When the UK government announced plans to censor pornography on the Internet to avoid minors from accessing adult material, it did not take long for the suggested national wall to contain cracks.
By being introduced on 15 July 2019, which would be only a few weeks away, the barrier would force online providers to carry out age check burden— and costs— by submitting credit card details or scanned copying of ID and passports to show that visitors are over 18 years old.
According to the UK government, websites that monetized pornography would be compelled to comply with or “face the withdrawal or blocking of payment facilities for UK consumers.”
The British Board of the Film Classification (BBFC), an organization which said to ZDNet, “will require the BBFC to remove services if the website is not in compliance,” is the phrase request instead of demand, because the endeavor to regulate access to a global pornography platform isn’t an simple job to achieve.
Back in April, we described just a few of the reasons why the porn block was likely to backfire, the least of which being that the easy use of a personal virtual network (VPN) or Tor network would bypass such constraints.
Since people in the UK today have grown up with the benefits of wideband, smartphones and tablets— rather than dial-up and PC’s that have megabytes of storage— it will not be a issue for many.
(The most popular ways to outsource checking of age on the market today can also be circumvented in a matter of minutes by quickly searching Google.) Adult content providers are given the opportunity to link your credit card, ID and porn preferences together in their digital profiles and are likely to leak information through data breach— which could possibly lead to
Another problem that was not so simple to see on the horizon, however, has possibly shelved the project permanently— a failure to meet EU requirements when the block was launched.
According to the BBC, the UK government, which has changed its focus from trying to thrash out a Brexit treaty with the EU to a conservative management fight reminiscent of a Fawlty Towers season.
Secretary Jeremy Wright of the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) said the project was suspended owing to a failure to maintain the EU updated about important information.
The irony can not be lost here, given that the porn block would have shifted the obligation of verification to suppliers with possibly serious implications for failure, and yet the government did not carry out its own validation and legal checks before the launch of the project.
While the porn block was initially designed as a means of protecting kids and preventing them from “stumbling across” adult material, you are far more likely to “stumble” over these content types while on social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, owing to spam and bots.
Attempting to control these huge platforms would, in the same manner, be a losing fight, and establishing security controls for large sites merely does not present technical knowledge or impact to the UK authorities and a film classification organisation.
The UK government may wish this was not the truth of the scenario as the creators of the Snooper’s Charter. However, more urgent things have to be addressed politically, and it is probable that the next Prime Minister will decide whether or not to resurrect the porn block.
Let’s hope this isn’t the case for the sake of our privacy and security at large.
