Age Verification Companies Seek Millions Over Abandoned UK Porn Block

Yet another reminder that trying to legislate porn blocks is never a good idea: Four companies who sank millions into the development of age-verification software for the British government—AgeChecked Ltd, VeriMe, AVYourself, and AVSecure—are now demanding £3 million in damages, since the “porn block” they developed it for has been scrapped. 

Stuart Lawley, the CEO of one of the companies, AVSecure, told the Telegraph’s Mike Wright that his company, “had been preparing for up to 10 million people signing up for the service on day one. ‘We are millions of pounds out of pocket, me personally millions, we have people who don’t have jobs anymore as a result of this,’” he said.

The plan to block underage internet users from accessing pornographic websites, known as the UK “Porn Block,” was abandoned after multiple delays in October 2019 by Secretary of State Baroness Nicky Morgan amid concerns over the privacy of personal identification information being stored by private companies. 

Digital privacy groups in the UK and internationally were appalled by the risks. “The big mistake the BBFC made, in our opinion, was when they pushed ahead with the voluntary code without public consultation,” Jim Killock, executive director at the Open Rights Group, told Wired. “What we had was a voluntary scheme, invented at the last minute, which hopefully companies would abide by but they were not under any obligation to.” 

But the companies behind the judicial review request claim that their systems were completely secure. “The age verification sector developed technology to guarantee privacy and data security for consumers,” chief executive and founder of AgeChecked, Alastair Graham, told the BBC. “AgeChecked provides anonymous age verification, and it does not retain any personal data.”

But it’s not just money and security that the age-verification companies are upset about. They’re claiming that the secretary of state shouldn’t have been able to scrap the legislation in the first place. “The four companies behind the judicial review…are arguing the secretary of state only had power to choose when the scheme came into force, not scrap it in the form passed by Parliament,” wrote Wright of the Telegraph. 

The AV companies’ suit comes in the form of a request for judicial review with a £3 million price tag attached, and it’s unclear whether they have a real shot at getting their money back, much less the abandonment of the porn-block scheme overturned. But let this be a lesson to other governments that have shown an interest in installing their own porn blocks: It can get messy!