According to the Minister Delegate for Digital, the year 2023 will mark “the end of access to pornographic sites for our children”. France will indeed impose an age certification device in order to block access to pornographic websites for minors, announced Sunday in The Parisian Jean-Noel Barrot.
The details of this device must be presented within the week, for an implementation “as of September”, according to the newspaper. All Internet sites for adults “must comply with it or risk seeing the distribution prohibited on national territory”, indicated the minister delegate. According to him, “France will be the first country in the world to propose a solution like this”.
Protect minors while preserving anonymity
The age certification must go through a “digital certificate” whose technical details are not yet finalized. The aim will be to preserve the anonymity of the Internet user from the point of view of the Internet sites.
“Telecom operators, who have the age of their customers, could for example be in the loop”, says The Parisian. “This technical solution on which we are working could be used to enforce the age limits which exist in our law, but which are not sufficiently respected online”, underlined Jean-Noël Barrot.
Currently, pornographic sites ask the Internet user to certify his age by entering a date of birth, or even more simply by pressing a box to say “I am an adult”.
New measures in Louisiana
The United Kingdom is also trying to better filter this access, with its online security bill, under discussion in Parliament. The government wants to make it mandatory for websites to have reliable age verification technology in place. And in Louisiana, a state in the southern United States, a law since January 1 requires you to present a copy of an identity document before being able to enter Internet sites with at least one third of their content which is “ detrimental to minors”.
While the objective of making it more difficult for minors to access pornography is widely shared, the various projects to implement age verification around the world have come up against the question of data protection. personal.