Real world computing

"I think cynicism is a good thing. And blunt sarcasm has been my trademark for 30 years". New age-verification laws for 18+ sites raise questions about the trust we can place in third-party services that promise not to keep our data

- JON HONEYBALL

There are new laws that have come into effect in the UK about controlling the access to certain sorts of material on the internet, specifically pornography. But it also applies to any material unsuitable for someone under the age of 18.

Age verification has always been a difficult subject. I'm sure we can all agree that there are classes of material that aren't suitable for minors.

And that some social media spaces allow quite unrestrained access by minors to material that is deemed inappropriate and allow access to those minors by predatory adults.

The question that has haunted the internet from the earliest days is how to manage and control this.

The nerds, and those of us who were around at the beginning, wistfully remember the lofty goals of an unrestricted internet, a global library and playground. This was entirely naive because it was unsustainable and indefensible when access by minors became prevalent.

Today, children need access to a smartphone; it's how they keep in contact with their family and friends.

Whether this is a good thing or not is largely irrelevant - it's what has happened, and it's impossible to usher that particular horse back into the stables.

If you start from the obvious position that there's a lot of nasty material out there, and much of it is accessed through or via online social media platforms, then it makes sense to target the larger sites that carry the most traffic. The nerd in me wants to scream "but that will still leave a lot of material that isn't controlled". And to ask all the awkward questions about how this will work against a server that is hosted on the other side of the planet, and which doesn't do any sort of credit card handling.

However, I accept that closing some access is better than doing nothing, while waiting for a properly architected solution is going to make the matter drift on for years.