The United Kingdom government has presented to Parliament a revised draft of its trailblazing online safety legislation. The legislation will now begin the process of scrutiny by the House of Commons and then the House of Lords before becoming law, probably early in 2023.
This new statute will have a profound impact on the adult industry because it revives previously abandoned legal provisions to require age
verification before UK citizens can access pornography online.
The original plan for this new law was to target only services that included user-generated content. This, in effect, limited the scope of the Bill to social media platforms. As a result, the first draft of the Bill mentioned “pornography” just once, and that was only to repeal the previous legislation, “Part 3” of the Digital Economy Act 2017. The new version of the Bill has 86 references to “pornography.”
The law creates a duty to ensure that children are “not normally able to encounter” pornographic content. It suggests this is achieved through age assurance, and specifies “age verification” because this provides the highest confidence level about the user’s age.
Read our report to better understand the impact on your business.
This report outlines the impact of the UK Online Safety Bill on the adult industry. The document highlights:
- The bill’s requirement for adult websites to implement age verification measures to ensure children do not encounter pornographic content.
- The strong data protection requirements must be adhered to when implementing these measures.
- The swift implementation timeline, with the new regulations likely to come into effect in the early part of 2023.
- The potential consequences for non-compliance include financial penalties and website blocking.
- The importance for adult websites to begin taking action now to verify the age of their users and prevent a potential loss of revenue.
- The various methods for age verification include facial age estimation, audio-based estimation, email address, mobile phone number, identity document scan, and credit card.
- An overview of VerifyMyAge’s comprehensive age verification solutions.
Download the full report below:
