Aylo, the parent company to some of the most popular tube sites like Pornhub, was announced on Tuesday that it will limit access to its platforms in the UK, starting February 2.
As of last year, Pornhub and other Aylo sites had complied with UK rules Internet Safety Act (OSA), which required — among other provisions — that pornographic websites verify the ages of visitors before showing them content that is inappropriate for minors.
Instead of verifying the ages of its users, Aylo will completely block 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 the law’s clear intent to limit minors’ access to adult content and commitment to enforcement, after 6 months of implementation, our experience strongly suggests that OSA has failed to achieve this goal,” Aylo said in a statement. “We believe that this framework has in practice diverted traffic to darker, unregulated corners of the internet and has also put the privacy and personal data of UK citizens at risk.”
Ofcom, the UK regulator that enforces OSA, disagrees with Aylo’s characterization of the legislation.
“Pornographic services have a choice between using age checks to protect users as required under the Act or blocking access to their websites 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 we would encourage the industry to continue with this if they can demonstrate that it is highly effective.”
Age verification technology has proven controversial as it rolls out around the world. 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 the OSA harms adults by collecting chunks of highly sensitive data.
“In other jurisdictions, Aylo has often been one of the only major platforms in compliance, only to see traffic diverted to even larger, non-compliant sites,” the company said. Sites that don’t comply with OSA are supposed to be fined, but Aylo claims that only the 4chan forum has been fined so far.
Ofcom also disagrees with Aylo’s claim that it does not penalize porn sites for non-compliance.
“We took strong and swift action against non-compliance, launching investigations into more than 80 porn sites and fining one porn provider £1m, with more to come,” Ofcom said.
The decision to block access in the UK is consistent with Aylo’s decisions to comply with age verification laws in the United States. Aylo’s sites are blocked in some US states where age verification is mandatory for adult content, as the company believes the age verification software opens the door to the risk of data breaches.
These fears are not unfounded. Pornhub was, in fact, vulnerable to a data breach at web and mobile analytics provider Mixpanel, which exposed data about some Pornhub Premium subscribers. This stolen data according to information it included information such as users’ email addresses, location, videos they watched, keywords associated with the video, and the dates and times they used the site.
