Aylo has geared up its campaign for age verification for online porn access to be done through devices rather than sites and platforms, by writing to Google, Apple and Microsoft.
Last week, the company behind porn sites including Pornhub, Redtube and YouPorn urged the three tech giants to support device-based age verification in their app stores and operating systems, Wired reported.
Aylo publicly argues that age verification for porn access shouldn’t be just the responsibility of individual porn sites and platforms, and that laws should push towards age verification on devices instead.
Many US states have introduced tougher age verification for porn laws in recent years, and the debate was super-charged last summer when the UK introduced tougher new age verification laws too.
Pornhub said that UK traffic for the site dropped by 77 percent following the UKlaw implementation. Aylo says that site-level age verification isn’t working, because porn users are flocking to less well-regulated and non-compliant porn sites.
In the letter to the tech giants revealed by Wired, Anthony Penhale, Aylo’s chief legal officer, wrote that his company “found site-based age assurance approaches to be fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.”
He said that these methods of age verification “failed to achieve their primary objective: protecting minors from accessing age-inappropriate material online”.
Aylo’s stance is that devices can be made ‘adult’ or ‘kid’-friendly, creating a more unified age verification system for adults-only content.
“Every phone, tablet, or computer should start as a kid-safe device”
-Alex Kekesi, Pornhub
Alex Kekesi, Pornhub’s vice president of brand and community at Pornhub, said: “Every phone, tablet, or computer should start as a kid-safe device. Only verified adults should unlock access to things like dating apps, gambling, or adult content.”
Apple and Microsoft refused to give Wired a comment on the letter. A Google spokesperson said the company was “committed to protecting kids online”.
The Google spokesperson added: “We don’t allow adult entertainment apps on Google Play and would emphasize that certain high-risk services like Aylo will always need to invest in specific tools to meet their own legal and responsibility obligations.”
Since the UK’s age verification for online porn laws toughened in July, the country’s communications regulatory body has launched multiple investigations into sites and apps it says have been non-compliant. Ofcom has also now issued the first fines to non-compliant sites and services.
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