UK Age Assurance Guidelines for Porn Sites Embrace AI Age Verification and Digital ID Wallets

The UK’s regulator for the Internet has created draft guidance for how adult websites will have to meet the legal requirements to prevent children from accessing their content. The age checks for porn sites that have been in the works for years are now finally on their way. The regulator, Ofcom, aims to have adult content safely guarded behind child-safety age gates. In the future, adult websites in the UK will have to ensure that UK users see these age gates on their landing pages. The guidance from Ofcom provides a more tangible concept of what will happen when the age-gating system comes into play in the next few years. The law also puts similar requirements on social media platforms to conduct age checks to protect minors. These requirements will likely be guidelines for user-to-user services that Ofcom is expected to release early next year. The government is aiming to make the UK the safest place to go online in the world. They are relying on age assurance technology to fulfill this policy pledge. Ofcom’s draft guidance for porn websites suggests that age checks could take different forms, such as Open Banking login, uploading a passport and a live selfie, and webcam assessments. Digital identity wallets will also be an approved method. Ofcom will likely add more methods for age assurance in the future, and “weak” measures will not suffice. Providers of pornographic content with a large number of UK users must conduct highly effective age checks to comply with the new legal requirements under the Online Safety Act. The threat of major fines for failing to protect minors from seeing porn has caused concern due to the potential for age verification to spread across the web. User generated content is outside the scope of the “Part 5 duties” at this time, but social media websites will also face similar requirements in the future as they will be subject to the child protection duties. Overall, what Ofcom is suggesting for porn sites is likely to be similar to the guidance it will provide for social media and user-to-user services in the future.