BBFC Advises AV Providers Regarding Use of Digital Wallets (XBIZ)

Read the full article by Stephen Yagielowicz at XBIZ.com

LOS ANGELES — The age verification regulator for the U.K.’s Digital Economy Act, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), has advised age verification providers that they will not be certified under the Age Verification Certificate (AVC) if they use a digital wallet in their solution.

According to the BBFC, the AVC is a voluntary, non-statutory scheme that has been designed specifically to ensure age verification providers maintain high standards of privacy and data security. The AVC will ensure data minimization and that there is no handover of personal information used to verify an individual is over 18 between certified age verification providers and commercial pornography services.

The only data that should be shared between a certified AV provider and an adult website is a token or flag indicating that the consumer has either passed or failed age verification.

“A consumer should be able to consider that their engagement with an age verification provider is something temporary,” said BBFC Policy Director Murray Perkins. “In order to preserve consumer confidence in age verification and the AVC, it was not considered appropriate to allow certified AV providers to offer other services to consumers, for example by way of marketing or by the creation of a digital wallet.”

“The AVC is necessarily robust in order to allow consumers a high level of confidence in the age verification solutions they choose to use,” Perkins added.