UK Porn Law’s Latest Guidelines Fail to Answer Critics (The Verge)

Read the full article by James Vincent at TheVerge.com

The government is determined to verify the age of porn viewers, but is creating more problems for itself

The UK government has released new guidelines for its upcoming age verification law, which will require pornography sites and apps to verify that visitors are 18 or older. The guidelines contain a number of important provisions, including the promise of new voluntary data standards and explicit exclusions for social media sites. But critics say the suggestions simply add to the legislative quagmire the government has created for itself.

“The policy is completely full of holes,” Jim Killock, executive director of the UK’s Open Rights Group, told The Verge. “It puts too much power in the hands of companies, [and] if teenagers in particular have any incentive to get around these controls, they will.”

The law was first proposed in July 2017, with the promise that it would be “fully in place” by April 2018. But concerns about the potential for government overreach, the stifling of free speech, and privacy violations have slowed its passage, and it’s now not expected to go into effect until next year.

The UK’s data watchdog, the ICO, will be able to establish a set of guidelines to protect users’ data in any age verification system. Privacy has always been a major concern for the new law since any verifier is going to end up creating a centralized database that potentially records the porn habits of UK citizens, which is a prime target for hackers.

However, the ICO’s guidelines will be voluntary, meaning companies like MindGeek won’t be forced to sign up. “Which is kind of crazy,” says Killock. “Because it means the government has basically conceded the argument [that user privacy is threatened by the new law], but regulators won’t be able to do anything about it.”