My Lords, Amendment 25YN is in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones. This is a retabling of the amendment that we tabled in Committee to ensure that the details of those applying to have their age verified in order to access adult material on the internet remain anonymous.
I will not repeat at length the arguments I made in Committee. The Government are going to force individuals to go through an age verification process which they did not have to engage in before. To do that, they will have to prove their age by providing sensitive personal information to an organisation. Many of those organisations will create databases containing that sensitive personal information, which could become the target for hackers and criminals. As I said in Committee, there have been some high-profile cases of such unauthorised access to sensitive information in relation to porn sites and other similar sites in the past, with devastating consequences for those exposed. This amendment seeks to guarantee that age verification solutions ensure that the identities of those seeking to do the right thing and to have their age verified, rather than getting around the regulations by using for example a VPN, are protected. It would require the age verification regulator to approve age verification solutions and ensure that, as part of that, anonymity is protected.
Rather than accepting the amendment, the Government appear to be moving in the opposite direction. On page 6 of their draft guidance to the age verification regulator, the Government state in paragraph 5:
“There are various ways to age verify online and the industry is developing at pace. Providers are innovating and providing choice to consumers. The Regulator will not be required to approve individual age verification solutions”.
Whatever your Lordships may think of anonymity, the first and most obvious question is: how will the age verification regulator know whether the solution will effectively verify age if it does not have to approve that solution? At paragraph 6, the draft guidance goes on to say:
“The privacy of adult users of pornographic sites should be maintained and the potential for fraud or misuse should be safeguarded”.
The draft guidance talks about not duplicating the role of the Information Commissioner’s Office and says that the focus of the age verification regulator should be on age verification.
In my discussions with the British Board of Film Classification, it has said that it has no particular interest or expertise in the area of data protection in relation to keeping confidential the details of those seeking age verification. We will end up with an age verification regulator that forces users of adult material on the internet to use an age verification solution but has no responsibility for approving such solutions.
In any event, the draft guidance is something to which the regulator has only to have regard to. We believe that if UK users of online adult material are to be forced to verify their age—it is only UK users, as those in other countries will not have to do this—the Government have a particular responsibility to ensure that their sensitive personal data, which they would not otherwise have to put at risk, does not get into the wrong hands. That is what this amendment seeks to achieve and I beg to move.
6.30 pm