The French government is preparing to launch a new control system to prevent minors from accessing web pages with pornographic content from September 2023.
The system is based on a certificate of majority installed in a mobile application. According to Le Parisién, the idea is that this system works like the verification messages that banks send to mobile phones for online purchases, while safeguarding anonymity so as not to infringe the data protection law.
Technically, in France it is already forbidden to expose minors to pornography: the sites display a message on their home page asking the age of the user, who however can easily circumvent this barrier by lying and assuring that they are over 18 years of age .
To try to understand how this system could work in Spain and its viability, Julia Sánchez, researcher and coordinator of the degree in Telematics Engineering at La Salle-URL, believes that one of the ideas that could be more effective “is accreditation through the DNI or driver’s license. A very similar example can be found in Louisiana (USA), where users must show credentials of this type when accessing a pornographic site. In the United States, a law was passed that requires users to present proof that they are of legal age, through a driver’s license or other official identification. As the researcher points out, something similar to what shared vehicle rental services use could be established, where identification is requested through a document, which in this case are photos of the driver’s license, which are later corroborated by third parties. or in Traffic, and if the card is valid, the user is authorized to use that service.
This researcher believes that including a third party that is in charge of verifying the age of the person trying to access the porn site is the most viable option. “In the end, the best way to verify anything is for there to be a third party, an entity, that is trusted or some system that is in charge of doing that verification”, because otherwise “we will end up at the same thing, who verifies? If I tell you that I am of legal age, you believe it, period. There has to be some way in between.” On the other hand, it should be guaranteed that whoever certifies does not know where I am accessing from and that the web page, in this case pornographic, only asks to prove that the user is of legal age and that they are not able to access their private information.
Another proposal, according to Julia Sánchez, would be to establish a parental control system. With this control, parents can see all the messages their children receive and control everything. You can see all calls, control internet access, filter pages, words, among many other things.
In Spain, however, there are already certificates that are frequently used by citizens. This is the case of, for example, the Fábrica de Moneda y Timbre, where various certificates are offered to carry out administrative procedures. These, according to its official website, “make it easier for the Administration, citizens and Spanish companies to carry out their procedures through the Internet in a totally secure way”.
The FNMT Digital Certificate for a Physical Person is the electronic certification issued by the Fábrica de Moneda y Timbre that links its subscriber to signature verification data and confirms their identity. This certificate, also known as a Citizen or User Certificate, is a digital document that contains your identification data. It allows you to identify yourself on the internet and exchange information with other people and organizations with the guarantee that only the user and his interlocutor can access it. The implementation of this certificate on web pages with pornographic content would facilitate the control of minors’ access to these sites.
The problem is that all these possible solutions and initiatives, as Sánchez points out, collide with privacy rights, since they give platforms, in this case pornographic ones, the opportunity to obtain users’ personal data. Web pages that apply age verification to allow access should not retain the information, only validate it.
When you enter a website, sometimes, instead of creating a specific account for that site, the website itself offers the option of using a third-party account –Google, Facebook or Apple– to be able to log in. One option may be to use this authentication to verify the identity of the user.
This solution, according to Sánchez, could turn out well, but you have to be careful. “Let’s put a user in a situation where a user does this, but he doesn’t want Google to have so much data and know that he is accessing a porn page. The user does not want Google or any of these services to have a record of what he does and what he stops doing, that is very intrusive, ”says Sánchez
On social networks like Twitter, Tiktok and Instagram, young people are also exposed to adult content and invasions of their privacy. And there are many users, especially parents, who ask the companies responsible for these networks to improve and include new age verification methods.
Instagram launched an initiative to verify the age of its users in October last year. As they indicate on their official page, “if a person under 18 tries to change their date of birth on Instagram to a date of birth corresponding to someone over 18, we will ask them to verify their age.” There are 3 ways to verify the age: upload a photo of the identification document, ask mutual friends to verify the age or through a selfie video.
In the case of the video selfies, they are sent to the British firm Yoti, which has developed an artificial intelligence tool that it says can calculate the age of those under 20 with a margin of error of 1.5 years. . The big drawback is the unreliability of the system to verify the identity of the person who appears in the selfie. They themselves claim that their tool is not as effective in verifying the age of women and girls, and people with dark skin.
Instagram also gives parents the option to monitor their child’s account. They simply have to access the application from their personal account and go to the configuration section and then search for “supervision”, there they can request to control the account of whoever they choose, as long as they accept the supervision request. This option allows you to see who is following and who is unfollowing the user of the account being monitored, who you are talking to via private messaging, and even controlling which accounts they can access.
