Spain has insisted on age verification for access to pornographic websites. The so-called “Carretera Digital Beta”, also known as “Porno Pass”, aims to please everyone involved. Young patrons can thus restrict access to adult content as required by the EU Commission.
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The purpose of the “Porno-Pass” is to provide discretion to visitors of such sites and to comply with data protection regulations. Legally compliant age checking is standard in porn sites, but in practice it can fail.
Once you register, users must remain anonymous
It is said that “Porno Pass” will be available as a smartphone app with public key encryption later this summer In a related presentation by the Spanish government. Users have to register here once with their ID card. They can then log in to adult sites a maximum of 30 times per month – anonymously and using the app.
For this purpose, the app generates a public key, a public key, and an associated private key, a private key, for each registration on a porn site – after a successful one-time registration with an ID card.
The purpose of public key encryption is to provide discretion
If a user now wants to log in to the corresponding site using the “Porno-Pass” app, the site’s server requests the corresponding public key in the app. The appropriate private key is stored here, which never leaves the smartphone on which the app is installed. If there is a matching private key for the corresponding public key, the app reports it back to the server, which means that the user has successfully confirmed his or her age.
The user’s identity should be completely invisible to the porn site and cannot be read through the app. However, this process is not without controversy due to fears of data leaks, among other things.
From the end of summer 2024, porn sites in Spain will be able to voluntarily use the “Porn Pass”. “We are already taking action and we ask the platforms to do the same, because what is at stake requires it,” said Spain’s digital minister, José Luis Escrivá. In the future, the system is likely to be replaced by the EU’s adapted digital identity system, eIDAS2. The revised EU regulation, which came into force in May, requires that all member countries provide their citizens with a wallet app with which they can identify themselves on the internet.
Leading adult sites are already under pressure
Pressure is already mounting on very large adult sites in the EU. Tighter regulations under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) have come into force on pornography sites Pornhub, Stripchat and Xvideos since April. Recommendations also include introducing an online age verification system (AVS). If violations are found, there is a risk of terrible fines.
It is questionable whether all this motivates the operators of such sites to voluntarily present their visitors with technical barriers. And users can easily avoid the EU-wide AVS requirement via a VPN connection. With such a service, the connection to a website can be established via a detour or VPN tunnel. If you want to watch porn without age checking, you connect to the site via a server in another EU country.
To the porn site’s servers, the request comes from a country without employed strict regulations, so the site will likely skip the age check – which is only applicable in the EU.
(No)
