Forbes: Age Verification For Porn Sites: Why It Won’t Work

[DVTimes]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/barryco...h=11ccaa1422d6

Accessing adult websites in Texas will–in theory, at least–become much more difficult this week. New laws that come into force tomorrow will require visitors to pass some form of age verification before they’re allowed to access content on sites such as Pornhub.

On the face of it, it’s hard to argue against laws designed to prevent children from accessing pornography. But there is a very real risk in that, by trying to protect children from adult content, you end up creating even bigger problems.

The new laws being passed in Texas will see it become the seventh U.S. state to attempt to tackle this issue in recent months. HB 1181 will require sites hosting sexually-explicit content to use “reasonable age-verificiation methods” to ensure visitors from the state are 18 or over. These might inlcude photos of government-issued ID or “a commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data to verify the age of an individual.”

The new law applies to any “commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material on an internet website, including a social media platform, more than one-third of which is sexual material harmful to minors.”

The problems of such systems are manifold, according to security and privacy experts. Let’s assume a site chooses to use photos or scans of government-issued ID to verify the age of visitors: how is that information being stored? Is it properly secured?

It instantly becomes a huge honeypot for cyberattackers, who could use such a database to extort registered users. Want your employer, your family, your neighbors to know that you’ve signed up for this porn site? Pay us $200 or else. And let’s face it, data security is probably not high up the priority list of most adult website operators.

The U.K. is currently grappling with the same issues as its Online Safety Bill passes through Parliament. It too will place an onus on adult website operators to impose some form of age verification, although the precise method of doing so remains ill-defined.

Like Texas, one of the options on the table is specialist, third-party age verification providers who might verify a user once and then allow them to access content on all sites using that same system. But the U.K.’s Open Rights Group, an organization working to protect people’s online rights and privacy, sees flaws in this approach too.

“Some of these systems use facial recognition techniques to identify people’s age,” said Dr Monica Horten, policy manager for freedom of expression at the Open Rights Group, in a statement earlier this year.

“The collection of large pools of children’s biometric data by private companies, with no governance structures in place, is something that all parents should be very worried about.”

Here, we’re going to look at how legislators around the world have tried to tackle this issue–and why it’s far from straightforward.

The difficulty of nailing down the security of age verification systems appears to be the main reason why Australia has this week backed away from similar laws. The country’s e-Safety Commission had previously recommended a pilot of age-verification technology, where users could use electronic access tokens to prove they were adults.

However, the government has decided more work needs to be done on the implementation of such systems before it proceeds with even a pilot. “The government will await the outcomes of the class 2 industry codes process before deciding on a potential trial of age assurance technologies,” it said, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald, a process which reportedly could take two years to even start. The can has been kicked down the road.

Even if a reliable, secure age-verification system is found, there will be many ways in which both adults and children will still be able to access pornography without having to show ID.

Although the biggest, most well-known adult websites may comply with individual state or national laws to avoid prosecution, many others won’t. Many of these sites operate from countries such as Russia and China, well beyond the reach of U.S. and other international legislators.

VPNs provide another easy escape route. The same, perfectly legal software that allows you to watch Netflix output from another country can also fool sites into thinking you’re accessing them from a jurisdiction with no age-verificiation requirements. Unless states or governments also ban VPNs–a highly draconian and almost impossible to implement move–then people will continue to evade regional blocks.

The U.K. saw such problems coming more than a decade ago. In 2012, the U.K. government reached an informal agreement with the country’s biggest broadband providers to implement network-level filters that covered all devices connecting to the home network. These would, in theory, allow parents to block access to porn and other unsuitable content with “one click”, according to then Prime Minister David Cameron. Every customer was given an unavoidable choice to switch the filters on or off.

There was just one problem: they didn’t work. An investigation by the magazine I was editing at the time, PC Pro, found that children could still access hardcore pornography from something as simple as a Google Images search, for example. At the other end of the scale, the filters routinely blocked adults from accessing perfectly harmless websites.

BCS, the chartered inistitute for IT in the U.K., says it’s unwise for any goverment to rely on technological solutions to the pornography problem. “There is a history of government making technical proposals–for example, filtering by internet service providers (ISPs) and failed attempts for age verification–in past legislation to prevent young people from accessing pornography,” it states in a report published today, in response to the U.K.’s Online Safety Bill.

“While technologists, and indeed young people themselves, have pointed out that bypassing U.K. specific age verification technologies is currently simple, there is still a view that technical intervention with age assurance on pornographic websites will prevent access”.

The BCS concludes that “online safety policies should aim to provide young people, their parents and advisers with an understanding of risks and how to mitigate them, rather than assuming technology will prevent those risks from arising”.

[Rochard]

"data security is probably not high up the priority list of most adult website operators"

WTF? Sure sure. We spend our time and money launching a site that becomes our bread and butter to support our families but data security is not an issue?

[The Porn Nerd]

Impossible to police or enforce so buh-bye.

[Kelli58]

“The collection of large pools of children’s biometric data by private companies, with no governance structures in place, is something that all parents should be very worried about.”

I would say not just for children but by any company. That just screams potential exploitation. Does nobody remember the damage the Ashley Madison hack did?

[mikeet]

Originally Posted by Kelli58

“The collection of large pools of children’s biometric data by private companies, with no governance structures in place, is something that all parents should be very worried about.”

I would say not just for children but by any company. That just screams potential exploitation. Does nobody remember the damage the Ashley Madison hack did?

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