Looks like UK is going the same way as a few states. Spare a thought for us. So messed up this increasing surveillance state.
The headline is very misleading. Porn companies are considering facial recognition as an option for validating age. Governments are putting more pressure on porn websites to keep minors away from the content, but it's very hard to thoroughly prove your identity online. A government issued photo ID is useless if you have nothing to compare it to visually. That's why many websites use bank/credit card info as opposed to an ID.
It is definitely a privacy concern if you worry about it being known that you watch porn, but I don't think it's right to fault the company.
Company? It's the UK communications regulator, Ofcom.
They found that many on low incomes don't have photocard ID when they rolled out voter ID despite opposition.
Considering no one seems capable of withholding data from motivated hackers, this could be quite horrific.
