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

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they consider the Information Commissioner’s Office’s (ICO) Age Appropriate Design Code to apply to providers of online pornography; and, if not, what plans they have to (1) direct the ICO, or (2) legislate in this area.

The Age Appropriate Design Code sets out the privacy standards companies must adopt when offering online services that are likely to be accessed by children. If a service is one that children should not be using, such as a pornography service, the Code does not apply. It is the government’s view that the focus of such a service should be on how to prevent children’s access to it rather than undertaking a data protection impact assessment with the aim of making the service child-friendly.

The Online Safety Bill will deliver comprehensive protections for children from accessing pornography by placing new duties on in-scope companies to protect children from harmful content online. The Bill will cover many of the most visited pornography sites, social media, video sharing platforms, forums and search engines, thereby capturing sites through which a large proportion of children access pornography. We recognise the concerns that have been raised about protecting children from online pornography on services which do not currently fall within the scope of the Bill. We are exploring ways to provide wider protections for children from accessing online pornography through the Bill.