UK regulators to porn sites: Age verification now or it will be expensive

Children and young people in the UK are to be better protected from online pornography and other harmful content. The British regulatory authority Ofcom is now increasing the pressure on adult portals such as Pornhub or xHamster to immediately implement "highly effective" age verification or age rating measures. In principle, they are already obliged to do so under the controversial Online Safety Bill. With new industry guidelines published on Thursday, Ofcom is now clarifying how affected operators of websites and apps should implement the required age verification.

According to the technical guidelines, possible methods include: open banking, i.e. the use of open interfaces for online banking, photo comparison with official documents or classification using biometric facial recognition. Age verification by mobile phone or credit card providers, the use of digital identity services (eID) and email-based age estimation are also permitted. The technical means to keep under-18s away from porn are also contested in this country. According to the Commission for the Protection of Minors in the Media (KJM), anyone who does not use new developments based on AI is acting negligently. Porn activists consider a mandatory age check to be dangerous, as it would drive the majority of users to sites abroad with even less protection.

Porn sites such as paid premium services that offer their content, including AI-generated content, must implement age verification systems (AVS) immediately, according to Ofcom. Failure to do so could result in sanctions, including fines of up to 18 million pounds or 10 percent of their global annual turnover. Business interruption measures such as the blocking of a domain for British users are also envisaged. Portals that host user-generated pornographic material must comply with the requirements by July 2025. This also applies to social media platforms such as Elon Musk's X and Reddit, which allow pornographic content. They can also remove pornographic material altogether or place an age restriction on it if they would rather not subject all users to an age check.

Ofcom wants to crack down

"For too long, many online services which allow porn and other harmful material have ignored the fact that children are accessing their services", said Ofcom boss Melanie Dawes. "Either they don’t ask or, when they do, the checks are minimal and easy to avoid. That means companies have effectively been treating all users as if they’re adults, leaving children potentially exposed to porn and other types of harmful content. Today, this starts to change." At the same time, Dawes announced: "We’ll be monitoring the response from industry closely. Those companies that fail to meet these new requirements can expect to face enforcement action from Ofcom.

In general, all age verification methods used by services must be "technically accurate, robust, reliable and fair to be considered highly effective", according to the documents. According to Ofcom, it has decided not to introduce any numerical thresholds for the required high efficiency at this time, such as "99 percent accuracy". However, such approaches could supplement the current criteria in the future. This is "dependent on the further development of test methods, industry standards and independent research". All services with user-generated content and search functions within the scope of the law must in principle check whether they are "likely to be used by children" in whole or in part. They have until April 16 to do so.

(nen)