Pornhub will stop offering full access to new users in the UK on February 2, its parent company Aylo said Tuesday, citing the nation’s and its age-verification requirements. The company said users who already verified their ages before the cutoff will still be able to access the adult site through existing accounts.
The move follows the Online Safety Act’s , which and require adult sites to use “highly effective” methods of . Aylo the system is backfiring and shifting both adults and minors to noncompliant porn sites that don’t verify age or moderate content according to . Aylo’s lawyers argued that only device-based age verification methods sufficiently protect user data.
Alexzandra Kekesi, VP of Brand and Community at Aylo, said “anyone who has not gone through that process prior to February 2 will no longer be able to access [the sites] and they’re going to be met with a wall,” according to . The adult site was in various US states after the passage of age-verification laws that Pornhub claimed put users’ privacy at risk. “These people did not stop looking for porn,” Aylo said at the time. “They just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content.”
Users who wish to get around these sorts of bans typically use to mask the origin of their internet traffic, though the UK is considering a ban on VPNs for children. The nation has also been a social media ban for users under 16 years of age, similar to the one enacted in .