Ofcom wants tougher age checks to stop kids seeing sexual content
Porn websites might soon be forced to scan users’ faces to make sure they are over 18. It’s one of the measures suggested by Ofcom, as it enforces the Online Safety Act. This legislation, which became law in September, requires social-media sites and search engines to protect children from harmful content on the internet.
The problem of children watching porn is huge. The average age at which they first see online porn is 13, according to research by the children’s commissioner for England. Shockingly, 27 per cent had seen sexual content by the age of 11, and 10 per cent aged just nine.
Most worrying is that nearly eight in 10 youngsters (79%) have seen violent pornography depicting “coercive, degrading or pain-inducing sex acts” before turning 18. Currently, some porn sites merely ask users to click a button to confirm they are an adult.
Ofcom’s task is to force websites to introduce age checks that are “technically accurate, robust, reliable and fair” (www.snipca. com/48651). Does face scanning meet those tests? It’s certainly accurate at identifying people, usually scoring over 99.9 per cent in studies, and can group people into age ranges.
However, it seems unlikely that face-scanning will ever be precise enough to tell whether someone is 18. Such technology can only “estimate” a person’s age, Ofcom says. But it can be used to check that a person’s identity matches the age it has verified for them. And that’s where robustness and reliability come in.
Ofcom suggests that users could prove their age by uploading photo ID such as a driving licence or passport. Face scanners could then compare it to the live image of the person to check they’re over 18. This process should work well, and is already used as a key component of passkeys.
But face scanning also needs to be robust enough to thwart the technical ingenuity of teenagers keen to beat the rules. It wouldn’t take long for children to work out how they could bypass age checks by using VPNs to pretend they’re outside the UK, for example. Adult siblings might also give them access.
Ofcom acknowledges that no age-checking system will be impossible to bypass, but says sites must “guard against simple tricks”. It suggested they perform “liveness checks” of a user’s identit
