Pornhub and other porn sites block content in France in protest of new law on age verification
The French government has approved a law that asks users who intend to enter porn sites to identify themselves in order to prohibit access to minors.
Symbol indicating no access for those under 18 and the porn site Pornhub.
Visitors in France to sites Pornhub and Youporn, operated by parent company Aylo, will be greeted starting Wednesday with a message denoting the country's age verification requirements, the company said in a statement.
The French government began phasing in requirements this year for all adult websites to force users to confirm their age with details such as a credit card or a document of identification.
With the message now at the top of its websites, Aylo is "communicating directly with the French people to tell them how dangerous, potentially invasive of privacy and ineffective the French law is," Solomon Friedman of Ethical Capital Partners, which owns Aylo, told AFP in a video call Tuesday.
EU investigates four pornography platforms for risks to minors
In a statement, the European Commission, the E.U.'s executive arm, reported that the investigation into Pornhub, Stripchat, XNXX and XVideos focuses "on risks to the protection of minors," including the absence of effective age verification measures.
A check carried out earlier Tuesday by AFP from France showed that on all four platforms it was only necessary to indicate that the user is over 18 to access content, without any verification.
In a preliminary analysis, the commission concluded that these platforms had not implemented "appropriate and proportionate measures" to ensure a high level of security for minors.
In order to preserve privacy, operators must offer a technical dual-identification option that prevents the platforms themselves from viewing users' personal information.
But Aylo says this is an ineffective mechanism that puts people's data at risk to malicious actors, hacks or leaks.
According to the company, countries should focus on developers of operating systems such as Windows from Microsoft, iOS from Apple or Android from Google, rather than porn platforms.
"Aylo is absolutely in favor of the concept of age verification," executive Alex Kekesi told reporters in a video call.
But requiring individual platforms to confirm the age of visitors "poses a very serious risk ... with respect to your privacy rights," he added.
"Google, Apple and Microsoft all have the capability built into their operating system to verify the age of the user at the operating system or device level," said Solomon Friedman, a spokesman for Aylo's parent company, Ethical Capital Partners.
Their ability "to supply an age signal to any site or app... can actually provide a solution" for controlling access to adult content without requiring users to share sensitive data with multiple websites, he argued.
"I understand that those three entities are large and they're powerful, but that is not an excuse for France to do what they have done," he added.
Aylo's message to potential porn viewers will be headlined with the image of "Liberty Leading the People" from Eugene Delacroix's famous painting of the bare-breasted allegorical character.
"The more [verification] the better," Culture Minister Aurore Bergé reacted Tuesday on X to Aylo's decision.
"There will be less violent, degrading and humiliating content accessible to minors in France," she added.
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