Pornhub is in desperate need of someone to serve as a bouncer outside the club. The company reportedly recently sent letters to Apple, Google, and Microsoft requesting the tech giants to help with age verification, requiring users to link their age to their devices — a move that would ease the burden of complying with age-gating requirements that have come into effect in the US and UK in recent years, according to a report in Wired.
Life has become difficult for pornographers since the implementation of new age verification laws in the United Kingdom, which require platforms to verify the age of every user who attempts to view their content. The company recently claimed that its traffic has dropped by 77% since implementing age checks. This has been similarly affected in the United States, where several states have established their own age requirements for adult websites, including an 80% drop in age in Louisiana.
Aside from the lack of traffic, Pornhub’s opinion is that implementing age verification is a nightmare. “Based on our real-world experience with existing age assurance laws, we strongly support initiatives to protect minors online,” the letter from Anthony Penhale, chief legal officer of Aiello — which owns Pornhub, Brazzers, RedTube, and Youporn — said, according to Wired. “However, we have found the site-based age assurance approach to be fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.”
Porn site operators would prefer that device manufacturers link the user’s age directly to their devices. That information can be provided directly to the site the user is accessing through an application programming interface (API). This conveniently shifts the burden onto the companies that are responsible for the devices, which Pornhub would obviously prefer, as it would presumably give them plausible deniability for any underage users who lie to device manufacturers about their age.
Pornhub may get its wish with the passage of California’s Digital Age Assurance Act, which requires app store operators to verify a user’s age before allowing them to download any app containing adult content, though it won’t take effect until January 1, 2027. Privacy experts warn that such a policy moves us closer to digital IDs, which come with privacy and security concerns and could effectively eliminate the concept of online anonymity.
That said, the current third-party age verification process that sites like Pornhub have to rely on is not good for user privacy at all. With no clear standard, platforms have experimented with various age authentication methods, ranging from age estimation schemes to biometric face scans to requiring users to provide a form of government ID. This 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 protecting kids from getting their brains messed up by watching porn, we’ve backed ourselves into a corner where we have to either accept increased surveillance from tech overlords or trust our information to shady third-party firms. So, it’s not great.