Just according to clients of mine who have sought legal advice. Their lawyer outline what they needed and I coded it for them. The whole thing is a mess though and ever-changing. What we need is age verification as a feature on devices built into the OS. Then if someone loads your site the browser lets you know, and then you can just show them a message that it's required. If it was just the adult industry I wouldn't hold my breath, but sports gambling sites need that feature too.

According to a recent webinar on age verification, gambling sites need to implement KYC (which has a higher litmus test than age verification,) and they also do not need to challenge anyone until they attempt to gamble. The laws are different. Simply watching gambling is not part of the requirement, so I don't think there's going to be any cross-connection between these two industries. My understanding is whether you are accepting funds to show adult content or not (i.e., tour) you still need to age verify against your risk assessment.

I don't think CSS blurring is very risk averse, and I won't personally suggest it for clients. I'm working on a WordPress plugin similar to this one, but it will actually batch transcode images to be blurred. I also include this as part of my custom CMS/transcoder products, which is an extra step to blur content.

You can use BlurHash and generate hash for each image, save it in the database and show it instead of each image.

I was also thinking: you could XOr the pictures (or just the (data) body of the pictures) with a key, and there is certainly a way to xor back the original picture with a php script once the user is identified, but having a blurred and an unblurred picture is likely better for se traffic.

Thank you for the information! BlurHash looks interesting, but I think since that solution is designed to send both the image and the blurhash in one payload for lazy loading purposes, it probably wouldn't work to prevent legal concerns.

I may look at using BlurHash for other things though. GD and Imagick blurring is really efficient, but if this is more efficient, it might be nice to integrate with some of the apps and transcoders I build.

BlurHash string is calculated for each image, and you need to store it. It's basically a tiny image derived from the original image, that can easily be delivered inline (inside HTML code).

What you can do with your code is only sending the BlurHash string, without the full image, until the user is permited to access the content.

Intended purpose for BlurHash is to HTML load inline (tiny) images for lazy loading.

But if you "break" the process, and deliver only hash strings, you can get an effectively blurred images based on the original ones, without actually sending the original images. Which is totally law compliant, and allows you to avoid "duplicating" the original images by blurring them. Which saves disk space.

any progress on this?

No progress. There wasn't any interest. I will likely do this when I have spare time in the coming months, but it won't be very soon.

That's a shame.

Whether or not blurring images would technically satisfy, for example, the UK age verification rules, for a small affiliate at least it would probably mean that you would be well down the queue for the attention of Ofcom.

I remember that. I think it came down to one European Parliament member realizing at the last moment that the wording of the directive or bill would make porn illegal, and spoke up about it, and places like 4Chan took it up.

This is not a solution.

The age verification has zero to do with if the pics are safe or not of the tour.

From my understanding it if the site is adult or not for the UK age verification.

If you are outside the UK then why bother to take notice as you are outside the UK legal authorities I would presume and as such they can send you fines but they have no legal powers from my understanding outside the UZk.

So why harm your site when at most they may just block your site from the UK.

Idiot.

This is not just a UK thing... Go back to fucking skulls...