Porn sites may require passport details in order to stop children from using them

Jeremy Godfrey of Coimisiún na Meán said the new Online Safety Code is all about protecting children from things that could harm their physical and mental development.

People may soon be required to upload their passport details or a selfie to websites if they want to view pornography as part of efforts to help protect children from harmful content online.

The new media regulator has said that part of the new Online Safety Code will be telling digital platforms that they must use an effective form of age verification to view pornography on their website.

“Just asking someone if they’re over 18 is not effective,” Coimisiún na Meán executive chairperson Jeremy Godfrey told the Irish Examiner. “You have to do more than that before they see that content.” 

While Mr Godfrey said his office will not be “absolutely prescriptive” on how the age verification should work, a requirement for a person to show their passport and then a selfie to verify they are the person on the passport could be described as a “gold standard” of verifying a person’s age.

“We care much more about the effectiveness than how it’s achieved,” he said. “There are other ways people could consider like you just have a live selfie each time you want to access it and they use biometrics to check. 

"It’s less accurate. It might be hard to distinguish between a 17- and 18-year-old that way. But it will protect younger children.” 

Online Safety Code

The Online Safety Code is out for public consultation until the end of this month. It outlines measures that video-sharing platforms will have to implement to keep users, especially children, safe from harmful content online.

The framework will also include the EU Digital Services Act and the EU Terrorist Content Online Regulation and, once established, the new code will be legally binding and platforms will face fines of up to €20m for breaches.

Under this code, Ireland’s Coimisiún na Meán will have responsibility for enforcing these measures on all video sharing platforms that have their European headquarters in Ireland. This will include some of the major tech giants. A full list of the sites included is expected to be published by the regulator in the next week.

Mr Godfrey said it is all about protecting children from things that could harm their physical and mental development.

“In particular, there are things like promotion of self-harm and suicide, promotion of eating disorders, cyber bullying of children,” he said. “They’re all covered by the code.

“We’re saying to the platforms you must prohibit that in the terms and conditions. And you must apply those terms and conditions diligently and have flagging mechanisms to identify them.” 

In a Q&A posted online about the code, Coimisiún na Meán addressed the idea that children could just bypass the age verification requirements for pornographic material.

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It said: “In the case of pornographic services, robust age verification measures must be used. The form of robust age verification is left to the platform and it is for the platform to satisfy itself that it meets all GDPR and privacy obligations in this regard.” 

The regulator said self-declaration plus estimation based on how someone uses a service is “unlikely to be good enough to restrict access to pornography and extreme violent content” but may be sufficient for preventing underage users.

A requirement on the online platforms will also be to identify how accurate its method is, as no age verification technique is 100% effective. They will be required to measure and report back to the regulator on that matter.

“You have to have some mechanism for checking what the quality is, so it’s transparent,” Mr Godfrey said. “Maybe a platform can respond in different ways. Maybe they will only show pornographic content for users who’ve opted in. But we’ll require them to be effective and prove they are effective.”