Pornhub is set to introduce a major restriction for anyone wanting to access the website.
Pornhub, along with any other website on which pornographic material can be found, now has to introduce 'robust' age-checking techniques.
The change in question will be completely rolled out in the United Kingdom in just a few month's time this summer.
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The new age restriction checks, made under the Online Safety Act (OSA), have been issued by regulator Ofcom and are intended to prevent children from easily accessing pornography online.
"For too long, many online services which allow porn and other harmful material have ignored the fact that children are accessing their services," said Dame Melanie Dawes, Ofcom's chief executive.
"Either they don't ask or, when they do, the checks are minimal and easy to avoid."
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She went on to explain: "That means companies have effectively been treating all users as if they're adults, leaving children potentially exposed to porn and other types of harmful content.
"Today, this starts to change."
Dawes also announced that 'adults will start to notice a difference in how they access certain online service' the age checks start to roll out in the coming months with a hard deadline of July 2025.
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"Services which host their own pornography must start to introduce age checks immediately, while other user-to-user services - including social media - which allow pornography and certain other types of content harmful to children will have to follow suit by July at the latest," she continued.
"We'll be monitoring the response from industry closely."
Ofcom has published a 'non-exhaustive' list of technologies that may be used to verify ages, which include the below:
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- Open banking
- Photo ID matching
- Facial age estimation
- Mobile network operator age checks
- Credit card checks
- Digital identity services
- Email-based age estimation
Dawes added those companies that fail to meet these new requirements can 'expect to face enforcement action from Ofcom'.
The new age checks have been hailed a 'pivotal moment in the fight to make the internet a safer place, particularly for children', Lina Ghazal, Head of Regulatory and Public Affairs at Verifymy, said.
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"The regulator's long-awaited guidance on age assurance means adult content providers now have the clarity they need to get their houses in order and put in place robust and reliable methods to keep explicit material well away from underage users," she concluded.
Aylo (parent company of PH) told Tyla: "First, to be clear, Aylo has publicly supported age verification of users for years, but we believe that any law to this effect must preserve user safety and privacy, and must effectively protect children from accessing content intended for adults.
"Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy. Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws.
"This is not speculation. We have seen how this scenario plays out in the United States. In Louisiana, Pornhub was one of the few sites to comply with the new law. Since then, our traffic in Louisiana dropped approximately 80 percent. These people did not stop looking for porn. They just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don't ask users to verify age, that don't follow the law, that don't take user safety seriously, and that often don't even moderate content. In practice, the laws have just made the internet more dangerous for adults and children.
"The best solution to make the internet safer, preserve user privacy, and prevent children from accessing adult content is performing age verification at the source: on the device. The technology to accomplish this exists today. What is required is the political and social will to make it happen. We are eager to be part of this solution and are happy to collaborate with government, civil society and tech partners to arrive at an effective device-based age verification solution.
"In addition, many devices already offer free and easy-to-use parental control features that can prevent children from accessing adult content without risking the disclosure of sensitive user data."
Topics: Life, News, Sex and Relationships, Social Media, Technology, UK News
Rhiannon Ingle