The UK Government has bowed to public pressure to put age verification for pornography into the Online Safety Bill. The draft Bill had been subject to a lot of community criticism for failing to protect children from commercial pornography sites.
Protecting children online at last!
While the announcement to include age verification measures in the Online Safety Bill is an advancement, it’s not all good news. Unfortunately, it will be at least a year, possibly two years, before the law is implemented. In the meantime, children will continue to have easy access to online hardcore pornography. The effect on their mental and physical health is considerable. The level of child-on-child sexual abuse is rising at a dizzying rate. The acting out scenes of sexual strangulation is becoming all too common among children and young people.
“Illegal Processing of Children’s Online Data”
There is another legal route through which the government could move to actually protect children much sooner. That is via the office of the Information Commissioner. The Commissioner has a duty under the Data Protection Act 2018 to protect children from pornography sites because the websites are illegally gathering and processing children’s data. Online safety expert and Secretary of the Children’s Charities’ Coalition, John Carr O.B.E, has set out the details of this matter in his blog site Desiderata under: “The Puzzle Deepens”. Let’s hope the new incumbent since last month, John Edwards, is willing, unlike his predecessor, to actually take action on this.
Privacy concerns are a red herring
Jim Killock from the Open Rights Group complains that this new age verification measure risks users’ privacy being invaded and might result in a data breach. This is a red herring.
First, the age verification technology proposed is highly sophisticated. It is used successfully for online gambling and other activities that require age limitations. It has not resulted in data breeches for these activities.
Second, their only job is to check the name and age of the person whose details have been provided.
Third, no database is being gathered by the age verification companies. Therefore there is no risk of a breach.
More importantly, the pornography industry itself gathers more information about private individuals and their viewing habits than any other online platform. It then sells that information on to advertisers and others.
As mentioned above the real concern is that the information Commissioner has so far failed to carry out his legal duty to protect children from the illegal gathering of their personal data and it’s processing by the pornography industry.
We hope that this anomaly will be rectified in the very near future.
