Smut
The pole on the stage behind the speaker was a nice touch, serving as a reminder of most people's image of the pornography industry: straight men watching largely nude women under controlled circumstances. A few minutes after arriving at yesterday's Age Verification Demonstration meeting, Pandora Blake appeared with news: the ladies' room was behind the stage. Of course. That's where the women are, right?
The meeting was there to present a series of mechanisms for implementing age verification, one of the more contentious clauses in the UK's 2016-2017 Digital Economy bill (not to be confused with the 2010 Digital Economy Act). Last year, I attended a couple of related meetings of the Digital Policy Alliance, which was seeking to develop a standard for age checking technologies. The BSI's draft PAS 1296 code of practice (requires free login) is the result. A side note: the reason I attended no further meetings is that rather expensive (for a small civil society organization) membership was required; I also note that the DPA's list of registered observers does not include civil society or consumer protection organizations, a strange and disturbing omission for a system intended for nationwide use.
I'll summarize, hoping that Alec Muffett will do a more thorough technical job later. Several of the ideas presented depended on using credit cards as proxies for age, an idea payment providers will probably resist. Some proposed to use credit profiles - Experian, Equifax. One of the audience asked incredulously: does Experian seriously want its logo on porn sites? Apparently so: it sponsored the event. A third proposal involves mining social media and Paypal. In this scenario, you-the-punter grant the age verifier (which may be a bought-in third-party service) the right to rummage around in your Facebook/Twitter/Paypal account to establish the probability that you're over 18. The site doesn't get your password, but it's unclear whether it or the supplier copies and retains your data. A fourth, from from Mindgeek, the biggest online pornography company, establishes your age classification once and gives you a federated token you can reuse across all the company's sites. Can we say profiling and a full view of each individual's preferences? Can we say that although Mindgeek swears now it will never sell or seek to monetize this data that someday down the road, someday the temptation may prove too strong? No: "We're not going to repeat Ashley Madison." I'm fairly sure Ashley Madison didn't intend to *be* Ashley Madison either. All of these ideas raise questions whether people's personal information may become linked to the list of porn sites they visit.
My personal favorite was .xxx domain owner ICM Registry. I had been waiting to play Magic Technology Bingo, in which emerging technology buzzwords would be sprinkled on this actually rather difficult problem like magic fairy dust (see also online voting. We'd already had "machine learning" to do all that probability stuff. Here, ICM Registry has an idea for an e-wallet, usable by anyone serving content into the UK market and loaded with virtual currencies. Micropayments! Struggling pornography producers can monetize snippets of content they couldn't charge for before! It should be needless to point out to net.wars readers that this idea has been going to save publishers for at least 25 years. This system would also support blacklisting (bad commercial producers that don't do age checks) and whitelisting. Government-approved porn, right there in your e-wallet!
The techiest solution is Yoti, which involves taking a selfie and sending it with an image of a government-issued document to a fourth party to verify photo is live and match the document and check the age. Thereafter, visiting a site requires taking a new selfie and scanning the site's QR code.
Finally, Chris Ratcliff, from Television X owner Portland TV, reviewed his company's history with age-checking and compared various options. The dropout rate with credit card verification, he said, is 70%, so it's important to support other methods such as checking against government-issued documents, electoral rolls, and so on. He got wistful: "It would be great if we could have access to the [Driver and Vehicle Licencing Agency's] datasets." Among the other silos he'd like to see opened up to use in age checking: the passport database. Er...
Big questions remain for all these guys about security. How much of the data used for verification will be kept? How will the data be protected? To what standard?
It took Pandora Blake to apply some sense. Instead of these basically dubious ideas for age verification, she said, why not try to change the bill, which reaches the committee stage next Tuesday (October 11)? Blake has written extensively about the problems she sees in the bill. Her key economic point: the bill will require UK-based commercial (which means what exactly?) pornography producers to age-verify all their customers, but will only require overseas producers to age-verify UK customers, meaning that UK producers will operate at a disadvantage (or will rapidly become overseas producers). The burden will fall most heavily on small, independent producerss who produce niche material - which means the ones who aren't producing airbrushed females for consumption by straight men but other things, like Blake's own feminist BDSM. What will disappear, she said, is healthy diversity, education, and "safety from monopolization".
Cue Tom Lehrer (YouTube).
Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.