New laws in the UK that will force viewers to verify their age before watching porn online could put them at risk of blackmail, open rights campaigners and pornographers have warned.
By the end of next year, the UK government wants to make sure that everybody watching porn online is over 18.
New laws passed as part of the Digital Economy Act will require porn sites to verify the ages of their British audience — or face being blocked by internet service providers.
All sorts of bizarre ways to verify one’s age have been proposed, including going to the post office with your passport or calling up your credit card company to prove your age.
The UK’s government is in talks with IT company MindGeek to have them devise a system that you can sign into to confirm your age.
But by doing that, MindGeek will own a huge database of Brits who watch porn, including their ages and identifiable information.
MindGeek already owns Pornhub, which suffered a major malware breach along with RedTube and Brazzers.
Small porn businesses and lawyers have warned that this puts the public at risk of blackmail in a potential copycat Ashley Madison-style hack.
By storing porn watchers’ personal details and porn habits in a central database, it is putting each person at risk of having their information shared by hackers.
Myles Jackman, a legal officer at Open Rights Group, said MindGeek has suffered a history of data breaches and that could put Brits at risk.
Speaking at an Open Rights Group panel, Jackman said: “We have been told by MindGeek that 20 to 25 million adult users will sign up to age verification by their estimation in the first month that age verification comes online.”
“And as a consequence of that, on the basis that they do not have the greatest history of data security … there’s a high probability that those people are risking putting their private sexual proclivities in the public domain.”
The British Board of Film Classification will be regulating age verification but has not yet officially been appointed.
Jackman nodded to one of the biggest data breaches of June 2015, when a group of hackers stole the customer database at Ashley Madison, an extramarital affairs website.
Within two months, they had posted the entire database of its customers online, which included personal addresses, names and payment details.
A witch hunt ensued as the names became public, and police in Canada reported that two men committed suicide after their names were revealed in the hack.