Online Safety Bill.what happens next ?

Redhulk50

The UK British Government will be introducing a online safety Bill this year .
This means age verification ID to watch online porn .
From what I have read this is already happening in a number of states in America and other countries.
Anyone who watches porn will need to prove they are over 18 with facial id a credit card , government ID documents such as Passport , Driving Licence .
This is scary stuff your government will store your data forever, your Data could get leaked things are gonna get tougher with digital ID , a cashless society our human rights and freedoms will be taken away , Big Brother is watching your every move !
When this U.K government bill is introduced soon will there be a age verification everytime I watch Sexlikereal ?

spacepirate

Redhulk50 When this U.K government bill is introduced soon will there be a age verification everytime I watch Sexlikereal ?

if they dont want to get in legal trouble.. yes. doubt youd be asked everytime though. theyd either store your id or some record of past verification.

petermc

Redhulk50 the thing is that I already use my credit card to subscribe to porn sites, as most paying customers do, so it’s not really a big change for me, more of a change for those who watch a lot of free porn. As for them watching your every move, I hate to break it to you but your ISP and probably Google already know what sites you go to. If you don’t believe that’s already being stored, I’m not sure why you believe they’ll begin storing it now.

I do understand the concern about the verification company being hacked and people’s details being out there but no one is banning anything, just making sure you’re the correct age to be watching it. In fact obscenity laws in the U.K. were actually relaxed a lot a couple of years back where now pretty much anything goes such as piss scenes, fisting etc.

There was talk early on in this process about there being an anonymous card you can buy in a shop for something like £5.00 which can be used to verify you online. Obviously the shopkeeper would have to be satisfied that you’re 18 or over to sell it to you and you’d have the initial embarrassment of obtaining the card but that would mean that you’re not in the system.

Gambling sites require that you age verify and I assume that this would be something similar. What the Government have said is that the company verifying your age won’t know what site it is for, just that they’re required to verify your age and, once it’s done, they don’t store the details, it’s immediately deleted. Whether you believe all this is a different matter of course.

From what I read a while back the enforcement of age verification is years away too. The initial focus of the Online Safety Bill was to remove illegal, harmful content, not necessarily porn related, and it would be some time before they started going after legal porn sites to enforce age verification. That may have changed however now that they’ve seen US States implementing it straight away.

I personally wouldn’t be too sorry to see the back of PH and their ilk as I think they have pretty much killed the porn industry compared to what it was. Free porn has put a lot of studios out of business, meant that there’s less work for models and that they don’t earn the money they used to, thus forcing them down the OF route to make money.

BungaBunga

Edit: I did some more research on the OSB and it's far, far worse than I thought. So my previous essay-length comment is largely redundant.

Basically, yes, you're right. You're going to get age-verified every time you access porn, by one means or another; unless the porn site refuses to implement the checks, in which case they're basically going to have to geo-block the UK and close all UK users' accounts. And not just porn. Pretty much any Web site of any kind where a user can upload content that another user can see.

Some great resources (and links to others) here: https://webdevlaw.uk/tag/online-safety-bill/

doublevr

Don't they have it like past 10 years or something around and it doesn't seem going anywhere

Redhulk50

doublevr
In the UK parliament it's been talked about for years but it always falls flat on it's face with objections from some politicians , but I think this time they mean business, I don't think there has been any objections from the opposition parties and it seems that they have been given the green light to do what they want , Covid was a test to see how far they could push us with their laws and control , they really want to censor free speech on the internet it's not China yet but it's getting closer.

.

ZENRA

If it's similar to the laws being passed in some states, a mess with no feasible technology to support its (misguided) intention and a lack of effective enforcement mechanism to boot. Most every adult likes or at worst has a neutral view of adult content nowadays and there is only so much time in the world social conservatives with reach can spend on attempting to patrol for it on the millions (probably higher) of sites out there.

damian

The internet as a whole is undergoing a massive change at the moment. You can see legislators working hard to restrict every single thing what made the internet so great in the first place. If the politicians weren't enough, now we also have private corporations stripping away more and more common things like Reddit changing their API to a paid model. Twitter is rate limiting how many tweets you can read and more and more platforms are introducing these authoritarian measurements.

I'm still hopeful that this will all lead into a pushback that'll blow in their heads while people are finally adopting true decentralisation, but sometimes I doubt it when I saw how many people (especially men) cucked out during Covid

spacepirate

doublevr

mnmlikereal then we should get Big Brother. No one will blame us for knowing you are watching porn

BungaBunga

I don't care if my ISP knows that I watch porn. I don't care if the government knows that I watch porn. I don't really care if they know what porn I watch. Privacy on the internet is a myth and always has been. I don't care if I have to prove I'm old enough to watch porn. I don't care about having my credit card number associated with my porn viewing history. All of that happens already.

What I do care about - a lot - is the UK losing access to important online services because their operators aren't willing to bear the added costs (and they will be considerable) of servicing a small market like ours when they could just choose to pull out of the UK instead. I'm quite certain many will do just that. I care about the internet in the UK turning into a China-style 'only state-approved services and content here' splinternet. I care about the government trying to outlaw end-to-end encryption while protesting that they're not doing that at all, when they clearly are. I care about my elected representatives being so technically clueless that they don't even understand what they're voting for.

This isn't really about illegal content. It's not about porn per se. It's about any and all content that the current shower in power - whichever party that may be - and the media don't like and want to stop. It's about having a toolkit for the state to exclude or outright block content and speech that they don't like, whatever it is, legal or not, by imposing unsustainable costs on content providers and selectively picking when they do and don't enforce the law.

This is the sort of shit you'd expect in Putin's Russia, not a supposedly liberal democracy.

Oh well. At least I can still watch porn. For now.