UK plan to control online porn is watched as test case

LONDON — The global push to more tightly regulate the internet and big tech firms is spreading to one of the web’s biggest and least visible corners: porn.

The British government wants to require porn websites to verify their users are adults. The effort is being watched by other countries hoping to better regulate pornographic content but has raised concerns about privacy, censorship and competition. It has run into multiple delays that reflect the confusion surrounding it.

“It’s a mess,” said Jim Killock, of the London-based Open Rights Group, a digital civil liberties group.

Killock says the government’s blueprints for its online “porn block” don’t do enough to protect personal data. Others believe the plan amounts to economic censorship. And many fear the rules would effectively give more power to a little known company that dominates the internet porn industry.

Under the plan, which is now expected to come into force late this year, British porn site visitors will be asked to prove they are 18 or older. Options to do so would include buying a card with an access code in a shop, where they will have to show photo ID, or going online to submit a copy of a passport or driver’s license or use a credit card.

The British government isn’t operating the system itself. Instead, it’s being outsourced to private companies, which can sell their own age verification technology to porn sites. Oversight, meanwhile, has been handed to the British Board of Film Classification, a film ratings and censorship body akin to the Motion Picture Association of America.


Privacy campaigners worry that handing over personal information to access adult sites means a person’s porn viewing habits can be tracked. Those fears are compounded by the lack of privacy and security standards for age verification providers. Instead, there’s a voluntary certification with vague and imprecise requirements.

One age verification provider, 18+, has said it won’t apply for the certificate because its digital wallet system wouldn’t be recognized.

“There are huge privacy concerns with how the data will be held, because the sort of information that people will have to be giving up is highly personal,” said Myles Jackman, a London-based lawyer. Also, “there is a risk that that data will be hacked, breached, stolen or published in the public domain.”

Critics point to data breaches at adult-oriented websites, notably a high-profile hack at infidelity site Ashley Madison that exposed personal details of millions of users.

They note that tech-savvy youngsters will figure out how to how to evade restriction by using, for example, virtual private networks. And there’s a loophole exempting social media sites such as Twitter, where plenty of smutty content is now found.

The film board acknowledges that “age-verification is not a silver bullet,” but it will stop kids inadvertently coming across inappropriate material. “Determined teenagers will find ways to access pornography.”

There’s also the question of how the new rules would be enforced on the many porn sites based outside the U.K. The film board says it could ask payment providers to withdraw their services and U.K. internet service providers to block them.

Jackman said the result could be “economic censorship,” because smaller, independent British porn producers that can’t afford to comply would simply shut down.

Online porn is a huge industry, but estimates of its size are notoriously hard to come by and there’s no official data. Pornhub, the world’s most popular adult site, is the 16th most visited in the U.K., according to Amazon’s Alexa web analytics .

Further raising concerns about the new system, one of the first age verification systems, AgeID, is owned by a multinational, MindGeek, which is widely recognized as the owner also of some of the most popular adult websites, including YouTube-like portals such as Pornhub, YouPorn and Redtube.

In response to a consultation by the film board, numerous people and groups said they were concerned that a company responsible for providing so much pornography online would also become a gatekeeper that potentially allows it access to reams of user data.

“There’s a clear conflict of interest,” said Killock. “The fact is they’re effectively creating the Facebook login of porn,” and will get “vast market intelligence” on their rivals and users on competing websites, said Killock, whose group in 2017 unearthed emails from MindGeek executives lobbying British officials to block rival porn sites.

Angie Rowntree, a director and founder of U.S. erotic site Sssh.com, said her company no longer uploads promo clips to Pornhub but many others continue to do business with MindGeek because its sites get an enormous amount of traffic.

“There’s a real risk of MindGeek monopolizing the U.K. segment of adult traffic to an even greater extent than they already do, by virtue of having some of the world’s best known and most popular free porn sites,” she said.

MindGeek spokesman Jim Clark says the company is merely responding to a market opening. 



“AgeID is not responsible for the creation of the law, nor is AgeID endorsed by the U.K. government. We have simply developed a product in response to the law,” Clark said by email.

Clark said AgeID doesn’t track users, has “data minimization, security, and privacy at its core,” and is designed not to see or store data, making it less tempting for hackers. And, he says, it won’t be the only choice of age verification on MindGeek websites.

Other countries mulling regulation are watching Britain amid concerns that easy access to porn can warp children’s view of sex.

Lawmakers in Ireland say they’ll examine the British model, after two teenage boys were convicted last week of the murder of 14-year-old Ana Kriegel in a case that shocked the country. One boy was also convicted of violently sexually assaulting her and was found to have thousands of pornographic images on two mobile phones, news reports said.

Britain’s porn firewall was set to take effect on July 15 but an administrative error delayed it by six months. The digital secretary, Jeremy Wright, vows it will eventually come into force.

“There are also those who do not want those measures to be brought in at all,” Wright told lawmakers. “Age verification for online porn needs to happen.”

source: technology.inquirer.net

Zuckerberg says regulation inevitable. Is Congress up to it?

WASHINGTON — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged Wednesday that regulation of social media companies is “inevitable” and disclosed that his own personal information has been compromised by malicious outsiders. But after two days of congressional testimony, what seemed clear was how little Congress seems to know about Facebook, much less what to do about it.

House lawmakers aggressively questioned Zuckerberg Wednesday on user data, privacy settings and whether the company is biased against conservatives. As they did in the Senate a day earlier, both Republicans and Democrats suggested that regulation might be needed, but there was no consensus and few specifics about what that might look like — or even what the biggest problems are.

New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the panel and a 30-year veteran of the House, said at the beginning of the hearing that he plans to work on legislation but is pessimistic that Congress will pass anything.

“I’ve just seen it over and over again — that we have the hearings, and nothing happens,” he said.

For Zuckerberg, who often found himself explaining what his company does in rudimentary terms to lawmakers twice his age, the hearings could be considered a win: Facebook shares rose more than 1 percent after climbing 4.5 percent on Monday. And his company regained more than $25 billion in market value that is had lost since it was revealed in March that Cambridge Analytica, a data-mining firm affiliated with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, gathered personal information from 87 million users to try to influence elections.

Still, Facebook’s stock remains 10 percent below where it stood before the scandal, a decline that has wiped out about $50 billion in shareholder wealth.

Zuckerberg agreed to the hearings as pressure mounted over the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the company’s own admission last year that it had been compromised by Russians trying to influence the 2016 election. Earlier this year, special counsel Robert Mueller charged 13 Russian individuals and three Russian companies in a plot to interfere in the 2016 presidential election through a social media propaganda effort that included online ad purchases using U.S. aliases and politicking on U.S. soil. A number of the Russian ads were on Facebook.

Zuckerberg told the Senate on Tuesday that the company has been working with Mueller in his Russia probe and apologized over and over again for the company’s handling of data privacy.

“I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here,” he said.

House lawmakers were a bit tougher on Zuckerberg than their colleagues in the Senate, many of whom seemed confused by the company and what it does. Some of the House members curtly cut him off in questioning, trying to make the most of their four minutes each.

Zuckerberg mostly held his composure, repeating many of the same well-rehearsed answers: He is sorry for the company’s mistakes. He is working on artificial intelligence technology to weed out hate speech and at the same time ensure that they don’t block people for the wrong reasons. People own their own data, as far as he sees it. And he’s come a long way since he created the platform in his dorm room almost 15 years ago.

Some of the lawmakers talked to Zuckerberg, 33, as they would their children or grandchildren, and were occasionally befuddled by the complexities of his company.

Wrapping up his four minutes, Rep. Gus Bilirakis, R-Fla., commended the platform, saying “it’s wonderful for us seniors to connect with our relatives.”

By the close of Wednesday’s hearing, Zuckerberg had spent roughly 10 out of the previous 24 hours testifying before Congress.

On regulation, Zuckerberg said he was open to it.

“The internet is growing in importance around the world in people’s lives and I think that it is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation,” he said.

Still, he said, lawmakers need to be careful, noting that new rules or laws could hurt smaller businesses more than a behemoth like Facebook.

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Greg Walden said the committee will look at what could be done.

“While Facebook has certainly grown, I worry it has not matured,” Walden, R-Ore.,  told Zuckerberg. “I think it is time to ask whether Facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things.”

Many questions focused on Cambridge Analytica, which gathered data several years ago through a personality quiz created by an academic researcher. The app vacuumed up not just the data of the people who took it, but also — thanks to Facebook’s loose restrictions — data from their friends, too, including details that they hadn’t intended to share publicly. Cambridge Analytica then obtained the data and was said to have used it to try to influence elections around the world.

Zuckerberg said at the House hearing that his own Facebook data was part of that sweep. He told the Senate that Facebook had been led to believe Cambridge Analytica had deleted the user data it had harvested and that had been “clearly a mistake.” He assured senators the company would have handled the situation differently today.

That may be enough to satisfy lawmakers for now. But that could change if Democrats take control of Congress in midterm elections this year.

Pallone said that if Democrats were in charge, “then we would push all the more.”   /muf

source: technology.inquirer.net