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I haven't heard of that one. Ofcom lists a bunch of acceptable methods here, but none of them involve buying a card from a shop.
Let's go over the acceptable method
Requires your face, thereby identifying you.
Requires banking details, thereby identifying you.
Vague enough that maybe it doesn't require it somehow for the "digital identity wallets" but questionable as to how the digital identity wallets verify it then without identifying you.
Requires your credit card details, thereby identifying you.
requires your email for the purpose of linking it to other things you use your email for like banks and utility, thereby identifying you.
Requires you to have your mobile network confirm you, thereby identifying you.
This is obviously identifying you.
You claimed "without mandatory ID verification", meanwhile every single one includes a form of mandatory identification. And despite that, it still fails as I've outlined in another comment.
Not only is it easy to bypass through the many many many sites that don't bother because they aren't big/based in the UK, but they also have obvious weak points for any non retard child to do.
Stuff like facial age estimation has been bypassed by video game characters and YouTube videos (and perhaps AI videos too), credit card/ID can be bypassed by just grabbing your parents wallet, mobile network operator age just use your parents or a friend's number.
It leaves the "in China 80% of kids are still gaming" problem left unsolved.
That isn't what I said. My exact words were '90% of them use third parties like AgeGo which don't require you to upload ID'. That obviously means uploading e.g. a driving licence, not age estimation through the camera.
Because yes, in order to use age estimation, AgeGo will need a short video clip of my face, which will then be deleted once the verification is complete. If this counts as 'identifying me' then fine, I don't care. It's worth it if it makes it harder for children to watch porn.
The particulars of identification don't really matter. If it's your face analyzed by AI or an ID card, you still have to connect your identity to your accounts (and the actions you take on an account). There's no way to get around that in order to truly know you are an adult, they have to have a general understanding of who you are.
If my face is an identifying piece of information, then my privacy is already being violated every time I walk outside or go in a city and get captured by 3000 CCTV cameras. AgeGo doesn't know my name, my date of birth, my address, my employer or any of my login details for any of my accounts. Given that there are already photos of me on my Facebook profile with my actual name and date of birth, worrying about AgeGo 'violating my privacy' by attaching a token to my Pornhub account that says I'm 18+ seems misguided.
This reminds me of my grandparents telling me not to buy things online with a credit card because 'hackers could steal my information'. Like technically yes, there is always a risk doing anything, but baseless paranoia is counterproductive.
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Buying a tag from Tesco’s with cash like you’d buy a beer is the closest you can get I think.
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Sure it will.
I will quote my earlier response here.
So what reason does AgeGo have to keep a grainy, 3 second video of my face at 2am?
Because there are many parties who wish to know for savoury or unsavoury reasons what embarrassing things people are doing when they think they’re alone - the security services among them - and consequently that information is very valuable.
I’m not saying that the ID company is saving face-key dicts, but I wouldn’t be very surprised if they were. And if this became rolled out all over the country and users got used to the system it would be very easy for the government to quietly or publicly justify getting the company to cough up ids. Especially when losing government accredition would immediately torpedo their business.
You may consider this excessively paranoid and you might even be right but the insistence on ID at a time when the government has been very clear that what you do alone in your room puts you as a thought criminal or potential rapist doesn’t inspire confidence in me.
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I think that meant a government issued ID document, not the act of identifying.
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Huh. I guess I was thinking of the older MindGeek AgeID system, which seems to have been sunsetted before being broadly implemented. The OfCom list there looks nearly identical to the proposals most American social conservatives (or anti-social-media people) have proposed, when they've considered any detail, with the sole exception of 'phone-based filtering'.
All of them seem to have similar privacy concerns: there's still a single point of data ownership that connects a user's meatspace name to their account(s). The ICO double-pinky-swearing people to safety doesn't really seem that persuasive from a security perspective.
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