Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment her Department has made of the security of the technology underpinning the proposals for verification for accessing adult content in the Online Safety Bill.

Age verification technologies are well established and are widely used across a number of sectors, including online gambling. They are proven to be able to verify a user’s age whilst protecting both their privacy and data. This government takes the issue of data privacy and security extremely seriously and that is why safeguards for users’ privacy are included in the Online Safety Bill. Furthermore, the Data Protection Act 2018 sets high standards of data protection and security and includes strong sanctions for malpractice. This will apply to age verification technologies. Both services in-scope of online safety regulation and age verification providers must comply with data protection laws or face enforcement action from the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Many third party age verification solutions provide an anonymised yes/no answer to the question of whether a user is over 18. This can remove the need for a service to process a user’s personal data.