By 25 July, all sites and apps that allow pornography – whether they are dedicated adult sites or social media, search or gaming services – must use highly effective age checks to ensure children are not normally able to encounter it. Online firms who publish their own pornography are already required to protect children from it, and thousands of sites have already introduced robust age checks in response.
Major porn providers operating in the UK have confirmed to Ofcom that they will introduce effective checks by next month’s deadline in order to comply with the new rules. They include PornHub, the most-visited pornographic service in the UK. Other services who are happy to be named at this stage include BoyfriendTV, Cam4, FrolicMe, inxxx, Jerkmate, LiveHDCams, MyDirtyHobby, RedTube, Streamate, Stripchat, Tube8, and YouPorn. This represents a broad range of pornography services accessed in the UK.
Monitoring compliance with these new duties is a priority for Ofcom. If any company fails to comply with its new duties, Ofcom can impose fines and – in very serious cases – apply for a court order to prevent the site or app from being available in the UK. As part of our work enforcing the Online Safety Act, we have already launched investigations into four porn providers and won’t hesitate to take further action from July.
Someone should be asking what the sentence will be for kids who commit identity fraud and use someone else’s ID to set up an account. It may flip the narrative to point out they are intentionally creating more criminal acts that will get kids in trouble with the law and possibly ruin lives.
The act in question doesn’t create offences for children; it (mainly) creates offences for service providers.
A kid who went on the internet and clicked I’m 18+ and looked at porn doesn’t have a victim (outside of the perpetrator if one wants to argue that). I don’t know what the laws are in the U.K. but here (U.S.) identity fraud/theft is a federal crime. With a possible sentence up to 15 years.
With how it was, there was no incentive for a kid to take their parents/older friends ID when they weren’t looking, or share ID’s/information with their friends to access those sites. If a person gets notice that their information is being used on a site they weren’t using, the likelyhood of it being reported goes up.
Hopefully nothing would ever go as far as being reported as fraud/theft, but all it takes is one person who doesn’t like their kid hanging out with someone else.
So while they didn’t create any new offenses for kids, they created roadblocks that put kids in a situation that may make them break the law out of sheer curiosity.
Getting caught drinking a beer, or smoking cigarettes would be a godsend compared to getting charges brought up for something so stupid.
Glad we can agree this is not about new offences.
In the UK there is no specific crime of identity theft, with offences generally being prosecuted as fraud. Fraud requires that the person committing the fraud intend to make a gain of money or property, or to cause someone else to make a loss of money or property.
There’s no real way to frame this as being bad for children except inasmuch as people over the age of consent (which is 16 in the UK) should be free to access as much porn as they please.
Yay! More clients!