Frustrated with the United Kingdom’s age-verification laws, Pornhub parent company Aylo decided earlier this year to restrict access to all of its platforms in the country for new unverified users. Now, just a few months later, the company is once again opening access to its sites—including Pornhub, YouPorn, and Redtube—to new users who verify their age through an Apple device.
Aylo announced the change Tuesday in a press release, calling Apple’s age-verification system “the most effective and privacy-protecting” way to prevent minors from accessing adult content online.
Apple introduced the feature earlier this year as part of iOS 26.4. The system allows adults to verify their age using either a credit card or a government-issued ID such as a driver’s license or passport.
“In our view, Apple’s UK device-level age-verification update offers one of the strongest and hardest to circumvent protections currently available for helping prevent minors from accessing age-inappropriate content,” the company said in the press release.
Aylo first restricted access to Pornhub and its other adult sites in February, arguing that the U.K.’s Online Safety Act (OSA), which went into effect last summer, was failing to adequately protect children online. The company said it would not participate in what it described as a “failed system” and instead limited access to its sites to users who had already verified their ages.
The OSA put more pressure on platforms, including search engines and social media companies, to protect users from harmful content. The law is largely aimed at preventing children from accessing pornography and other material tied to self-harm, suicide, and eating disorders. One of the law’s key provisions requires porn platforms and sites hosting user-uploaded content to use technology that verifies or estimates a user’s age. In practice, that has often meant requiring users to upload a government-issued ID or a selfie to prove they are old enough to access certain content.
However, the system is far from foolproof. Users have found simple workarounds, including VPNs and even drawing fake mustaches to fool some AI age-estimation tools. A recent report involving 1,000 children in the U.K. from the online safety group Internet Matters found that more than a third had figured out ways around the age-verification checks.
In the U.K., one law maker already called for stricter controls on VPN usage including requiring age checks.
Across the pond, half of U.S. states have passed similar laws requiring porn sites to implement age-verification systems, prompting Pornhub to restrict access in many of those states. Just this week, a new law goes into effect in Utah aimed at discouraging the use of VPNs to bypass age-verification requirements.
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