Prohibiting minors from accessing pornographic sites is a real headache for governments around the world. To verify the identity of Internet users, you must provide very sensitive personal data to these platforms. Pornhub therefore asks that Microsoft, Apple and Google take care of verifying the identity of its users.
Help from Microsoft, Apple and Google sought
To do this, Pornhub suggests the creation of a common and secure standard that would allow the user’s age to be recorded on a PC or smartphone. The site would send a simple local request to the publisher who would establish whether the person has the right to visit it, without further details about it.
01net specifies that Pornhub is not the only player on the global internet to request that such verification be put in place. This is the case for Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, etc.) or Match (Tinder, Meetic, OkCupid, etc.).
According to them, application stores like the App Store have private data such as the user’s age, credit card information and other elements from the device used. This would make it easier to identify users to allow them to access age-restricted services, including Pornhub, without endangering their anonymity.
Age verification is a real quagmire
In France as in other countries around the world, the Pornhub case – but also pornographic sites in general – represents a real problem. Especially when we know that in France, half of boys under 13 have already consulted an adult site.
Ideas to allow age verification never came to fruition, as did the bans demanded by Arcom and child protection associations. The Paris judicial court and the Paris Court of Appeal rejected their request in 2023.