According to the Digital Economy Bill unveiled by the UK Government, all British pornographic websites will have a mandatory age verification process in order to prevent children from accessing such websites accidentally or intentionally.
The Open Rights Group, which campains for privacy and free speech online has said: “While preventing children from seeing pornography is a worthy aim, age verification is fraught with difficulties if infringements of privacy and free expression are to be avoided.”
As independent.co.uk reports, to enforce the measures, the Government suggested a new, separate watchdog be created. The body would be able to alert credit card companies, even if the websites themselves didn’t cooperate.
Last week, the Digital Economy Bill was given its first reading in the House of Commons, and will now be disputed for some months before becoming law, which the government presumes to take place in spring 2017.
Open Rights Group has found that half of schoolchildren admit to seeing sexual and violent material on the internet and that children wanted to copy the behaviour they had seen on porn sites, despite the majority of respondents saying porn didn’t help them understand consent.
editor@ugchristiannews.com
