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Porn company fined £1M over inadequate age checks (UK)
- metalman 11mo agogreat news for self employed prostitutes everywhere
- meitham 11mo agoerm, I think they're now called "sex workers" but self-employed or digital prostitutes is more correct now, given the inability to tell if you're dealing with a person or AI hologram!
- metalman 11mo agowhy I specified, prostitute, as the restrictions with online sexiness, will push unrequited demand, back into real life, where nobody is concerned with bieng all nicy nice about the "titles" involved, it's kinks for sale, maddness, life on the edge, or cartoon's, so for those too chicken to buy a piece of tail, then they can buy a blow up doll, or something else in brown paper, or soon enough, personal AI...assistants, rather then the variety you can see getting lunch at noon, on the corner of young and bloor, which AI will never be able to simulate, ha!, anybody who can make it past a receptionist like those, still able to conduct serios negotiations, is made from stern and focused material indeed.
- Lio 11mo agoI love the way that the BBC studiously doesn't name any AVS Group Ltd sites in that article.
- DoctorOW 11mo agoI'd like to think somewhere in the newsroom somebody read off the list of websites, nobody admitted to visiting, so they had to conclude none of them had name recognition.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- sva_ 11mo agoFunnily, ofcom itself provides a list in the opening text https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/investigation-into-avs-group-ltds-compliance-with-the-duty-to-prevent-children-from-encountering-pornographic-content-through-the-use-of-age-assurance https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/i...
- entuno 11mo agoYeah, they didn't really think through the fact they're publishing big lists of sites without effective age verification in all the investigation notices on their website..
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- IlikeMadison 11mo agoThey can fine all they want, if the company doesn't have any entity in said territory they can just ignore it. What Ofcom succeeded to achieve though is to deter more and more foreign IT companies to ever expand and create jobs in the UK.
- crimsoneer 11mo agoI mean, while this might be true, I'm not sure democracies being totally incapable of regulating the internet is a good place to be. I'm not sure a race to the bottom (if you attempt to regulate us in anyway we'll leave/go complain to the US president) is really a great outcome here. "Porn websites should check your age" is not some radical totalitarian demand I think?
- brainwad 11mo agoI think it actually is a radical totalitarian demand, if the only accepted form of age verification is government ID scans or selfie face capture. People should have a right to serve content without having to deal with the SPII of their clients.
- crimsoneer 11mo ago... but they specifically don't have to, right? You can just use a third party verification company. Or you can not, if you'd prefer not to. You just have to do something vaguely meaningful that isn't just "Pinky swear you're 18".
- worldsavior 11mo ago1M is nothing.
- sam_lowry_ 11mo agoNothing for you Facebook or Citybank crooks, but porn is a very competitive business with thin margins.
- worldsavior 11mo agoThese companies are rich more than you can imagine, 1M for them is nothing.
- IAmBroom 11mo agoCite? You need to prove your statement is generally true, not that one unicorn company had profits.
- raesene9 11mo agoI'd like to believe that technical people at OFCOM actually know the impossibility of what they're being asked to implement but are just going through the motions, so their bosses/politicians can put out pointless press releases like this. Trying to restrict access to content on the Internet by requiring "robust" age verification was never going to achieve the goals they stated, and has a number of predictable (and already seen) negative side-effects. Unfortunately governments all over the place seem intent on continuing this type of regulation, I presume so they can be seen to be doing something. Good time to be in the VPN game, I'd guess.
- LandR 11mo agoUntil governments try to ban VPNs...
- raesene9 11mo agoThat is one option, but then you get into the world of Corporate VPNs which are heavily in use and it would seriously cause problems if you banned. Then you're into "what about all TLS connections" which can be used to send traffic, so you have to do TLS interception at scale, which is a very non-trivial problem to try and solve. Then you're into non-TLS encrypted protocols, so your only option there is to block anything you can't intercept..... At that point you've pretty much broken Internet access in your country, might as well just chop the cables :P
- falcor84 11mo agoI wish I was as optimistic about the resilience of the open web as you, but I see what the Chinese government achieved and what the Russian government have been doing over the last few years, and I'm very concerned.
- raesene9 11mo agoOh I'm not saying they won't try and do it, just it'll either be ineffective or they'll effectively wreck the Internet. For the UK I'm kind of doubting they'll put enough money into it to make it good, so we'll get the ineffective version and politicians will get stories like this one written about their efforts.
- theturtle 11mo ago[dead]
- cynicalsecurity 11mo agoUK repeats the same stupidity as the Prohibition in the United States was?
- meitham 11mo agoThis ban targets children, prohibition covered adults! This more like requiring proof of id when you purchase alcohol
- debugnik 11mo agoExcept by ogling your ID, the attendant isn't making a copy and linking it to your purchase in a database that will get breached, or shared with the wrong future government.
- samtheDamned 11mo agoThis isn't the same due to the sensitive nature of pornography consumption but in the US this is exactly what happens when you buy certain cold medicines (pseudoephedrine specifically)
- curiousgal 11mo agoHighly recommend watching The Thick of It to get a glimpse of how such UK policies come to be.
- orwin 11mo agoHeavy tangent: I finally tested the age verification thing in France: it's fine. I heavily dislike the biometric verification, it feels it can be gamed easily and in my opinion is dangerous, but the e-Id/bank verification seems solid. Weirdly, it might makes 'local' porn site like Dorcel who used to ask for credit cards for age verification (because of prior regulation not followed by mindgeek) more popular in the long run.
- nextchainxio 11mo ago[dead]
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]