Starting today, millions Adults trying to access pornography in the UK will be asked to prove that they are over 18 years old. Under the new online child safety law, the self-reported checkbox allows anyone to claim to be the upper hand on porn sites, which can be achieved through an estimated age estimate of facial scans, ID document uploads, credit card checks, and more. Some of the largest porn sites, including Pornhub and Youporn, say they will follow the new rules. Social media sites like Blues, Reddit, Discord, Grindr and X are introducing UK age checks to prevent children from seeing harmful content.
Ultimately, it’s not just the British who will see this change. Around the world, a new wave of child protection laws forces profound shifts to normalize strict ages, allowing extensive inspections across the network. Some of these measures are designed to specifically prevent minors from accessing adult material, while others are intended to prevent children from using social media platforms or accessing harmful content. In the UK, websites and apps that require pornography, self-harm, suicide and eating disorder content are now required, requiring age checks.
Protecting children online is an urgent issue, but privacy and human rights advocates have long warned that while they may be in good faith, age checks introduce a range of speech and surveillance issues that could end up snowballing online.
“Age verification hinders people’s ability to access online information anonymously,” said Riana Pfefferkorn, a policy researcher at Stanford University. “This includes information that adults have the right to access rights, but may not want others to know about the information they are consuming, such as pornography—and the information that children want to access, but for political reasons, this is inappropriate, such as accurate information about sexual, reproductive health information and LGBTQ content.”
The efforts to introduce strong age checks online for the past decade have recently attracted attention. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court paved the way for states to require porn sites to check visitors who are at least 18 years old to use age verification technology. For example, with the law passed, PornHub has blocked visits from at least 20 states with tourists. Meanwhile, French court ruled last week that porn sites can check the age of users. Ireland implemented age check laws for video websites this week. The European Commission is testing an age verification application. In December, Australia’s strict social media ban on children under the age of 16 will take effect and provide checks for people logged in on social media and login engines.
“If people choose not to log in [to search engines] To avoid age-guaranteed checks, this may have a wide impact on the streamlined, comprehensive way people search online information.
Arrival age
Although the recent wave of court rulings and legislation in age verification is new, multiple online platforms and services require some form of age check. The UK-based age-verified company, Yoti, works on a variety of digital identity technologies, including face scans facing estimated ages, and he said it conducted over 850 million age checks and completed more than one million a day. A YOTI spokesperson told Wired in an email: “Brands around the world are using this technology, including social media, gaming, adults, dating, retail and vaping.”
There are many forms of age verification mechanisms. The UK Online Security Act, overseen by communications regulator Ofcom, lists seven “efficient” methods that websites can use. Typically, the website will hire third-party companies from the insurance industry that grows in age, rather than checking the age directly.
