My Lords, I want to say a few words because I have been working on the issue of age verification for a long time. I became interested in it when it became apparent a couple of years ago that it was going to come to the top of the agenda. For the last year or so, the Digital Policy Alliance, which I chair, has been working with the British Standards Institution to produce a publicly available specification—PAS 1296—exactly on this issue. Its whole point is to enable anonymised verification of the attribute of your age. People have said that you would have to give the information to the adult content site, the porn site, but you do not necessarily need to.
There are two stages: when the child, or the adult, first arrives at the site; and, if they are allowed into the site, what they then do. At the point when they come to the front page of the site, where they should be asked to prove their age, there should be an option—and this is the point about anonymity—that allows them to bounce off, with a token, to an age verifier. I have on my smartphone, for instance, one from Yoti. I can identify myself to Yoti; it knows about me and can send an encrypted token back to the website, which does not contain any identity information at all—purely the fact that I am over 18. If the regulator later needs to unravel the token because it appears that rules have been breached, it is possible to present the token and start unravelling it—but only with proper powers. The point is that a hacker cannot find out who presented that token. So it is possible now to do what is necessary.
That answers the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Maxton. The problem with an identity card is that it will identify you. If you gave your identity to one of these websites and it happened to be hacked,
like Ashley Madison, and if you were a Cabinet Minister—or even like most of us here, actually—your career would probably be in ruins. So I think it is essential that people be permitted anonymity. That is why, I am afraid, I am not in favour of the identity card method. There are other similar ways of doing the same thing—