Age Verification? A godsend to the web owners

Let's laugh our socks off at the pitiful UK Porno Age Checks

The new regulations to protect our young from watching porn are a godsend to Pornhub and co.

Now they no longer need to beg for your private details, no longer need to trick you into giving them your credit card data to access a free site, no the UK government are are forcing all porn users to sign up with all details properly.

You need to be immensely naive to believe these checks will prevent youngsters watching porn. They will, like prohibition in the US in the 1930's drive more into hidden and dark web sites. Sites based in countries where no internet registration (for the web site owner) is required. No imprint showing responsibility is necessary.

Let's add insult to injury. Where does the OFCOM, the useless ICO jurisdiction end? Let's take a cloud hosted Porn-Site belonging to a German or French interpreneur with for example the legally correct "impressum/imprint" (maybe the UK could catch up on that one). So he allegedly doesn't check user age. They send him a million pound fine and he laughs his socks off. Who on earth do these weedy Brits think they are?

Next problem. How do you define porn? How about the hundreds of porn sites that don't have images, just extremely detailed stories. We can cite texts from books that are openly available from Apple and Amazon. No checks at all except you have some means of electronic payment.

Sorry, UK you have got this wrong. The value of Pornhub, xHamster and all the others will now go sky high because they have a shed load of private data they can sell to Meta and the other data vaults.

Germany and France among other countries have mandatory "imprint/impressum" regulations. This means every web site hosted by someone within their jurisdiction must publicise site ownership and responsibility including a natural person and a reachable address and phone number.

We are miles behind on this. Image the Thames Water site actually saying where the buck stops.

Some info on a pitiful report by aunty: BBC Article