“And that’s very, very sensitive data,” he added.
The British Board of Film Classification, the regulator that would be responsible for ensuring compliance with the new laws, plans to provide certification for age verification companies.
But the process would be voluntary and at least one company has already said that it will not apply for certification. In an open letter published on Medium this week, the company, 18+, said its “digital wallet” was a better protection of privacy but would not qualify for certification because the board’s rules appeared to ban that approach.
When the move was announced, officials said Britain would be the first country to require mandatory age verification for viewing online pornography.
This week, the Irish government said it would study the proposal in Britain after thousands of pornographic images were found on the phone of one of two teenage boys convicted on Tuesday of murdering a 14-year-old girl.
The girl, Ana Kriegel, who was born in Russia, was tricked by the two boys, both 13 at the time, into entering a ruined farmhouse on the outskirts of Dublin, where she was sexually assaulted and beaten to death last year. The boys, who cannot be named because they were underage at the time, were believed to be the youngest people ever found guilty of murder in Ireland.
Evidence released after the trial, but which was not shown to the jury, revealed that one of the boys had thousands of pornographic images on a smartphone, including some depicting sexual violence, as well as web searches for “child porn,” “animal porn” and “Russian teens.”
Prime Minister Leo Varadkar of Ireland, speaking about the case in Parliament on Wednesday, expressed concern that young people had such easy access to pornography and that “so many young people learn about sex through pornography, which is not an accurate representation of what is healthy in life.”
The Irish justice minister, Charles Flanagan, told The Irish Times that he intended to discuss Britain’s new laws on age verification with his British counterpart.