By 25 July, all sites and apps that allow pornography – whether they are dedicated adult sites or social media, search or gaming services – must use highly effective age checks to ensure children are not normally able to encounter it. Online firms who publish their own pornography are already required to protect children from it, and thousands of sites have already introduced robust age checks in response.
Major porn providers operating in the UK have confirmed to Ofcom that they will introduce effective checks by next month’s deadline in order to comply with the new rules. They include PornHub, the most-visited pornographic service in the UK. Other services who are happy to be named at this stage include BoyfriendTV, Cam4, FrolicMe, inxxx, Jerkmate, LiveHDCams, MyDirtyHobby, RedTube, Streamate, Stripchat, Tube8, and YouPorn. This represents a broad range of pornography services accessed in the UK.
Monitoring compliance with these new duties is a priority for Ofcom. If any company fails to comply with its new duties, Ofcom can impose fines and – in very serious cases – apply for a court order to prevent the site or app from being available in the UK. As part of our work enforcing the Online Safety Act, we have already launched investigations into four porn providers and won’t hesitate to take further action from July.
So much for being better than the US. Welcome to the downfall of modern society UK.
It’s been happening for decades.
“PrOtEcT ThE ChiLdReN! 👆🏻🥴”
I can not hear that anymore!
Children need awareness, rather than shielding, concealment and tabooing.
silver lining, the kinks of the future are gonna be sooo fucked up.
Amen. It’s like they think that somehow it is better to only encounter the world when you are in college and alone.
mastodon has porn and you don’t even need an account to use search. also, this will just drive people to use sketchy sites that won’t follow the rules.
VPN subs will be up and UK viewership will be nonexistent
If your kid has half a brain he’ll do what we did as kids when porn sites were blocked on the home WiFi: He’ll just get a VPN.
And when VPN websites were blocked on the home WiFi, we’d just download their apps on mobile data.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Better to educate your kids on their natural urges and letting them use the more moderated sites than have them go down the more dodgy rabbitholes. No kink shaming but some of the things people do are nasty.
I’m disappointed that Pornhub is apparently capitulating instead of blocking access entirely in protest, like they’ve done in other jurisdictions.
I think they realized that they won’t get the jurisdiction to bend on this one, and the general response from UK government will be “good riddance to bad rubbish”.
They only really block access when there isn’t an official way to validate. Iirc, Louisiana did this over a year ago and pornhub is doing age verification there now.
This feel strangely like it has little to do with actually protecting kids…
It’s about making LGBTQ content “adult only” and using this same mechanism to enforce ID law on that content. They’ve been doing it in some USA states for a few years now. No one wants to be the Porn Politician that votes against it.
It’s more about penetrating your privacy but think of the children is the go-to argument to sugar-coat that.
Someone should be asking what the sentence will be for kids who commit identity fraud and use someone else’s ID to set up an account. It may flip the narrative to point out they are intentionally creating more criminal acts that will get kids in trouble with the law and possibly ruin lives.
The act in question doesn’t create offences for children; it (mainly) creates offences for service providers.
A kid who went on the internet and clicked I’m 18+ and looked at porn doesn’t have a victim (outside of the perpetrator if one wants to argue that). I don’t know what the laws are in the U.K. but here (U.S.) identity fraud/theft is a federal crime. With a possible sentence up to 15 years.
With how it was, there was no incentive for a kid to take their parents/older friends ID when they weren’t looking, or share ID’s/information with their friends to access those sites. If a person gets notice that their information is being used on a site they weren’t using, the likelyhood of it being reported goes up.
Hopefully nothing would ever go as far as being reported as fraud/theft, but all it takes is one person who doesn’t like their kid hanging out with someone else.
So while they didn’t create any new offenses for kids, they created roadblocks that put kids in a situation that may make them break the law out of sheer curiosity.
Getting caught drinking a beer, or smoking cigarettes would be a godsend compared to getting charges brought up for something so stupid.
identity fraud/theft is a federal crime. With a possible sentence up to 15 years.
Yay! More clients!
Glad we can agree this is not about new offences.
In the UK there is no specific crime of identity theft, with offences generally being prosecuted as fraud. Fraud requires that the person committing the fraud intend to make a gain of money or property, or to cause someone else to make a loss of money or property.
There’s no real way to frame this as being bad for children except inasmuch as people over the age of consent (which is 16 in the UK) should be free to access as much porn as they please.
Yep, ancap thought in terms of efficiency, to justify ancap, goes after the central controller just not having enough information to fully govern a society well enough.
These fuckers apparently think something changed, if you have one big honeypot of a web and mandate checks (as a justification) that yield said information to them.
BTW, they are right, until we find a way to decentralize services.
Are they going to add a box to enter your age like on Steam that you immediately roll back to 1st January 1901?
They did this in Florida. They want you to submit a picture of yourself and your photo ID to a porn website
So what privacy will I have to give up?
Actually I’m in Canada so I’m probably safe anyway.
I mean… I don’t watch porn so this doesn’t affect my anyway…
It’s tied to your account on the website. So it’s tied to all of your viewing activity. It could be leaked or compromised. It could be subpoenaed. It could be purchased.
Some of these ham fisted age verification checks ask you to upload photos of your government ID
So people too young or too privacy conscious to use those major platforms will move to nicher porn sites. Doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all… /s
Say it with me folks! VPN!
V! P! N!
don’t the uk have a history of straight up putting porn in print magazines and on free television every day?
Page 3 of the sun newspaper was the famous one for just having a topless women emblazoned on it
To Americans, tits may be considered porn. To a good chunk of the rest of the world, it’s not as pornographic.
Nudity isn’t always pornographic or sexual depending on the context. But in this context it absolutely is. The Sun put tits there to sexually arouse readers, that was the point.
To Brits it is pornographic.
So this will affect Reddit and Lemmy too, presumably?
It already has. Lemmy.zip if unavailable to users (of the admins own volition as they don’t have the capability to comply) in the Uk because of the law
Time to invest in a VPN company
Headline should have been: porn sites have no spunk. Screw the government and just plug the whole country. Though we’ll no longer have easy access various VPNs will still allow us to reach around the block with IP protection (just like consuming BBC service without a license).
