New rules for the internet will start being enforced on Friday, which may well change how you browse.
Ofcom’s Children’s Codes, a set of regulations designed to protect young people online, will mean sites hosting adult content like pornography will need to have “highly effective” age verification in place.
Social media sites will need to make sure their algorithms aren’t pushing harmful content to young people and if their terms and conditions say those kinds of posts aren’t allowed, the sites will have to make sure their own rules are properly enforced.
So what’s going to change?
The biggest change you’ll notice straight away is around age verification.
Many adult sites currently have simple boxes for users to tick and say they’re over 18 – that’s no longer good enough, according to Ofcom.
Instead, they’ll have to properly verify their users’ ages before allowing them to see adult content.
So on Friday, users visiting adult websites should be presented with a screen that offers them a few different ways to verify their age.
That could be by checking credit card details, checking ID or by using AI facial age estimation.
This is different to AI facial recognition; whereas facial recognition “recognises” a face by comparing it to an ID or to a database, facial age estimation doesn’t attempt to identify the individual.
Instead, it judges faces based on the positions of their features and other ageing traits to estimate how old a user is.
“Facial age estimation is effectively taking a selfie in front of your mobile phone or your laptop, and we capture that image […] on behalf of the business,” Robin Tombs, the chief executive of age estimation company Yoti, told Sky News.
“[The AI] checks ‘liveness’ to ensure it isn’t a photo of somebody older and then estimates the age from that selfie, and…
