when it all goes wrong.
I'm also more concerned about what it means for Blogs like this and Literotica. I presume at some point the Govt will expand the rules to include sites which are 'Adult' even if they don't include video (which seems to be the main focus of the new laws). Will Blogger provide adult verification services? I very much doubt it, given the costs and given that Blogger is free. As far as I can tell there's no way for me to add age verification to my blog, so what are the chances of Blogger doing it? Given they tried to kick us all off a few years ago anyway, I fear the days of adult blogs are numbered... will someone else offer as a new home? I doubt it, and even if they do they would have to charge for the services.
I can't help thinking also that there should be some 'recognized' verification company, possibly set up and controlled by the Govt which verifies access to all sites so that you only need to verify once.. but then do you even trust the Govt with that data? Probably not.
So I guess we enjoy our freedoms while we can and hope that Blogger doesn't turn around and wipe all it's 'adult' content out some day. As for the under 18s, well I can imagine there will be a thriving market in DVDs and DVD players* going forward... because you see streaming and getting rid of all your physical content was always a shit idea and I never went down that route. Maybe this will teach the younger generation to 'own' stuff and not rely on streaming their whole lives.
(*Perhaps that's a bit archaic of me, I'm sure the young are perfectly capable of sharing porn files just like they share music files... )
This article on the BBC website highlights that I'm not alone in my concerns, with several interviewees also reluctant to give their personal information to a random company to verify their age.
There are already reports that some UK adult verification sites have had information leaks raising concerns about privacy. Obviously sharing information like facial scans or ID details comes with a risk as no website on the planet has not been hacked thus far, including the Pentagon, etc.
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