On July 15th the way people in Britain watch porn will change dramatically. In order to protect young people from pornographic material, strict age blocks on pornography will come into effect. While the issue of children not watching inappropriate materials is a worthy one, the method of implementation threatens the privacy of millions.
Accessing online pornographic materials has become increasingly easy, with young people getting more interactive with the internet and the cultural acceptance of exploration of sexuality improving. But the realities are that young people, especially boys, have always had access to pornography. Now, you can search for pornography quickly, finding your personal preference in materials for your personal use. This is making people fearful that young people have access to inappropriate content with ease and, especially for young people, can teach them unrealistic examples of sexual relationships. However, with all this need to protect children against pornography, myself and many experts would argue that this is better than the government’s response.
The issue
The age block will require pornographic sites to take enough precautions in verifying their users are over 18, such as uploading a passport or driving license or buying a pass from a newsagent. Websites that don’t comply with this risk fines or even their websites being banned in the UK.
With hacking and the mass collection of people’s data becoming a huge issue ethically this response calls into question the privacy of people on the internet. Privacy campaigners have raised increasing concerns over the new proposals for policing pornographic and the high potential for causing harm to many people’s lives especially in the event of a hack.
Jim Killock, the executive director of the Open Rights Group, said that a major data leak of personal identification and preferences “might lead to people being outed”. This is frightening, for example, if a person was gay but was in a family that disapproved. A hacking leak could be the difference between life and death for that individual. It could lead to homophobic attacks, isolation from family and friends as well as that person’s most secret information being publicly available. In addition, for all those who work or network, their pornographic information can be used for blackmail and can ruin that person’s reputation.
Can we trust the porn industry with personal data? @mindgeek owns the biggest #ageverification product.
It lost:
* 1 million customer records in 2012
* 800,000 customer records, card details in 2016
* Delivered malware ad attackshttps://t.co/52a38mrUFf #BBCBreakfast— Jim Killock (@jimkillock) April 18, 2019
People’s privacy, especially with something as secret and personal to people’s lives as sexual preferences should be protected and be handled with the utmost care. Yet the British government is letting all that go, to prevent fairly few teenagers from accessing pornography as the age block can easily be manipulated with a VPN service and places like Twitter which contain large amounts of pornographic materials will have no such restrictions.
The lack of press attention on this story has allowed the Conservative government to implement this privacy invasive policy. According to You Gov, only 25% of British people are even aware that such a plan will take place which will massively affect their private lives and will take effect in three months.
The alternatives
However, there are other ways to view pornography. Teenagers, especially teenage boys are going to have sexual desires and will explore their sexualities. According to Ken R Wells, sexual exploration allows teenagers to feel less stress, be less aggressive, helps them to feel comfortable in their bodies and boost their self-esteem. This country has an issue with violence amongst teenagers with knife crime, a mental health crisis with suicide being the biggest killer of young men and a huge issue with self-esteem across men and women.
Instead, experts have proposed to create pornographic material that is more reflective of a healthy relationship or to teach about healthy relationships and sexual exploration in school in order to inform young people about their sexualities.
Believing in the privacy of British people should be a huge priority for any government. Instead, it is clear that the government is ignorant about the realities of online data collection and are unaware that their own private personal sexual preferences can be leaked to the public without their consent or knowledge. It is hopeful that the threat of their own pornographic interests being public will help the government understand the breach in privacy they are pushing onto the British people.
