The French lower house on Thursday approved a bill requiring porn sites to verify the age of a visitor. The sites can decide for themselves how exactly they do this. A government proposal is to use credit card information.
France’s telecoms authority CSA will be given the power to inspect companies and impose sanctions if they do not comply with the law, under the proposal. One of the options in it is to block a site on a national level. The law has not yet been finalized: the upper house still has to vote on it, but Politico writes that there is a strong expectation that the bill will pass without any problems.
While restricting access to adult pornography isn’t really a topic of division, it’s not about how to achieve that goal. While the proposal to use credit card information would achieve that goal, it comes with two drawbacks: not everyone has a credit card and handing over this sensitive information is not without risks. If a site has poor security, not only is a person visiting the site on the street, but possibly their credit card details.
The UK has also struggled for years with age verification on porn sites. These plans met with resistance from, among others, privacy experts, and the technical implementation proved difficult. Partly because of this, the introduction was postponed several times, until the ship finally ran aground in October of last year. In Australia is still working on the idea.