In letters sent to Apple, Google, and Microsoft this week, Pornhub’s parent company urged the tech giants to support device-based age verification in their app stores and across their operating systems, WIRED has learned.
“Based on our real-world experience with existing age assurance laws, we strongly support the initiative to protect minors online,” reads the letter sent by Anthony Penhale, chief legal officer for Aylo, which owns Pornhub, Brazzers, Redtube, and YouPorn. “However, we have found site-based age assurance approaches to be fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.”
The letter adds that site-based age verification methods have “failed to achieve their primary objective: protecting minors from accessing age-inappropriate material online.” Aylo says device-based authentication is a better solution for this issue because once a viewer’s age is determined via phone or tablet, their age signal can be shared over its application programming interface (API) with adult sites.
The letters were sent following the continued adoption of age verification laws in the US and UK, which require users to upload an ID or other personal documentation to verify that they are not a minor before viewing sexually explicit content; often this requires using third-party services. Currently, 25 US states have passed some form of ID verification, each with different provisions.
Pornhub has experienced an enormous dip in traffic as a result of its decision to pull out of most states that have enacted these laws. The platform was one of the few sites to comply with the new law in Louisiana but doing so caused traffic to drop by 80 percent. Similarly, since implementation of the Online Safety Act, Pornhub has lost nearly 80 percent of its UK viewership.
The company argues that it’s a privacy risk to leave age verification up to third-party sites and that people will simply seek adult content on platforms that don’t comply with the laws.
“We have seen an exponential surge in searches for alternate adult sites without age restrictions or safety standards at all,” says Alex Kekesi, vice president of brand and community at Pornhub.
She says she hopes the tech companies and Aylo are able to find common ground on the matter, especially given the recent passage of the Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) in California. “This is a law that's interesting because it gets it almost exactly right,” she says. Signed into law in October, it requires app store operators to authenticate user ages before download.