The Telegraph – Age-gating could be the vaccine passports of the internet

The Government’s announcement this week that children will be better protected from online porn has been warmly welcomed. But this headline-grabbing policy has a lot of devil in the detail, and is more likely to succeed in expanding digital ID in a checkpoint Britain than it is in shielding our children from lurid imagery.

It is not the first time the policy of mirroring age restrictions for adult content offline in the online world has been proposed. The problem is, it’s incredibly hard to enforce online, creates serious privacy and fraud risks, and is unlikely to achieve the goal of protecting children.

Commercial porn websites could indeed request credit card details to grant users access – but there’s little to stop a child using a parent’s or older sibling’s card details. It would be a blackmailers’ dream for websites to build honeypots of credit card details matched with inventories of people’s private sexual interests. Proposals for websites to conduct passport or driving license checks would be even worse – a recipe for fraud and exploitation.

And it won’t just be commercial porn sites requiring ID, which account for a fraction of online porn – Nadine Dorries plans to extend internet passports to sites like Twitter and Reddit, which are also full of adult content, and responsible for children’s exposure to porn which is often by accident rather than by intention.

The tech-solutionists, forever hunting lucrative government contracts, have a new pitch. They could age-gate websites using technology that requests a biometric, AI face scan estimating visitors’ age. The price of this high-tech age guesstimate would be giving identifying data as sensitive as your DNA to a company that would sit between individuals and their sexual desires. As much as they say the data processing would be ephemeral, with nothing permanently stored, data that valuable means that a security flaw or inevitable future breach could incur misery and ruin for millions of people. It would just be a matter of time. In any event, a world in which the state requires biometric face scans for citizens to freely roam the internet is not the democratising web anyone imagined, but a truly dystopian one.

Another alarming proposal was hidden in the government’s announcement: companies could “confirm [visitors’] age against government data.” This is a gentle way of suggesting that adult websites require visitors to use government-backed digital IDs, which means government wants us to have government-backed digital IDs.

I don’t know what’s worse – private companies harvesting people’s porn-watching habits, or the government doing it. But what I do know is that we all ought to be worried about this Government’s obsession with digital ID.

Johnson’s Government has already created mandatory Covid ID, despite no evidence that they would reduce Covid cases – a mandate they’ve since had to drop under threat of Big Brother Watch’s legal challenge, but the medical IDs still sit on millions of people’s phones. They’re now trying to mandate voter ID, despite no evidence of significant ballot box fraud in the UK – a “solution in search of a problem”, according to David Davis MP. They’re trialling digital IDs for nightclubs from next week. And now they’re trying to create an internet ID, despite no evidence that it will protect children.

I have no objection to digital forms of ID in principle, where possession is a choice rather than a requirement. But an internet passport would be the most intrusive identity scheme of all. And this notion of confirming identity against government data is one likely to stick, and sprawl into multiple areas of our increasingly identity-checked lives. Of course for now, “a bus pass to vote” will suffice, but it will die with our analogue-world elders – the internet-connected generation is becoming an internet-tracked generation. It is not a paranoid prediction, but a pragmatic one, to warn that these multiple identity demands could soon spawn the backbone of a unified, centralised, government-managed ID system, probably mediated by private companies, that pokes into everything from our medical data to sexual habits.

Some might say this is simply the inevitable tide of technology, but it doesn’t have to be. Not only is a culture of checkpoints, tracking and suspicion far from an inevitability but a conscious, technological reshaping of our society that contradicts Britain’s liberal values; it introduces new privacy and security costs without the benefit of addressing the problem of online child safety.

We should try to limit children’s access to adult content online, but in reality we will never be able to totally prevent them from accessing it at home any more than we can stop children watching 18+ films at home – we can only create an ID-based, surveillance-controlled internet in a broadly fruitless attempt to get there. And if we accept the harms that pornography can lead to, perhaps the question should be whether more legislation is needed to control that content itself.

Silkie Carlo, Big Brother Watch Director

The Telegraph – The new ‘porn laws’ could be the vaccine passports of the internet

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