Access to five sites in France, including Pornhub, XVideos or XHamster, is suspended following the decision of the Paris court. You will need to decide whether to keep them or block them this Friday, July 7. Prohibited to minors, these sites today face the impossibility of verifying the age of their visitors.
Since July 2020, porn sites can no longer, at least in theory, be satisfied with a one-click statement and must verify the age of their visitors. The only problem, three years later, still no solution has been adopted.
If Jean-Noël Barrot wants the Paris court to “be exemplary” and “block these five sites”, the Delegate Minister for Digital has announced an experiment to find a solution for age verification in “double anonymity”.
Scan a QR code to access a site
Thus, three players have entered the testing phase: Docaposte, IN Groupe (in association with Orange) and GreenBadg. For each of these solutions, the user will rely on a mobile application to certify her age.
For ten days, Jacky Lamraoui, the founder of GreenBadg, has been in demand for his solution. Launched last year, this startup collects a person’s ID card and a video selfie of their face. Then it’s your IDNow partner who handles the checks.
In its operation, GreenBadg’s age verification solution asks a visitor to a porn site to scan a QR code of the app in question. The latter then makes the link with the date of birth that appears on the previously registered identity document.
The access validation is thus instantly transmitted to the site, which unlocks its content. It is also through a mobile application that the other solutions that are being tested will work.
But in the Dorcel group, specialized in pornography, which is participating in the ongoing tests, the solutions seem far from satisfactory. The president of the group, Grégory Dorcel, thus declared to the World: “The tests show that there is still a long way to go before these solutions are effective and adopted by the general public, with a satisfactory user experience.”
A technical reference that is long overdue
Above all, the current vagueness is likely to persist for a long time. For months now, pornographic sites have been hiding behind the publication of a technical repository to justify their breach of the law. This document should frame solutions for verifying the age of adult site visitors. Expected last February, it is still waiting.
But the bill to secure the internet, approved in first reading in the Senate on Wednesday, July 5, provides for Arcom to be given six months to publish this repository after its promulgation. Thus, the approval of the law, scheduled for October, would require the publication of the technical document before April 2024.
However, the reflection could go a long way if the Paris court prohibited access to the main pornographic sites in France. The French ranked third among the largest consumers of Pornhub in 2022. However, French habits could change. If a verification system were introduced, 27% of the French would stop visiting pornographic sites.
Source: BFM TV
