What is the Arcom age verification standard?
The access of minors to adult online content is an increasingly worrying social problem. The numbers are alarming: in France, a 2020 study carried out by Médiametrie shows that around 40% of adolescents under 15 have already been exposed to adult content online. This exhibition, facilitated by the lack of real barriers to entry to these sites, has important consequences on the development of young people, altering their vision of intimate relationships and exacerbating the risks of early addiction.
Faced with this problem, the Arcom has taken strict measures by requiring adult sites to comply with a rigorous age verification standard.
At present, Age verification on adult content sites is clearly superficial and ineffective. The majority of platforms simply ask users to confirm their age by checking a box or entering a birth date. This process, based solely on a good faith statement, is easily bypassed by underage users, who can access the content in a few clicks without any real verification. According to a survey conducted by UNAF (National Union of Family Associations), 70% of minors under the age of 15 know that they can access adult sites without real restrictions.
Arcom, or Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication, is an independent public entity in France that was created to ensure the respect of rights and obligations in the audiovisual and digital fields. Its field of action therefore includes the protection of the public, and in particular that of minors.
In October 2024, in response to growing concerns about young people's access to adult content, Arcom has taken a decisive step by publishing a framework defining the procedures for verifying age on pornographic sites.
This text, drawn up in consultation with the CNIL and in application of the SREN law of May 2024, details the technical requirements that platforms must now meet to effectively protect minors from accessing inappropriate content.
Adult content sites have 3 months to implement effective age verification solutions. The consequences of non-compliance are considerable. Platforms that do not respect these new rules risk losing their access to the French market, a major commercial impact for them. Since the adoption of the SREN law, Arcom's powers have been strengthened. It now has significant sanctioning power, being able to impose fines of up to 4% of the worldwide turnover excluding taxes of the site concerned, as well as access blocking measures, applied by Internet access providers.
The Arcom standard mainly covers the technical conditions of age verification systems as well as data protection requirements of the users
Today, porn sites, especially free ones, generally just ask for the age of users on their home page only. From now on, age verification is mandatory on all pages and must be required each time someone request access to the service. Even more, sites can no longer show content until the user has proven to be of age. For example, this involves the blurring of the visited page.
To avoid impacting the user experience, they can generate proof of age that they can reuse, thus avoiding having to go through the whole process again every time they visit. However, for security reasons, this reusable proof must be accompanied by a second authentication factor (like a code sent to the user's phone).
In addition, the Arcom standard allows adult content sites to diversify age verification methods, such as facial biometrics, presenting an ID, or using a digital identity wallet. However, to fight identity fraud, age verification systems must have robust liveness detection and face comparison solutions against attacks regardless of their degree of sophistication (such as deepfakes). In this article, we invite you to discover the most common attacks to impersonate an identity.
Finally, age verification solutions need to be effective on all populations, without ethnic bias. These should be tested on diversified databases to avoid discriminatory biases and to ensure their effectiveness for all users.
Age verification is similar to identity verification and necessarily involves the collection of sensitive personal data.. The protection of users' data and privacy is therefore a prerequisite under the GDPR.
First of all, the Arcom standard requires legal and technical independence between age verification solutions and adult content services. This means that age verification systems must be provided by independent third parties to ensure that they are objective. In addition, total confidentiality is required with respect to this data, which should under no circumstances be kept, neither by the age verification provider, nor by the content sites.
This confidentiality is reinforced by the obligation to use “double anonymity”, which allows total tightness between the user, content sites and age verification solutions. This mechanism allows:
Finally, the Arcom standard requires to inform explicitly users of the data protection level.
Conclusion:
While 74% of French people are in favor of implementing age verification measures to access pornographic sites, the Arcom standard today shows that the authorities are taking this phenomenon seriously. In order to facilitate the compliance of content sites, Arcom grants a transition period until April 2025, during which the use of a bank card to verify age is authorized, to at least protect the youngest users. The market can expect this standard to evolve in the coming months to perhaps ensure compliance at European level.
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