Pornhub Urges Big Tech Companies to Adopt Device-Based Age Verification

According to Wired, Pornhub's parent company has sent letters to Apple, Google, and Microsoft urging them to support device-based age verification.

Currently, Pornhub has disabled itself in regions requiring age verification due to a lack of good, privacy-preserving age verification options.

Many adult sites use third-party services and perform privacy-invasive face scans or ask for you to upload a picture of your government ID in order to access the site. Many others simply ignore the age verification mandates altogether.

Pornhub points out that the age verification mandates have been largely ineffective at protecting children and have put user data at risk. They say that they “have found site-based age assurance approaches to be fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.”

By site-based age assurance, they mean every website having their own age verification system that needs to individually verify for every site a user visits.

Device-based age assurance would be completed once on the user’s device, then the signal can be sent to websites via an application programming interface (API).

With Apple and Google’s wallet apps supporting digital IDs, and Chrome and Safari supporting the Digital Credentials API, it’s not clear what exactly Pornhub is looking for in terms of platform support. It seems that the Big Tech companies have already been working on a device-based digital ID system for a while now.