Pornhub to comply with UK's upcoming age verification law

Under the UK's Online Safety Act, all sites and apps that host porn will have to establish "strong age checks" by a July 24 deadline, the UK's Office of Communication, known as Ofcom, shared.

The Online Safety Act (2023) is a set of laws to regulate online content. Age-verification for porn has been in the works for years in the UK, first attempted (and failed) in 2019 and reintroduced in 2022.

When the law goes into effect, complying porn sites must verify viewers' ages using one of the following methods:

• Facial recognition (users show a photo or video and technology analyzes to estimate their age)

• Banking information

• Digital wallets

• Credit card age checks

• Email-based age estimation (technology analyzes where else the email has been used to estimate age)

• Mobile network operator checks (confirming whether a phone number has age filters applied to it)

• Photo ID matching

The duty is on the platforms to establish these checks.

According to free speech advocates interviewed by Mashable, age-verification laws like this raise serious privacy concerns. Ofcom states it will work with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which regulates data protection in the UK, and will refer cases where websites haven't complied with data protection laws to the ICO.

According to Ofcom research, eight percent of children aged 8-14 in the UK visited a porn site or app in a month, including three percent of 8-9 year-olds. Boys aged 13-14 were most likely to visit such a site.

Eighty percent of adults support age checks on online porn sites as a way to protect children, according to Ofcom research.

Aylo, which owns Pornhub and other popular adult sites, has agreed to comply with the laws, though it hasn't stated which verification it will require.

"For years Aylo has publicly called for effective and enforceable age assurance solutions that protect minors online, while ensuring the safety and privacy of all users. The United Kingdom is the first country to present these same priorities demonstrably," Pornhub's vice president of brand and community, Alex Kekesi, said in a statement emailed to Mashable on behalf of Aylo.

"We think it's really positive," Ofcom's group director for online safety, Oliver Griffiths, told Mashable. "It's a bit of a contrast with what they've done in a number of countries."

Aylo blocked Pornhub and its other sites in France on June 4 in light of the country's age-verification law. Weeks later, the law was suspended until it's deemed legal under EU law, and Pornhub and is (for now) operating in the country again.

This difference could be because of Ofcom's discussions with people within the porn industry, as both Griffiths and Kekesi mentioned to Mashable.

"Ofcom has consulted with industry stakeholders and has presented a variety of flexible methods of age assurance that are less intrusive than we have seen in other jurisdictions, giving us the confidence to operate within their framework," Kekesi said. "Our conversations with Ofcom have been constructive and solution focused."

However, Kekesi did say that Aylo believes device-based filters are "the safest and most effective option for protecting children and maintaining user privacy online."

Age-verification legislation has ramped up in the U.S. as well. Around a third of states have instituted age-verification laws, which typically mandate that sites with over one-third explicit content require viewers to upload a government ID or participate in a facial recognition scan to confirm their age. In most instances, Pornhub effectively blocked itself in those states. The Supreme Court just upheld Texas's age-verification law, which sets a precedent for such laws in the rest of the country.

Griffiths called this a "global issue" and seeks to build global norms around age checks.

Another issue with these regulations, according to skeptics, is that age verification can be circumvented by software like VPNs. An initial study out of New York University suggested that age verification simply doesn't work because of the widespread availability of VPNs.

"If you have dedicated teenagers who are intent on getting around the checks in the same way as they kind of find their way into pubs and bars to buy alcohol, a number of them will manage to get through it," Griffiths said. "So don't think this is going to be foolproof." Ofcom research, however, points to younger children who stumble upon porn accidentally and discover it's "one click away."

"We think this is going to make a really significant difference" in those instances, Griffiths said.