Aylo, the parent company to some of the most popular tube sites like Pornhub, announced on Tuesday that it will restrict access to its platforms in the United Kingdom, effective February 2.
Since last year, Pornhub and other Aylo sites had complied with the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA), which mandated — among other provisions — that websites with pornographic content verify the ages of visitors before showing them content that is inappropriate for minors.
Instead of verifying the ages of its users, Aylo will block access to platforms like Pornhub in the U.K. altogether; however, U.K. users who have already verified their identity will still be able to use their accounts.
“Despite the clear intent of the law to restrict minors’ access to adult content and commitment to enforcement, after 6 months of implementation, our experience strongly suggests that the OSA has failed to achieve that objective,” Aylo said in a statement. “We believe this framework in practice has diverted traffic to darker, unregulated corners of the internet, and has also jeopardized the privacy and personal data of U.K. citizens.”
Ofcom, the U.K. regulator that enforces OSA, disagrees with Aylo’s characterization of the legislation.
“Porn services have a choice between using age checks to protect users as required under the Act, or to block access to their sites in the U.K.,” Ofcom said in a statement to TechCrunch. “There’s nothing to stop technology providers from developing solutions which work at the device level, and we would urge the industry to get on with that if they can evidence it is highly effective.”
Age-verification technology has proven controversial as it rolls out across the globe. While children’s online safety is a pressing concern, privacy advocates argue that the type of cloud-based age-verification methods mandated by legislation like OSA harms adults by collecting swaths of highly sensitive data.
“In other jurisdictions, Aylo has often been one of the only major platforms to comply, only to see traffic diverted to even larger, non-compliant sites,” the company said. Sites that do not comply with OSA are supposed to get fined, but Aylo claims that so far, only the forum 4chan has been fined.
Ofcom also disagrees with Aylo’s claim that it is not punishing porn sites for noncompliance.
“We’ve taken strong and swift action against non-compliance, launching investigations into more than 80 porn sites and fining a porn provider £1 million, with more to come,” Ofcom said.
The decision to block access in the U.K. is consistent with Aylo’s decisions around navigating compliance with age-verification laws in the United States. Aylo’s websites are blocked in a number of U.S. states where age verification is mandated for adult content, since the company believes that age-verification software opens the door to the threat of data breaches.
These fears are not unfounded. Pornhub was, in fact, vulnerable to a data breach at the web and mobile analytics provider Mixpanel, which exposed data about some Pornhub Premium subscribers. This stolen data reportedly included information like users’ email addresses, location, videos watched, keywords associated with the video, and the dates and times that they used the site.
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