CYBERSPACE—After two years of delays, and protests from internet freedom and privacy advocates that the law will be “disastrous,” as Forbes.com reported, the United Kingdom has finally announced what officials there say will now be a definite date to ban online porn nationwide—unless users are willing to upload personal documents top prove that they are at least 18 years of age.
The government there confirmed on Wednesday that on July 15, 2019, the U.K. will become the first country in the world to institute a blanket, age-verification requirement for online porn sites, a law which is expected to hit some of the most trafficked sites on the internet, including PornHub, YouPorn and other massive sites, according to CNBC.
Earlier this year, the U.K. government said that the age verification law would take effect some time in April, but at the end of March, official said that the date had been pushed back again.
Putting the law into effect will be a massive undertaking, with porn sites accounting for up to 30 percent of all data transmitted over the internet, according to Forbes. Pornhub alone was the seventh-most trafficked site in the world in March, according to SimilarWeb stats, with nearly 3.4 billion visits in that month alone.
Other countries have simply banned porn altogether, for all internet users of any age. India, the world’s second-most populous country, started last October, blocking 827 porn sites, as AVN.com reported.
Online activist Jim Killock, of the Open Rights Group, called the government’s decision to impose the system without uniform privacy standards “dangerous," according to the Independent.
“The idea that they are ‘optional’ is dangerous and irresponsible. Having some age verification that is good and other systems that are bad is unfair and a scammer’s paradise—of the government’s own making,” Killock said, adding that potential leaks of user data would be “disastrous.”
Serge Acker, CEO of the age verification software firm OCL & Portes, told the Independent that the law's requirement that users upload personal data unsafe for consumers.
“Alternative, independent solutions exist," he said. "Users can anonymously prove they have the right to access content without having to create a honeypot of hackable data.”
Photo By Adrian Pingstone / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
