WIKIORG policy update/2018-w31
This is ORG's Policy Update for the week beginning 01/08/2018.
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ORG’s work
Parliament
Other National developments
Porn Scam Hitting Inboxes across UK
E-mails have been landing in inboxes in the UK and across the world aimed at shaming adult website users into paying to avoid their porn-surfing habits revealed. They exploited the negative stigma around pornography as it is frowned upon in certain cultures. They confronted users stating that they know a private password used by the e-mail recipient that they had actually used previously. Scammers also said that they had access to their web-camera and were recording the user whilst they were watching porn and would send an email to all of their email contacts unless they paid up. This alarmed man e-mail recipients and porn-surfing users into paying, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars from 151 victims across the world, paying the scammers. Many say that legal porn sites should warn their users about sextortion.
Age verification and Pornography
The online porn industry has been pressured to introduce age-verification measures to its sites as many are concerned with minors being exposed to hard-core pornographic material. Pornographic material can be easily accessed through simple internet searches. In the UK, the government intends for age-verification measures to be in place by the end of 2018, as part of the Digital Economy Act 2017. This will enforce rules that could see porn website operators face fines and have their websites blocked by UK internet providers if they don’t put in place age-verification systems for site visitors, using identifiers such as credit card details, driver’s licence or passport number. The rules are estimated to impact 20 - 25 million porn site visitors in the UK. They were intended to be implemented this April, but have been deferred until later in the year, leaving the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) more time to draft guidelines around what exactly constitutes pornography and how the companies should police access to it.The creator of Pornhub developed AgeID, which is a system that uses encrypted details to verify a site user’s age. It has floated AgeID could be used across all porn websites in the UK to make them compliant with the law. However, any system that acts as an authentication tool to verify age will become a target for hackers seeking to uncover the details of millions of website users. A system like AgeID, that is ran by one of the largest purveyors of internet porn could potentially be used to mine data on the millions of users signing up. In the wake of numerous major data breaches around the world in recent years, it is hard to imagine millions of Brits trusting a system that could be seen to catalogue their sexual proclivities. The UK-based Open Rights Group led the campaign against the age verification system and sees its implementation by the UK Government as being deeply flawed. Legal Director Myles Jackman stated how “The privacy risk was so severe that if all that data were hacked they would never be taken seriously again when it came to holding private citizens’ data, whether covertly or otherwise,”.
Media coverage
See ORG Press Coverage for full details.