This time is the right one? The Minister of Digital Jean-Noël Barrot announced, Sunday, February 5, in the columns of the Parisian, the creation of an online age verification tool. In its viewfinder, pornographic sites, constrained by law on domestic violence of July 30, 2020 to ensure that their users are of legal age, but who since the actual application of the text, in October 2021, have avoided any compliance by agitating their incompetence on this subject. Easy: the government itself had so far had no idea how to go about it. So, “porn” is often satisfied with the minimum: a sworn statement, or commercial solutions far from the requirements of the Cnil, the personal data policeman. 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” 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 world’s eyes 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 not very widespread: less than one parent in two currently uses it in France because it is too “complex”, judge Jean-Noel Barrot.
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.