The British government is said to be taking steps to issue adults their own identification number for watching pornography online.
Since David Cameron’s leadership, there have been multiple proposals to change the regulation in how pornography is viewed in the UK.
Where previously the idea of making pornography an “opt in” service when one signs up to their internet provider, the newest plan would have every porn sites operating in Britain collect some kind of age-verification, before users could access their requested media.
The system of age verification would then work to issue a “unique identifiers” to each user of the system – which would crudely be the user’s porn viewing ID. It is believed each ID number would then be stored in some form of database.
The recent plans have been brought to public attention via The Open Rights Group, an organisation that “exists to preserve and promote your rights in the digital age.” As their Executive Director Jim Killock writes, the proposed scheme would do little to achieve the intended government goal of preventing the underage accessing pornography.
The idea was criticised further by software engineer Alec Muffett on Twitter live-tweeted a close reading of the proposed standard, and listed a number of flaws with the idea of compiling a database of those who watch pornography in the UK, most namely, such a database would be vulnerable to leaks.
