French visitors to the adult sites Pornhub, Youporn and RedTube will on Wednesday be greeted with a message denouncing the country’s age verification requirements, reports The Guardian.
Parent company Aylo, in reaction to a French law requiring adult sites to take extra steps to verify that their users are 18 or older, will stop operating in France, a spokesperson said.
“I can confirm that Aylo has made the difficult decision to suspend access to its user-uploaded platforms (Pornhub, YouPorn, RedTube) in France. We will be using our platforms to directly address the French public tomorrow,” a spokesperson for Pornhub said on Tuesday.
By showing the message rather than Pornhub’s vast library of adult content, Aylo “is communicating directly with the French people to tell them how dangerous, how potentially privacy-infringing, and how ineffective the French law is”, Solomon Friedman of Aylo’s owner, Ethical Capital Partners, told reporters in a video call on Tuesday.
France has this year gradually introduced requirements for all adult websites to have users confirm their age with details like a credit card or ID document.
In a bid to preserve privacy, operators must offer a third-party “double-blind” option that would keep the platforms themselves from seeing users’ identifying information.
But Aylo says this is an ineffective mechanism that puts people’s data at risk from bad actors, hacks or leaks.
They say countries should target developers of operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows, Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android, rather than porn platforms.
Read more of this report from The Guardian.