Trust in organization to control age of access to pornographic sites in France 2020

While the government has given up using the public identification platform France Connect to check the age of fans of online pornographic content, organizations like internet service providers and pornographic sites themselves are arousing clear mistrust of the French. Thus, in 2020, the vast majority of respondents expressed their distrust of internet service providers (69 percent) or publishers of pornographic sites (87 percent) to verify the majority of people wishing to consult this type of content. Likewise, 56 percent of French people among regular fans of porn videos online did not trust a private service approved by the state to verify age on the basis of identity documents (like identity cards or passports).

Restriction for minors and effectiveness of measures

As the average age of watching pornography occurs as early as between the age of 13 and 14 for the majority of French people, the necessity to prohibit such content for minors has become important in the last years, considering the fact that the exposure to porn can be shocking for children and set irrealistic expectations of men and women. While the majority of habitual porn watchers mentioned parental control measures as being the most effective in controlling children's illicit activities, other methods such as entering credit card information proving the age of the viewer were accepted by 24 percent of those questioned. Neverthless, the effectiveness of those measures was rated quite poorly, and 64 percent of French people would just find another site or use a VPN to bypass the age restriction controls.

Illicit content and the dangers of consumption

One of the major dangers in surfing the web in search for sexual content is to come across child pornography. While the CNIL (National Commission on Informatics and Liberty), which is an independent French administrative regulatory body, whose mission is to ensure that data privacy law is applied to the use of personal data, recorded a whooping 7.5 thousand content removal requests, of which more than five thousand requests were processed and content was removed. France stood in best position compared to its European neighbors in terms of child pornography content removal.