Aylo, the company which runs a number of pornographic websites, including Pornhub, is to stop operating in France from Wednesday.
It is in reaction to a French law requiring porn sites to take extra steps to verify their users’ ages. An Aylo spokesperson stated that the law posed a privacy risk and that assessing people’s ages should be done at a device level.
Pornhub is the most visited porn site in the world, with France as its second biggest market, after the US. Aylo – and other providers of sexually explicit material – find themselves under increasing regulatory pressure worldwide.
The EU recently announced an investigation into whether Pornhub and other sites were doing enough to protect children. Aylo has also pulled out of several US states, again due to issues with verifying the ages of its users.
All sites offering sexually explicit material in the UK will soon also have to offer more robust “age assurance”.
‘Privacy-infringing’
Aylo, formerly Mindgeek, also runs sites such as Youporn and RedTube, which will also become unavailable to French customers.
Canadian private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners owns it.
Their vice president for compliance, Solomon Friedman, called the French law “dangerous”, “potentially privacy-infringing” and “ineffective”.
“Google, Apple and Microsoft all have the capability built into their operating systems to verify the age of the user at the operating system or device level,” he said on a video call reported by Agence France-Presse.
Another executive, Alex Kekesi, stated that the company was pro-age verification, but there were concerns about user privacy.
In some cases, users may have to enter credit card or government ID details in order to prove their age.
French minister for gender equality, Aurore Bergé, wrote “au revoir” in response to the news that Pornhub was pulling out of France.
In a post on X [in French], she wrote, “There will be less violent, degrading and humiliating content accessible to minors in France.
Advertisement
The UK has its own age verification law, with platforms required to implement “robust” age checks by July, according to the media regulator Ofcom.
These may include facial detection software which estimates a user’s age.
In April, in response to Discord testing face scanning software, experts predicted it would be “the start of a bigger shift” in age checks in the UK, where facial recognition technology would play a larger role.
BBC News has asked Aylo whether it will block its sites in the UK as well when the laws come into effect.
In May, Ofcom announced it was investigating two pornography websites which had failed to detail how they were preventing children from accessing their platforms.
