Pornhub Begs Tech Giants to Verify User Ages on Their Device: Report
Pornhub desperately needs someone to serve as a bouncer outside the club. The company reportedly sent letters to Apple, Google, and Microsoft recently pleading with the tech giants to help out with age verification by requiring users to link their age to their devices—a move that would lessen the burden of complying with age-gating requirements that have gone into effect in the US and UK in recent years, according to a report from Wired. Life has been hard on the pornographers since the United Kingdom enacted new age verification laws that require platforms to verify the age of every user attempting to view their content. The company recently claimed that its traffic is down 77% since the age check implementation took effect. It’s taken similar hits in the United States, where many states have instituted their own age requirements for adult websites, including a drop of 80% in Louisiana. Pornhub’s beef, other than the lost traffic, is that age verification is a nightmare to implement. “Based on our real-world experience with existing age assurance laws, we strongly support the initiative to protect minors online,” the letter from Anthony Penhale, chief legal officer for Aylo—which owns Pornhub, Brazzers, Redtube, and YouPorn—said, per Wired. “However, we have found site-based age assurance approaches to be fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.” What the porn site operator would prefer is that device manufacturers simply link a user’s age directly to their device. That information can then be provided directly to the site that the user is accessing via an application programming interface (API). It also conveniently shifts the burden onto the companies that are responsible for the devices, which Pornhub would obviously prefer, since it would presumably give them plausible deniability for any underage users who lie about their age to the device makers. Pornhub might get its wish with the passage of California’s Digital Age Assurance Act, which requires app store operators to confirm a user’s age before allowing them to download any app that may contain adult content, though it won’t go into effect until January 1, 2027. Privacy experts have warned that such a policy moves us closer to digital IDs, which come with a plethora of privacy and safety concerns and could effectively end the concept of online anonymity. That said, the current third-party age verification process that sites like Pornhub have to count on isn’t exactly great for user privacy, either. With no clear standard in place, platforms have experimented with a variety of different age authentication methods, ranging from age estimation schemes to biometric face scans to requiring users to provide a form of government ID. That requires users to give up sensitive information about themselves, and we’ve already seen at least one breach of a verification platform that resulted in user IDs being exposed. Basically, in the name of keeping kids from rotting their brains on porn, we’ve painted ourselves into a corner where we have to accept either increased surveillance from tech overlords or trust our information to shady third-party firms. So, that’s not great.
