The UK Information Commissioner's Office is set to crack down on porn sites and other adult-only services to prevent children's access. Companies found breaking the rules could be slapped with fines as much as 4 percent of their annual global revenue.
This is a reversal for the ICO which had reiterated that services meant for adults were not subjected to the Children's Code or Age Appropriate Design Code. The regulator's new stance comes after a report last month highlighted that the ICO hadn't enforced a single child-protection case in the two years since the Children's Code came into effect.
In 2021, the watchdog faced a legal challenge from 11 civil-society groups. John Edwards, the Information Commissioner, said the groups argued that the wording of the code covers all services "likely to be accessed" by children and not just services aimed at children. The ICO has changed its position. It now accepts that if there are a significant number of children accessing the sites, they are in the aegis of the code.
This has been welcomed by child online safety groups. John Carr, from the Children's Charities' Coalition on Internet Safety, is pleased with the development. He said the ICO is going to move against porn sites who have known for a very long time that what they are doing is wrong. Carr says such porn sites never felt any legal pressure to do anything. He believes the sites shouldn't be processing children's data.
Edwards said ICO will work with adult-only services, such as Pornhub and xHamster, to make sure that they comply with the code by preventing children's access. He outlined that if a company can show that their services are not accessed by a significant number of children, they would not be subjected to the code. However, the ICO is yet to determine the threshold for what it would consider to be a "significant" number of children. The regulator's new step coincides with the Children's Code second anniversary. It had come into effect in September 2020 with a 12-month grace period.
