Latest news with #AgeVerificationProvidersAssociation
Tom's Guide
3 days ago
- Politics
- Tom's Guide
An extra 5 million age checks a day are being completed thanks to the UK's Online Safety Act
New data suggests there has been an additional five million age verification checks every day in the UK since the introduction of the Online Safety Act. Sites hosting content deemed harmful for under 18s must now verify the age of visitors. But many see this as a significant privacy and cybersecurity risk – and have turned to the best VPNs in an attempt to bypass the checks. The Online Safety Act has triggered an important discussion about online privacy and there are strong views from both supporters and critics of the law. Those backing the law, including the UK government, have said it's doing a vital job at protecting children online. However, the law's opponents have said it comes with significant cybersecurity risks and compromises online privacy. One cybersecurity expert called it a "disaster waiting to happen." According to the Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) there has been a significant increase in daily age verification checks online. As reported in the Guardian, the AVPA's Executive Director, Iain Corby said: "As a result of new codes under the Online Safety Act coming into force on Friday, we have seen an additional five million age checks on a daily basis, as UK-based internet users seek to access sites that are age-restricted." The AVPA said it couldn't share a baseline comparison to this figure, but some sites introduced age verification checks before the Online Safety Act became law. Reddit, X, and Spotify are just some of the sites you might have to verify your age to access all its content. But there have also been reports of overreach and content not traditionally seen as harmful being blocked. The UK government said "platforms should not arbitrarily block or remove content and instead must take a risk-based, proportionate approach to child safety duties." It went on to say "the act is not designed to censor political debate and does not require platforms to age gate any content other than those which present the most serious risks to children." However research by the BBC found that reports on the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine have been blocked as a result of the Online Safety Act. There has been vocal opposition to the law and a petition demanding the UK government repeals the act is approaching 500,000 signatures. The UK government has said it wouldn't repeal the act, adding that it is "working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections." "Proportionality is a core principle of the act and is in-built into its duties," the UK government said. "As regulator for the online safety regime, OFCOM must consider the size and risk level of different types and kinds of services when recommending steps providers can take to comply with requirements." MP Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, is one of the law's biggest supporters. He said the law "marks the most significant step forward in child safety since the internet was created" and that "age verification keeps children safe." However Kyle has also made controversial comments towards opponents of the law and in a tweet said you "are on the side of predators" if you wanted to overturn the Online Safety Act. The law has received support from an array of children's charities and YouGov research found that 69% of Britons are in favor of age verification checks. However, this is down from the 80% support recorded prior to the law's introduction and only 26% had encountered age checks online. Furthermore, 64% said it would be "not very / not at all effective" in preventing under 18s from accessing harmful content. Regardless of the positives, and the well intentioned nature of the law, there are fundamental privacy and cybersecurity concerns that need to be addressed. People don't feel comfortable handing over sensitive personal information to third-party age check providers such as AgeGO, Persona, and Yoti. Each provider has a different approach to data security, with some deleting it straight away and others holding it for some period of time. Any data being stored is at risk of a breach and the impact of one could be catastrophic. The recent Tea app breach exposed the ID of thousands of women in the US – an age verification provider breach could be even worse. Major VPN providers surged up the UK Apple App Store charts as people looked for ways to avoid age verification checks. Suspect free VPNs also rose in popularity and put people's data at risk in different ways. These privacy and cybersecurity concerns must be appropriately addressed, and not cast aside, should the UK government want the Online Safety Act to succeed in the best way it can. We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.
Politico
10-07-2025
- Business
- Politico
The tech winner in SCOTUS ruling on porn age checks
With help from Daniella Cheslow and Aaron Mak The Supreme Court's decision to uphold Texas' age verification law for porn websites will likely have a ripple effect across the internet — and not just for the vast numbers of people who watch online porn. The Texas law says that websites that have more than one-third of their content considered 'sexual material harmful to minors' need to verify ages before granting access, ensuring that any visitors are older than 18. When it upheld the law in late June, the Supreme Court also cleared the path for the 23 other states that have similar regulations in place, and 21 more states that are considering passing their own requirements. A majority of Americans, then, will soon need to share some kind of information — such as a face scan, a photo ID or a phone number — to access pornography online. The adult entertainment industry challenged the law and lost, as did free speech advocates like the American Civil Liberties Union, who worry that mandatory age verification erodes people's online privacy and anonymity. Tech industry groups opted to stay out of the case, though they have fought similar battles against age verification laws for social media websites. One group that warmly welcomed the decision, however, was the emerging crop of tech companies that provide age verification services. 'We expect this judgment to accelerate the adoption of age verification laws across the remaining 26 US states and globally,' Iain Corby, the executive director of the Age Verification Providers Association said in a statement following the SCOTUS decision. The trade group, which started in 2018, represents a new industry providing a service that more and more laws are making mandatory. Companies offer age verification technology through several methods, including using AI to estimate a person's age based on their voice, their face and their digital history. The Supreme Court's decision is expected to lead to a boom for the industry, both in demand and innovation, observers say. 'We're going to see what is technically possible in terms of age assurance,' Ariel Fox Johnson, a senior advisor for data privacy at Common Sense Media, a children's advocacy group, said at a Cato Institute event on July 8. 'We're going to see what companies are really capable of here.' Privacy advocates worry that the age verification tools, whether it's using an AI to scan your face to estimate your age or submitting your personal information to analyze your online activity, are an increasingly invasive technology. They also worry the rise of age verification will further entrench the need for data brokers — another industry that has raised privacy concerns as it has grown. Depending on the technique, age verification can rely heavily on material provided by data brokers. The industry already plays a major role in identity verification, which could easily be transferred to age verification tools. In a brief it submitted to the Supreme Court, the AVPA highlighted a company that uses a person's phone number to check against 'commercially available databases' to verify their age. Another uses an email address to analyze online interactions and transaction data, looking for records like mortgages or credit cards that would determine they are over 18. Data brokers, or companies that collect and sell people's information for a variety of purposes, have become essential for advertisers, fraud prevention and the federal government, often highlighting the benefits of being able to quickly deliver details on millions of Americans. While lawmakers and privacy advocates have raised concerns about how information sold by data brokers creates risks, both to public officials and to national security, the industry's increasingly central role in commerce and government business has made it tough for advocates to push back. (Lawmakers drew one line last year, passing a law making it illegal for data brokers to sell data to foreign adversaries.) Now, with a huge new landscape of age-verification requirements, that entrenchment is likely to deepen. 'There are legitimate deep, and complicated conversations about the harms that data brokers pose, what are the appropriate ways to regulate them, how does that square with constitutional considerations — but these age verification laws along with some other laws are simply getting out ahead of that legislative discussion, and enshrining these practices as legitimate child safety efforts,' Cody Venzke, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Digital Future Daily. A fuzzy audit trail for AI-generated police reports AI-generated police reports were designed to be difficult to audit, according to a new report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The report published Thursday is based on a review of public records obtained by the digital rights group from police departments subscribed to Axon's Draft One software, as well as public remarks from the company. In a roundtable discussion about Draft One from last year, Axon's senior principal product manager for generative AI Noah Spitzer-Williams explained that its software intentionally deletes the first draft of its AI-written police reports, to avoid potential transparency requests. 'So we don't store the original draft and that's by design. And that's really because the last thing we want to do is create more disclosure headaches for our customers and our attorney's offices,' he said in the video. EFF said that AI-generated police reports should be aggressively tracked and audited, but Axon's design intentionally prevents that. An Axon spokesperson said that Draft One was designed to replicate the existing process for filing police reports, where 'only the final, approved report is saved and discoverable, not the interim edits, additions or deletions made during officer or supervisor review.' EFF's report comes after Alfred reported for DFD last September that several police departments were struggling to parse out which reports were written by real people and which were AI-generated in response to public records requests. The group obtained internal discussions showing the Frederick police department in Colorado asking for help to figure out which reports were written by AI, and Axon responding by sharing its own internal tracking data, after noting that the audit log available for its customers may have issues. 'To set expectaitons (sic), it's not going to be graceful, but this wasn't a scenario we anticipated needing to make easy,' Spitzer-Williams told the Frederick police department last August, according to a copy of the email exchange obtained by the EFF and provided to POLITICO. Europe unveils rules for advanced AI The European Union published its highly anticipated guidance for advanced AI models like Gemini, Grok and ChatGPT on Thursday. As POLITICO's Pieter Haeck reports, AI companies that agree to the voluntary code of practice will be required to report certain design details of their models and their policies surrounding copyrighted content. Models that could impact public health and safety are subject to additional systemic risk mitigation measures. Companies that sign on to the guidance will have a clearer route to comply with the EU's AI Act, a wide-ranging statute that covers everything from facial recognition systems to image generators. Some of the act's most broadly applicable provisions — particularly regarding large language models — are set to go into effect in August. Big tech corporations and others have been raising a fuss over the AI Act. Last week, both the European and American tech industries sent letters in a bid to modify the law. Leaders from European companies like Mistral, ASML and Mercedes-Benz pleaded in a letter to the European Commission for a two-year delay on implementation to allow regulators to further simplify the rules. U.S. industry groups representing Meta, Google and others also sent a letter to President Donald Trump, urging him to press the EU on the 'discriminatory' impacts of tech laws like the AI Act in trade negotiations. Kai Zenner, digital advisor to European Parliament member Axel Voss of Germany, told POLITICO's Daniella Cheslow that the guidance 'isn't looking that bad.' He said civil society groups and lawmakers pushed the European commission to resist pressure from tech companies, but that those advocates are likely to have more fights on their hands in the coming years. post of the day THE FUTURE IN 5 LINKS Stay in touch with the whole team: Aaron Mak (amak@ Mohar Chatterjee (mchatterjee@ Steve Heuser (sheuser@ Nate Robson (nrobson@ and Daniella Cheslow (dcheslow@
CBS News
28-03-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
Proposed bill in Colorado would require age verification to access adult websites
A proposed bill that aims to protect minors in Colorado from accessing adult content is moving forward. Senate Bill 25-201 is designed to address rising concerns around children's access to explicit and harmful content on the internet. The bill would implement age verification measures for platforms hosting this content, offering a way to protect minors without stifling adult access. Pornographic content is easily accessible by anyone with an internet connection. Research shows that over half of children aged 11 to 13 have encountered explicit content, often unintentionally. This bill goes further than simply clicking "yes" or "no" when asked if a user is 18. It would require these platforms to verify that users are of legal age. The process would focus on age, not identity, ensuring that users can prove their age without disclosing personal information. SB 25-201 mandates the use of certified age verification technologies that do not store or share personal data. "The bill requires what we already require in the industry, which is to immediately delete any personal info used in that process," said Ian Corby with the Age Verification Providers Association. "There's even one solution where you just wave your fingers around, because this tendon ages differently, and they can figure out your age with 99% certainty." Previous attempts to pass similar laws have faced legal challenges due to overreach, often threatening to restrict access to legal content. Sponsors of the bill said it avoids those pitfalls by targeting only the harmful content and applying age verification solely to users seeking access to adult materials. Supporters said this bill underscores the importance of community responsibility while safeguarding the next generation. They also believe age checks would protect against the mental health consequences of early exposure, like social isolation, misconduct and depression. Opponents also believe children shouldn't have access, but they said age verification violates adults. Critics raised concerns about its potential to infringe on personal freedoms and privacy. They said that age verification technologies could lead to unintended consequences, such as data breaches or the circumvention of privacy rights. Some fear it also robs people of anonymity and threatens to bar individuals who either lack government ID or whose age is misidentified by the relevant technology. Both sides agree there needs to be a balance between protecting children and respecting privacy.
USA Today
27-01-2025
- Politics
- USA Today
What to know about an Oklahoma senator's efforts to 'restore moral sanity' in his state
An Oklahoma senator introduced a series of bills Tuesday, including one that would ban pornography in the entire state and increase penalties for those who produce child sexual abuse material. Sen. Dusty Deevers, R-Elgin called the bill, SB593, and seven others he introduced a 'slate of legislation to restore moral sanity in Oklahoma." If the bill regarding pornography passes, those found guilty of producing, distributing or possessing pornography would face criminal penalties of up to 10 years in prison. 'Pornography is both degenerate material and a highly addictive drug,' Deevers said in a news release. 'It ruins marriages, ruins lives, destroys innocence, warps young people's perception of the opposite sex, turns women into objects, turns men into objects, degrades human dignity, and corrodes the moral fabric of society. Any decent society will stand against this plague with the full weight of the law.' The bill would 'significantly heighten' current zero-to-20-year penalties for the possession, distribution and production of child sexual assault material to 10-to-30 years, Deevers announced. Any additional offenses relating to child sexual assault material will lead to 15 to 50 years in prison. 'There is perhaps no more psychopathic and antisocial behavior in existence than producing, distributing, or watching child sexual abuse material,' Deevers said in the release. 'These people should not be back on our streets after brief stints behind bars. Rather, they should be locked away for decades at a minimum.' Deevers' bill echoes Project 2025, a political initiative listing conservative ideals and legislative proposals. According to the project and its authors, people who produce any porn are 'child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women.' 'Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime,' the authors wrote. 'Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.' Current age verification laws Deevers' bill comes after many states, Oklahoma included, have passed laws that require age verification to access pornography. According to the Age Verification Providers Association, the following states have passed such laws. Louisiana Utah Mississippi Virginia Arkansas Texas Montana North Carolina Idaho Kansas Kentucky Nebraska Indiana Alabama Florida South Carolina Tennessee Georgia Deevers' other bills target abortion, marriage, divorce, drag shows and more Deevers also introduced seven other bills Tuesday, including: SB456 – The Abolition of Abortion Act, which would close the self-managed abortion loophole and 'declares that life begins at conception and ensures that no person may lawfully terminate the life of a child in the womb,' Deevers said. SB550—Ensures that Oklahoma kids cannot see adult cabaret performances, including Drag Queen Story Hour. Those who perform these shows around children would face a prison sentence of one to five years and organizers would face up to one year in prison. SB228 – The Covenant Marriage Act, which would allow couples in Oklahoma to opt into a covenant marriage, only to be dissolved in cases of abuse, adultery, or abandonment. Those who opt in would be eligible for a $2,500 tax credit. SB829 – The bill would end no-fault divorce in Oklahoma by removing 'incompatibility' as a valid reason for divorce. If signed into law, divorces would only be allowed in cases of abandonment, gross neglect, extreme cruelty, habitual drunkenness, insanity for a period of five years, adultery, unknown pregnancy and fraudulent contract. The at-fault parent must pay restitution to the children involved by putting money into a trust fund the children can access when they turn 18. SB281 – The Make Adoption Affordable Again Act, which would provide tax credits to families seeking to adopt and those who donate to adoption-facilitating organizations. The bill would provide a tax credit of up to $10,000 for individuals and $50,000 for businesses. SB328 – The Promote Child Thriving Act, which would create a $500 tax credit per child for a mother and father filing jointly. The credit would be escalated to $1,000 if the child was born after the marriage of the parents. SB736 – This bill would grant health share ministries the same tax benefits as traditional insurance, making sure that those who opt into these plans are not discriminated against in the tax code. 'Health care should honor our convictions,' said Deevers. 'This bill ensures that families who choose Christ-centered health solutions are not penalized.' In his news release, Deevers condemned democrats and leftists, arguing that the political party has spearheaded a 'century-long assault on morality and decency.' 'Contrary to what the left would have us believe, it doesn't have to be this way,' he said. 'We can protect the most vulnerable, restore a high view of marriage, and shield children from explicit material that can warp their innocent minds. We simply must have the courage to stand against the most radical and degenerate elements of the far-left.' Proposed bill is free speech issue, say critics Mike Stabile, Director of Public Policy for the Free Speech Coalition, an organization that represents workers and businesses in the adult industry, said Monday morning that Deevers' bill is not shocking. "Politicians on the right have been quite explicit about their desire to ban sexual content, even when it's privately viewed by adults in their own homes," he wrote in an email to USA TODAY. He added that bills focusing on age verification are simply porn ban bills in disguise, especially in southern states. These calls for action against "pornographers," he said, apply to adult content creators writers, artists and educators. "Porn is the canary in the coal mine of free speech, and the trial balloon used by governments to pass laws that can censor speech more broadly," he said. "No matter how people feel about adult content, we should all be concerned about the proposed government crackdown on speech." Saleen Martin is a reporter on USA TODAY's NOW team. She is from Norfolk, Virginia – the 757. Follow her on Twitter at@SaleenMartin or email her atsdmartin@
