Ben
The UK government is looking to pass new rules that would see sites hosting “non-conventional” porn videos blocked from UK users.
As ever, the problem lies in the fuzzy lack of definition contained within the boundaries of “non-conventional” sex acts, which can include things like female ejaculation, and other things you personally may or may not be interested in, but aren’t criminal acts.
“Although it is nominally designed to enforce the [Obscene Publications Act] guidelines of the Crown Prosecution Service, in practice it draws far tighter lines, many of them inexplicable. The ban on female ejaculation is a particularly strange example,” Jerry Barnett, author of Porn Panic, told The Guardian.
Other new measures aimed at protecting children include blocking access to any website that hosts pornography but fails to put strict age verification checks in place – which would include sites like Reddit or Twitter as well as sites that primarily host pornography. These checks would likely need to include a verification method such as a credit card and sites that don’t comply could see payment processors block them from using their services, thereby cutting off their funding.
The move came just three days after the UK enacted the new Investigatory Powers Act, which gives a wide-range of different government a complete list of user’s Web browsing data, which ISPs are now obliged to provide.
It shouldn’t really need pointing out that having a huge database of the nation’s browsing habits is a bad idea from a data security perspective, but given the wide range of agencies that can access it and the inevitability of data leaking, it seems a matter of ‘when’, rather than ‘if’ it happens.
