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Aylo, the company which runs a number of pornographic websites, including Pornhub, is to stop operating in France from Wednesday.<\/p>\n
It is in reaction to a French law requiring porn sites to take extra steps to verify their users’ ages.<\/p>\n
An Aylo spokesperson said the law was a privacy risk and assessing people’s ages should be done at a device level.<\/p>\n
Pornhub is the most visited porn site in the world – with France its second biggest market, after the US.<\/p>\n
Aylo – and other providers of sexually explicit material – find themselves under increasing regulatory pressure worldwide.<\/p>\n
The EU recently announced an investigation<\/a> into whether Pornhub and other sites were doing enough to protect children.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Aylo has also pulled out of a number of US states<\/a>, again over the issue of checking the ages of its users.<\/p>\n All sites offering sexually explicit material in the UK will soon also have to offer more robust “age assurance.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Aylo, formerly Mindgeek, also runs sites such as Youporn and RedTube, which will also become unavailable to French customers.<\/p>\n It is owned by Canadian private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners. <\/p>\n Their vice president for compliance, Solomon Friedman, called the French law “dangerous,” “potentially privacy-infringing” and “ineffective”.<\/p>\n “Google,\u00a0Apple\u00a0and\u00a0Microsoft\u00a0all\u00a0have\u00a0the\u00a0capability\u00a0built\u00a0into\u00a0their\u00a0operating\u00a0system\u00a0to\u00a0verify\u00a0the\u00a0age\u00a0of\u00a0the\u00a0user\u00a0at\u00a0the\u00a0operating\u00a0system\u00a0or\u00a0device\u00a0level,”\u00a0he said on a video call reported by Agence France-Presse. <\/p>\n Another executive, Alex Kekesi, said the company was pro-age verification, but there were concerns over the privacy of users.<\/p>\n In some cases, users may have to enter credit cards or government ID details in order to prove their age.<\/p>\n French minister for gender equality, Aurore Berg\u00e9, wrote “au revoir” in response to the news that Pornhub was pulling out of France.<\/p>\n In a post on X [in French]<\/a>, she wrote: “There will be less violent, degrading and humiliating content accessible to minors in France.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The UK has its own age verification law, with platforms required to have “robust” age checks by July<\/a>, according to media regulator Ofcom.<\/p>\n These may include facial detection software which estimates a user’s age. <\/p>\n In April – in response to messaging platform Discord testing face scanning software<\/a> – experts predicted it would be “the start of a bigger shift” in age checks in the UK, in which facial recognition tech played a bigger role.<\/p>\n BBC News has asked Aylo whether it will block its sites in the UK too when the laws come in. <\/p>\n In May, Ofcom announced it was investigating two pornography websites<\/a> which had failed to detail how they were preventing children from accessing their platforms.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n