Porn sites forced to check users are aged 18+

The Government is again trying to force porn sites to verify that UK users are aged 18 or above, as part of the Online Safety Bill.

The idea was first proposed by then-prime Minister David Cameron in 2013, before being delayed until 2019, and then eventually scrapped following pressure from privacy campaigners.

That scheme proposed people visiting porn sites would prove their age either from ID such as driving licences and passports, or by buying age-verification cards in shops.

The new plan doesn’t state how sites should verify age, but insists that systems must be “secure, effective and preserve privacy”.

It aims to dispel fears about hackers stealing personal data from the systems by saying that the measures put in place “should not process or store data that is irrelevant to the purpose of checking age”.

Options being tested include checking a user’s age against information held by their mobile provider, or passport data stored in government databases.

Sites that don’t check the age of users face fines of 10 per cent of their global turnover, which for the biggest sites will run into billions of pounds. They would also be blocked from the UK by telecoms regulator Ofcom.

Bosses of the sites will be held criminally liable, and face jail sentences of two years if they don’t co-operate with Ofcom’s investigations.

Chris Philp, minister for tech and the digital economy, said it was currently too easy for children to access pornography online. He added: “Parents deserve peace of mind that their children are protected online from seeing things no child should see”.

More than half (51 per cent) of 11 to 13-year-olds have come across internet porn, according to research by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC).