Sunday, January 20, 2013

Playboy Fined for Being Open to Children

In the United Kingdom, an agency known as Ofcom has recently slapped the adult magazine with a £100,000 fine over its failure to protect kids from pornographic content. The governmental agency has recently found out that a couple of Playboy websites – Playboy TV and Demand Adult – failed to provide adequate controls to check if their users are older than 18. It means that the websites didn’t ask their visitors to enter credit card details in order to prove that they were mature enough to view pornographic material and incur a lot of personal debt.

Demand Adult portal has displayed hardcore porno which could be viewed with just one click of a button saying “Enter I am over 18”. Apparently, these particular words aren’t something that would drive most porn users away. As for Playboy TV, it fared a little better, because it didn’t display explicit detail. Nevertheless, it still allowed visitors to register by providing details of a debit card, which can’t be regarded as an effective age verification method. As such, Playboy TV received a £35,000 fine, and Demand Adult is demanded to pay £65,000.

Last month, the UK Internet watchdog also fined adult site Strictly Broadband, which failed to include effective controls in place in order to verify that users of the website were aged 18 or over. The problem of our days is that it becomes harder and harder to introduce a system which would guarantee that the users are over 18. For instance, one of the verification systems is Captcha – it would force people to submit their responses through a Nokia 3310, and it is still considered by some as a proper foolproof age verification system. Playboy still has something to consider regarding the way of protecting children from explicit content.

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