UK: Porn sites may have to ask face id, credit card details to protect children

In an effort to prevent kids from viewing pornography online, Britain unveiled new age-check guidelines on Tuesday. One of the recommendations is to employ artificial intelligence (AI) to determine whether a viewer appears to be of legal age along with taking face ids and credit card details. The recently enacted Online Safety Act mandates that websites and applications that show or distribute pornographic material make sure that children are not typically exposed to it on their platform. In Britain, you have to be at least 18 years old to watch porn. An Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England study conducted in 2021–2022 revealed that children encounter online pornography for the first time at the average age of 13, almost a quarter by the time they are 11 years old, and one in ten as early as 9. “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,” media regulator Ofcom CEO Melanie Dawes said. The regulator described its suggestion on facial age estimation as using AI to analyse a viewer’s features. That would likely require taking a selfie on a device and uploading it. The watchdog said its proposed guidance also included photo identification matching, requiring a user to upload a photo ID such as passport or driving licence to prove their age, and credit chard checks. Another suggestion was open banking, whereby users can consent to their bank sharing information with online porn sites to confirm they are over 18. The Institute of Economic Affairs, a free-market think tank, said mandatory age verification threatened user privacy and would expose users to breaches and abuse by increasing the amount of sensitive data held by third parties. The regulator said weaker methods such as self-declaration of age, online payment methods that do not require a person to be 18, and disclaimers or warnings, would no longer meet the standards in its new guidance. Ofcom said it expects to publish its final guidance in early 2025. (with inputs from Reuters)