This time is the right one? The Minister Delegate in charge of the Digital Transition Jean-Noël Barrot announced, on February 5 in the columns of the Parisian, the creation of an online age verification tool. In its sights, pornographic sites, forced since the law on domestic violence of July 30, 2020 to ensure that their users are of legal age, but which since the actual application of the text, in October 2021, have dodged any bet in compliance waving their incompetence about it. Easy: the government itself had so far had no idea how to go about it. So, porn is often satisfied with the minimum: a declaration on honor or commercial solutions far from the requirements of the Cnil, the policeman of personal data. Far, too, from the new standards of the world around him.
Because for many years, the (important) place of pornography on the Internet did not worry many people. THE “Zeitgeist”, the spirit of the times is no longer the same. First, because pornography has changed. Many investigations – journalistic and judicial – have lifted the veil in recent years on an environment that has become increasingly violent. The world, too, has changed. The Weinstein affair, the #MeToo movement and its offshoots have opened the eyes of the entire planet to the treatment of women. Finally, the Internet has been transformed: the youngest now have access to it, sometimes before the age of 10, using their own smartphones.
The game is therefore worth the candle. And it opens other perspectives: pornography is not the only one affected by the question of age online. We can think of social networks, supposed to be inaccessible before the age of 13 and in which childhoods are sometimes shattered. Gambling or “alcohol sales sites”, explains Jean-Noël Barrot himself. The deployment of a device could also be envisaged on video game titles which highlight the purchase of various virtual objects (weapons, avatar costumes, etc.). Strict age verification would thus come as a double-edged sword of parental control that is still too little widespread: less than 1 in 2 parents have recourse to it for the moment in France due to a too “complex” operation, judges The Minister.
This announcement will finally probably be of interest beyond France. No country in the world yet has a robust and privacy-friendly age verification system.