Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps his Department is taking to ensure the security of age-verification check databases.

All providers of age verification (AV) services must comply with data protection laws. In addition, ahead of the introduction of mandatory age verification on online pornography sites, the regulator, the British Board for Film Classifcation, has created a voluntary certification scheme, the Age-verification Certificate (AVC), which will assess the data security standards of AV providers. Age verification solutions which offer these robust data protection conditions will be certified following an independent assessment and will carry the BBFC's new green 'AV' symbol. Details will also be published on the BBFC’s age-verification website, ageverificationregulator.com.