In a new statement today headed Blackmail, scams and damage to people’s lives: in the name of Internet safety, ORG executive director Jim Killock makes it clear that his London-based digital rights campaigning group is “highly supportive of shielding children from internet porn”.

“But,” Killock adds, “the government’s plan invites disaster.” He contends that DCMS’s claim of putting “stricter measures in place to protect users’ data and privacy” falls short because the new privacy certification scheme is completely optional.

“The result,” he says, “is that children won’t be protected in practice — but adults using age verification will be at risk of blackmail and scams following data leaks.”

He points out that MindGeek, which owns the vast majority of porn sites, will corner the age verification market. It claims that its products will be safe, but it lost customer records of one million users in 2012, and 800,000 in 2016.

“There is a better way,” Killock asserts. “The government needs to legislate mandatory privacy rules to prevent potentially catastrophic leaks of the public’s’ porn preferences that could lead to people being outed or having their careers destroyed.

“Government must stop pushing technical solutions of limited impact. The current plan for age verification will only target a handful of sites — perhaps 100 — of the estimated five million adult websites available. Social media sites with porn like Reddit and Twitter are exempt.”

Open Rights Group is therefore calling on the Government to legislate immediately and put compulsory privacy protections in place.

“The Press reaction to the new ‘porn ban’ has been sceptical,” the statement ends. “People are seeing through these incompetent and dangerous plans.”

Our original story on April 16 reported that the Government is currently inviting public feedback on the censorship proposals in its White Paper on Online Harms, and that ORG is urging Brits to make their feelings on this issue clear to those in power.

Tuesday’s ORG statement pointed out that social media sites like Facebook are not the only intended targets of the swingeing legislation proposed in the White Paper.

It explained that every kind of internet platform and publishing operation would come under its scope. Yet no criteria have been outlined for deciding which sites are deemed ‘harmful’.

And thus there is vast potential for ‘harmless’ sites to be caught by blocking or banning actions, with no legal comeback.

Publisher Tony Mitchell concludes from this that a website as careful with content as The Fetishistas could easily find itself at the mercy of the censor’s off-switch.

Many Fetishistas visitors will already have found that they have to set their devices to ‘accept porn’ just to view our site, even though it has no porn content. This could easily get the site unfairly blacklisted under the Government’s harsh censorship proposals.