Aylo, the parent company of some of the most popular tube sites like Pornhub, announced on Tuesday that it will restrict access to its platform in the UK from February 2nd.
Since last year, Pornhub and other Aylo sites have been complying with Britain's Online Safety Act (OSA), which requires websites with pornographic content to verify the age of visitors before displaying content inappropriate for minors, among other provisions.
Instead of complying with the OSA by verifying users' ages, Aylo completely blocks access to platforms like Pornhub in the UK. However, UK users who have already verified their identity will still be able to use their accounts.
“Despite its clear intent to restrict minors' access to adult content and to enforce the law, after six months of implementation, our experience strongly suggests that the OSA is failing to achieve its objectives,” Airo said in a statement. “In fact, we believe this framework directs traffic into unregulated, dark corners of the internet, putting British citizens’ privacy and personal data at risk.”
Ofcom, the UK regulator that enforces the OSA, disagrees with Mr Ilo's characterization of the law.
“Porn services have the option of using age checks to protect their users, as required by law, or blocking access to sites in the UK,” Ofcom said in a statement to TechCrunch. “There is nothing stopping technology providers from developing solutions that work at the device level, and if it can prove to be highly effective, we strongly encourage the industry to move forward with it.”
Age verification technology is proving controversial as it is rolled out around the world. While children's online safety is a pressing concern, privacy advocates argue that cloud-based age verification methods of the kind required by laws such as the OSA harm adults by collecting large amounts of sensitive data.
“In other jurisdictions, Aylo was often one of the only major compliant platforms, but traffic was directed to larger non-compliant sites,” the company said. Sites that don't comply with the OSA are supposed to be fined, but Aylo claims that only the forum 4chan has been fined so far.
Ofcom also disagrees with Aylo's argument that it does not punish porn sites for non-compliance.
“We have taken strong and swift action against non-compliance, launched investigations into more than 80 porn sites and fined a porn provider £1 million, with further fines to come.” Ofcom said.
The decision to block access in the UK is consistent with Airo's decision to navigate compliance with age verification laws in the US. Aylo's website is blocked in many US states that require age verification for adult content. This is because the company believes age verification software opens the door to data breach threats.
These concerns are not unfounded. In fact, Pornhub was vulnerable to a data breach at web and mobile analytics provider Mixpanel that exposed data about some Pornhub Premium subscribers. The stolen data reportedly included information such as users' email addresses, location information, videos watched, keywords associated with the videos, and dates and times of site usage.