UK regulator Ofcom has announced new recommendations to help protect children from accessing online pornography that includes calls for porn sites to scan users’ faces in order to prove their age.
Currently there are little to no age checking measures for people accessing online porn in the UK, with either immediate access to websites or easily passed tick boxes to confirm you’re over 18.
Facial age estimation scanning was one of the age identification methods suggested in the new guidelines, alongside other methods such as sharing bank account details, photo ID checks, and credit card checks to prove the age of porn users.
If brought into law, it could mean your computer’s webcam or smartphone’s selfie camera scanning your face to determine you’re over 18 before the device will let you access adult content, similar to the FaceID scanning on an iPhone or controversial facial identification technology used by police forces around the world.
The proposed crackdown is designed to protect UK kids from viewing adult content at inappropriately young ages. Ofcom quoted research that said the average age UK children first watch porn is 13, and one in ten can be just 10 years old.
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“Pornography is too readily accessible to children online, and the new online safety laws are clear that must change,” said Ofcom CEO Melanie Dawes. “Our practical guidance sets out a range of methods for highly effective age checks. We’re clear that weaker methods – such as allowing users to self-declare their age – won’t meet this standard.”
Ofcom’s calls for new porn check tech comes after the UK’s new Online Safety Act came into law in October. It broadly attempts to shift responsibility for who accesses online content to tech companies, which includes online porn sites providing UK visitors with age check verification.
“Regardless of their approach, we expect all services to offer robust protection to children from stumbling across pornography, and also to take care that privacy rights and freedoms for adults to access legal content are safeguarded,” Dawes said.
If brought into law, the age checks – including possible face scanning – would be brought into law after Ofcom provides its final decisions in 2025, after which the Government would have to make sure changes were made.
But a new report from the European Policy Information Center (EPICENTER) suggests actually implementing age check rules for porn would be “practically impossible”.
“As seen in the UK, users may shift to using VPNs and other systems to circumvent controls, with the paradoxical risk of fueling traffic to less monitored and less secure platforms and applications,” the report said.
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It also raised privacy concerns, saying: “[M]andatory age verification could significantly increase the amount of sensitive data held by third parties and the frequency at which it is collected, exposing users to privacy breaches and abuse.”
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