Tech consultant warns against porn id plan
A proposal to make Ghanaians verify their age with national identification cards before accessing pornographic websites has drawn sharp pushback from a technology consultant, who says the idea is not only technically impractical but could turn into a data harvesting nightmare.
Maximus Ametorgoh, speaking on Joy FM’s Midday News, did not dispute the goal behind the proposal, protecting children from harmful online content. His problem is with the method.
“The whole idea of protecting children is sensible and absolutely the right thing to do,” he said. “For me, if I want to protect my child, I will block the website entirely.”
The plan, floated by Communications Minister Samuel Nartey George, would require users to submit national ID details to adult platforms before gaining access. Ametorgoh argues that what sounds straightforward on paper is anything but. For such a system to work, he explained, each website would need to collect a user’s personal data, verify the authenticity of the ID document presented, and then cross-reference it against a backend system capable of confirming the user’s age.
“That is a lot of technology which we do not have and cannot implement easily,” he said.
Beyond the infrastructure problem, Ametorgoh raised a more troubling concern, one that cuts to the heart of what the policy could inadvertently create. Most adult content websites operate outside Ghana’s jurisdiction. Once a Ghanaian submits their national ID to one of those platforms, he asked, who controls what happens to that data? Who regulates how it is stored, shared, or sold?
“Submitting an ID card is like saying all those adult websites should collect the IDs of Ghanaians, and that borders on privacy,” he said. “If I submit my ID card to a website hosted outside Ghana, who controls that data? Are they going to register every adult content website as data controllers?”
He warned that bad actors could exploit the policy altogether, setting up websites with no intention of providing content, purely to vacuum up identification data from unsuspecting users.
“If I wanted to build an ID repository, I would simply create an adult website knowing that Ghana is asking people to submit ID cards,” he said. “I would collect the ID information and use it for purposes other than granting access to the website.”
For Ametorgoh, the entire verification framework misses the point. If the government genuinely considers these platforms harmful, the answer is not to leave them accessible while building a complicated gating system around them, it is to cut off access entirely. He put it plainly: “You cannot say you do not want your child to smoke and then leave a cigarette in the kitchen and expect the child not to smoke.”
“Either Ghana is blocking it, or we are preventing people from visiting that website,” he said. “For adult content websites, for me, this is overkill.”
Source: myjoyonline.com
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