No porn for you, UK: Online Safety Act now requires age and ID checks on all adult sites

What just happened? Accessing adult material online in the UK changed dramatically today. The Online Safety Act's enforcement has expanded, introducing a broad range of rules that includes mandatory effective age-checking systems for pornography websites, which usually means handing over selfies or government IDs.

The rules, designed to protect children from exposure to harmful content online, require sites that publish or display pornographic content to have rigorous age-verification systems in place. The usual "tick this box to confirm you're over 18" will no longer be sufficient.

UK communications regulator Ofcom requires these sites to offer facial age estimation, via photo or video; age checks that can be confirmed by a credit card provider, bank, or phone operator; photo ID matching, which compares government IDs such as passports against selfies; or digital identity wallets that contain proof of age.

Accessing popular porn platform Pornhub from a UK IP address ...