Spain's "porn passport" to implement EU plans: Age check with passport planned
The Spanish government has introduced a method that allows porn sites to check the age of their users. This is still voluntary, but the EU has other plans.
Pornographic content should only be accessible online for adults – In Spain, a new age verification procedure is intended to enforce this.
(Image: M-Production/Shutterstock.com)
Spain has made an advance in age verification for the use of pornographic websites. The so-called "Cartera Digital Beta", also known as the "Porn Pass", is intended to make things right for everyone involved. Youth protection authorities can use it to restrict access to adult content, as required by the EU Commission.
The "porn passport" is intended to provide the audience of such sites with discretion and comply with data protection regulations. Porn sites have a legally compliant standard for the age check, but this could fail in practice.
Users should remain anonymous after one-time registration
According to a presentation by the Spanish government, the "porn passport" will be available as a smartphone app with public key encryption in late summer of this year users will have to register once with their ID card. They can then log on to adult sites anonymously, up to 30 times a month using the app.
For this purpose, the app generates a public key and a corresponding private key for each login to a porn site after successful one-time registration with an ID card.
Public key encryption is intended to ensure discretion
If a user wants to log in to a corresponding site using the "Porn Pass" app, the site's server requests a corresponding public key in the app. The corresponding private key is stored here, which never leaves the smartphone on which the app is installed. If there is a matching private key for the corresponding public key, the app reports this back to the server and the user has successfully confirmed their age.
The user's identity should be invisible to the porn site at all times and cannot be read via the app. However, the process is not without controversy, partly due to fears of data leaks.
From late summer 2024, porn sites in Spain will be able to use the "Porn Pass" voluntarily. "We are acting in advance, and we are asking the platforms to do so because what is at stake requires it," said Spain's Digital Minister José Luis Escrivá. In the future, the system is likely to be replaced by the EU's adapted digital identity system, eIDAS2. The new EU regulation on this, which came into force in May, requires all member states to offer their citizens a wallet app with which they can identify themselves over the internet.
Leading adult sites already under pressure
The very large adult sites are already under increasing pressure in the EU. For example, the strictest rules under the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) have applied to pornography sites Pornhub, Stripchat and Xvideos since April. The recommendations also include the introduction of online age verification systems (AVS). Violations could result in horrendous fines.
However, it is questionable whether this will motivate the operators of such sites to voluntarily present their audience with technical hurdles. And users could even easily circumvent an EU-wide wallet obligation – via a VPN connection. With such a service, the connection to a website can be established via a detour or VPN tunnel. Anyone who wants to watch porn without an age check connects to the site via a server in another EU country.
For the server of the porn site, the request then comes from a country without the planned strict rules, so that the site would presumably do without the – age check, which is only enforced in the EU.
(mack)