Why age checking on porn sites is not a good idea

After years of umming and ahhing, the government is now making moves to force porn sites into using age verification. Rebel against the proposed ‘Digital Economy Act’, and the websites face being blocked by internet providers, as well as £250,000 in fines.

Just like gambling sites, users could be asked to provide credit card details, with all online porn outlets set to have age checks by April 2018, regulated by the British Board of Film Classification – the body that sets age limits on films and video games, for who knows how many millions.

Imposing law and policy on a global platform still very much in its infancy is always going to be complicated, but this bill has been dubbed by cybersecurity experts like Dr Joss Wright as “one of the worst proposals” on digital strategy, who doubts there could be a “non-discriminatory, transparent, privacy-preserving and secure for end users”.

“It seems to me to be a very premature date,” Dr. Victoria Nash, an author to a report on the new bill, also told the BBC. “The idea you can get a regulatory body up and running in that timeframe seems extraordinary to me.”

There’s hundreds and thousands of sites that would be pulled up by these new laws, but it doesn’t cover content that we all know lives on social networks like Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter too – sites you can also peep some beheadings, violent altercations and an array of racist, sexist abuse. British Internet isn’t a little microcosm either: VPNS to mask your IP address’ location could circumvent the age checks altogether. And whether than means VPNs, torrenting or nabbing your ma’s Mastercard from her purse: if you’re 16 and horny, you’re going to get it somehow.

The proposed act’s biggest criticisms come from those concerned over cybersecurity. Linking any kind of online system to identity that can be accessed by the government leaves room for hackers. There’s been no assurance that age verification providers will protect user privacy in the bill, so your user profile and credit card details could be shilled out in a leak. Databases of porn habits with personal information attached could be built and left vulnerable – we saw what happened with the Ashley Madison hack in 2015, which released all the personal details of users of the extra-marital arrangements portal. There will be more scope for phishing, identity theft, privacy risks, blackmail and widespread ransomware attacks. At the pace security breaches are happening right now with WannaCry and Petya, it’s a serious concern.

We’ve also got to be aware that the government, the police and intelligence agencies could be collecting this private data. Keep that in mind: Tory minions are gonna know what you’re getting off to. As Sex & Censorship blog author and campaigner Jerry Barnett told the Guardian: “This is the state, yet again, intervening in people’s private lives for no reason other than good old British prurience and control-freakery.”

Additionally, campaigners are warning that people with bad credit ratings could miss out on accessing porn. Many in the UK don’t have access to credit cards, sometimes because of credit rating – 40 percent of people over 18 here don’t have a credit card, according to the UK Cards Association. So there: sexual expression, gratification, curiosity, general wanking off becomes more inaccessible, even classist.

Corey Price, the vice-president of Pornhub, told Huffington Post that they would be attempting to implement various methods of age verification, like phone numbers, passports, driving licenses and credit data.

These age-checks are ultimately coming into play as a way to fix a social issue with technology. The move has been welcomed by several children’s protection charities, like the NSPCC and Childnet – some claim it actually isn’t going far enough.

Government officials bleat about protecting children from porn, but haven’t made a major move yet to address why a lot of young people are clicking in the first place. Though the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems outlined plans to improve Sex and Relationships Education in schools, it’s still really terrible. As Prospect reports, SRE only became compulsory in March 2017. That doesn’t mean it’s well-informing either – whether its abstinence-based teaching for 12-year-olds in east Belfast or 60-year-old Mr Lily glumly handing out Durex in the Croydon school gym. A lack of sex education leads to unrealistic expectations of sex, body image issues, unsafe practices, pregnancy, STIs, the list goes on.

Ofsted found that in 2013, 40 percent of schools were providing inadequate sex ed: millions aren’t getting the info they need on consent, sex with someone of the same sex, domestic violence and abuse, FGM and a range of sensitive, important issues. LGBT young people aren’t getting the true support that’s desperately need: a recent study found almost half of trans pupils in the UK had attempted suicide, and 45 percent of LGBT people report being bullied in school. This is where porn enters – Pornhub even brought in sex psychologists and counselors to launch a digital sexual wellness centre earlier this year. Though the industry has an array of issues, ranging from fetishisation to questionable working conditions, misogyny and more, we can’t deny that porn is an important, needed education tool right now, filling in where our system plans to shut kids out.

Theresa May recently announced major changes to internet regulation that would change how the URL space forever. Censorship, in the style of China’s regime, hasn’t been ruled out by the prime minister and her minority government, all in a bid to tackle terrorism. However, Jim Killock of Open Rights Group related that this could make online crime easier, as this latest revelation will, as it pushes activity to “dark corners of the web, where they will be even harder to observe”.

As our government continues its relentless moral pursuit of porn, issues such as abuse online and the stratospheric growth of revenge porn stagnate. The bid to ban ‘non conventional’ sex acts – face-sitting, spanking, female ejaculation and more – in porn last year was arbitrary policing of consensual online activity and sexual freedom. If there is to be any regulation, working with security experts, pornography providers, actors et al is paramount. Controlling the constantly mutating internet isn’t simple, or in any way doable; it’s dangerous, reductive and just really fucking stiff.