In the UK, the porn industry offers to enter the user age check before visiting adult sites

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British porn industry leaders themselves came up with an unusual initiative - to introduce a special anonymous identity check of users who visit sites with adult content. The meaning of such identification is very simple - you need to make sure that the user has reached the age of majority and legally give him a look at what he wants.

This initiative is the answer to one of the points of the political program of the Prime Minister of Great Britain David Cameron. Most recently, he won the local elections and, together with the conservative party, will determine the country's policy in the near future. Cameron, besides his purely political statements, is also known for the fact that for quite a long time he has been fighting to restrict access to pornography (including online porn) for minors. For this, he offers a range of measures. On the one hand, it is necessary to completely destroy “extreme porn”, which refers to pornographic scenes involving children and violence against women. On the other hand, in order to combat pornography on the Internet, Cameron suggests introducing forced filtering of materials by search engines. “I openly declare to Google, Bing, Yahoo and others: you have to do this, it’s your moral duty,” he says.

Such statements by the British Prime Minister expectedly provoked a war of disputes, the main argument in which such is - is this prohibition not a form of censorship and a restriction of freedoms? Nevertheless, Cameron consistently defended his point of view, stating that in the event of his victory in the elections, this item of his political program will be brought to the end. Sites with adult content that will be freely allowed to watch adult videos for everyone will be closed. Probably, in response to this, the porn industry decided to seize the initiative and themselves proposed a mechanism for verifying the identity of users.
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Since the issue of visitors' privacy is inevitably touched upon here, no one is going to create a special centralized database of “porn lovers”. The point is that the provider will provide its users with a username and password to access the Internet, and the existing “neutral” databases will actually check their age. For example, it may be a database of mobile operators or a database of the Department of Pension Provision. To ensure the privacy of inquiries about the age of the provider’s subscriber, special “anonymizing hubs” will be used. In other words, when entering a porn site where you need to confirm your age, he will turn not to a database of adult citizens of Great Britain, but to a certain intermediate server that will execute this query instead of him. The question “who will manage this server?” Remains open.