https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67615719One of the most read stories on the BBC website, was this one about the proposed use of facial recognition software for porn sites. At the moment its only a recommendation by Ofcom and it won't happen until at least 2025, if it happens at all, but it does show where things are going.
If anyone thinks that this technology is still in development, or that it has never been used in a real world environment, then they really ought to look at what is going on in China, where facial recognition software is already being used to limit childrens access to online gaming.
The exact same thing is being suggested by Ofcom, for restricting childrens access to porn here in the UK, but once the principle is established, then it could easily be extended to online gaming, or anything that people do on the net. Porn is just the guinea pig that will be used to test it out.
We've been here before of course. A few years back, the govt said that people would need to gve their credit card details in order to access porn, but they later dropped that idea, mainly because of the privacy issues and it had limitations, because a child could still gain access by using their parents credit card, so it wasnt foolproof.
This facial recognition tech is more sophisticated, and it can determine if a child is using an adults id, although the privacy issues remain. Everyone would need to have a digital id document of some sort to confirm their age and that would need to be stored online somewhere, which effectively means id cards for all British citizens including children would be required and there will be objections to that from civil liberties groups.
There are also cost implications for the porn sites themselves. Only the large ones will be able to afford this technology, so I expect the smaller ones will simply withdraw from the UK and block UK users from accessing their sites, because thats cheaper than complying with the ofcom rules.
So in future, porn will most likely only be accessible through vpns, because you can pretend that you are in a different country, but then the govt might require you to have your face scanned before you can use your vpn. At some point, we will get to a stage where this is required for everything that we do and if you look at online banking and how that is no longer possible anymore, without you also having a phone to receive your access codes, then its probably going to be the banks that will introduce facial recognition tech first, even before the porn sites do.
All in all, I think it spells the end for anonymous internet access and the introduction of Chinese style state surveillance, within maybe ten years from now.