from Hacker News

UK.gov to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

by ketanip on 2/9/22, 6:50 AM with 175 comments

• by oxfordmale on 2/9/22, 8:42 AM

  This needs to be seen in the context of the political situation in the UK. Boris Johnson, the current PM, is currently on this 9th and last political live. During the strictest period of lockdown, when UK citizens where not able to say goodbye to loved ones dying in hospitals, several parties were organised at his residence . It is alleged he attended two of them himself and was photographed drinking beer. In attempt to rescue his political career, he has announced several "red meat" measures and this appears to be one of them.

  Over the years several attempts have been made to introduce this. Just like past attempts it will face a heavy lobby from the adult content industry and social media companies. More importantly this government will likely not be around long enough to actually introduce it (the consensus is that Boris will be gone after the May local elections). It will almost certainly drop off the radar of a subsequent government as there are much bigger and more important issues to tackle after Covid.

  In the unlikely event it will get introduced, it will be delayed for years. For past measures Ofcom, the media regulator, was asked to classify all adult websites to determine if they fall in a category that requires age verification, and as you can imagine, this can take a while. In addition age verification is only required for websites that allow users to upload content, not commercially sourced content. There are endless loopholes here, however, likely adult websites will just block user content from UK visitors. It is not like there is a shortage of commercial content. Of course VPN providers will do well out of this too.

• by habosa on 2/9/22, 8:00 AM

  People don’t realize how invasive the UK govt is when it comes to internet monitoring.

  Today if you try to access adult content on a UK mobile device you get blocked by age verification. You have to call your mobile provider and prove your age (it’s a once-per-contract thing). One of the ways you can prove your age is with a credit card. But I imagine it’s a large deterrent because not many people want to call Vodafone and ask permission to look at pornography. They’d probably just rather get a VPN.

• by toyg on 2/9/22, 8:16 AM

  I have a gut feeling this is a lead balloon, meant to be shot down so that other stuff can pass untouched. This type of bill is typically full of horrible little clauses that would never clear Parliament on their own, but if you bag enough of them together, pushing them all at the same time, eventually some will make it through.

• by samwillis on 2/9/22, 7:41 AM

  There was a thread about this yesterday [0], this is almost certainly not going to happen. I think based on the number of times they have tried to legislate for this, most recently in 2019, I would put the odds of it happening (even in a hamstrung way) at less than 10%.

  Big company’s (Facebook, etc) will lobby against it, they will argue about what the threshold of requirement is. Then there is the logistics, privacy, security and cost factors. Not going to happen.

  I believe this is all about making it look like politicians are doing “something” without actually doing anything.

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30256984

• by pdpi on 2/9/22, 7:36 AM

  One particular bit that tickles me about this is the mandatory credit card checks for age verification on porn sites.

  Yesterday’s obvious attempt at fraud is tomorrow’s legal obligation, and the fraudsters are going to love it.

• by rswail on 2/9/22, 1:38 PM

  Keeping credit card details will expose private companies to the requirements of PCI to store them. It's against those rules for private companies to keep the cardholder information connected to the card details like the PAN. The PANs aren't even allowed to be stored unencrypted and access to them is subject to PCI as well.

  Plus it means that people that don't have those forms of identification will be restricted from using the internet. Libraries won't be able to offer a lot of services, the "unintended side effects" are enormous.

  But never put it past this particular British government from establishing the very best in footguns.

• by scim-knox-twox on 2/9/22, 8:04 AM

  Sure, let's give even more personal information to Big-Tech.

• by danboarder on 2/9/22, 7:16 AM

  What could possibly go wrong... I don't expect Facebook or TikTok to oppose this very much, having credit cards on file is conveniently closer to making more money.

• by boffinism on 2/9/22, 7:41 AM

  This feels like it could be resolved by technology.

  I am happy to identify myself to government entity A to prove my age, but I don't want A to know what sites I visit.

  I want to visit site B, but I don't want to identify myself.

  Is there no API that will allow B to verify my age via A, without A finding out what site B is, and without B finding out anything more than my age bracket?

• by hughrr on 2/9/22, 7:38 AM

  Oh no they’re not.

  People will start buying shitty VPNs advertised on prime time TV instead and entirely side step the issue but create two more at the same time.

  Think we need a new national anthem now along the lines of https://youtu.be/P1CyPjQQTAM

• by pmlnr on 2/9/22, 7:38 AM

  > and potentially any other platform where users can post their own content

  So... the internet?

• by frankfrankfrank on 2/9/22, 12:10 PM

  Easy solution … give up Facebook and TikTok and all the other social media addictions like a sane and healthy person. Social media is essentially the tobacco of today; a toxic, destructive, addictive force.

• by jsnell on 2/9/22, 11:45 AM

  Is there really a lot of porn on those platforms? I would have expected porn to be forbidden by the content policies of any big service with user generated content, it's probably the easiest kind of abuse to automatically detect, and it's something the services are very motivated to keep out since they can't sell ads on that content. I have never heard of either of those platforms as having a reputation for hosting porn.

• by pharmakom on 2/9/22, 7:30 AM

  They are also talking about doing it for Reddit, which makes me really sad.

• by barcoder on 2/9/22, 7:18 AM

  In pre-Brexit Britain we were promised less friction on the internet because we wouldn't have to accept cookies [1].

  Who would have thought there would be more friction for just about every part of British life? /s

  [1] https://preprod.metro.co.uk/2021/08/27/no-more-cookie-pop-up...

• by rswail on 2/9/22, 1:56 PM

  Age verification is to Tories as abortion is to Republicans.

• by TheMightyLlama on 2/9/22, 8:30 AM

  I would rather my passport number to be honest.

• by tupac_speedrap on 2/9/22, 9:59 AM

  Oi, you got a loicense for that smut?

• by parkingrift on 2/9/22, 12:02 PM

  I don’t care for porn as the motivator, but social media should be absolutely unavailable to children.

• by loudtieblahblah on 2/9/22, 12:48 PM

  This would be amazing in the US

• by Barrin92 on 2/9/22, 7:22 AM

  For Facebook or TikTok it's a sensible move because they are social networks trying to connect natural persons. Not just child protection as mentioned in the article but ecommerce scams, misinformation, catfishing or botting would be cut down if you could verify that the online identity represents who it claims it does.

  It would be good though if there is some identity standard across platforms rather than the existing patchwork solutions that exclude people without say, credit cards. Digital ID systems like in South Korea or Taiwan seem good because they're uniform across the country and comparable to national ids.