Later this month, Italian citizens will have to take an additional step before accessing porn sites. On Friday, Italy’s communications regulatory agency, known as AGCOM, announced a age verification system Its objective is to prevent minors from accessing websites with pornographic content. He initial list of sites covers around 50 sites including Pornhub, XHamster and Onlyfans.
The new rule will require users to be verified through “certified third parties,” which could be another company, bank or mobile operator that already has the relevant information. Once the third party verifies the user’s age, they will issue a code that grants access to the porn site. While the stated goal of the legislation is to prevent harm to minors, the age verification process uses a “double anonymity” system to allay privacy concerns. To protect user privacy, porn sites can only see if a user is of legal age and not their identity, while the third-party verifier can only see the user’s identity and not the website they are trying to access.
Under the law, users must do this every time they try to access affected porn sites. AGCOM He said the new rule will come into force on November 12, and any pornographic site that does not comply could receive fines of up to 250,000 euros.
Italy is the latest European Union country to implement age verification rules, after France put a similar system instead in the summer. Just outside the EU, the UK also recently introduced its own age verification process that requires a selfie or government ID. Since then, Pornhub said UK visitors to its site have plummeted. 77 percent.
