Pornhub wants Apple, Google to fix its traffic drop ‘problem’, here’s how

Pornhub is trying to hand off a big problem, and it wants Apple, Google, and Microsoft to take over. According to a report from Wired, the company recently sent letters to the three tech giants asking them to handle age verification at the device level. In short, Pornhub wants your phone, laptop, or tablet to confirm your age before you ever reach an adult website.

The request comes at a time when age verification laws in the United Kingdom and several US states are hitting the adult industry hard. These laws require porn sites to verify the age of every user who tries to view their content. The result has been a massive drop in traffic for Pornhub. The company says its UK traffic has fallen by 77 percent since the rules took effect, and in states like Louisiana, traffic is down by as much as 80 percent.

In letters sent to the tech companies, Anthony Penhale, chief legal officer for Aylo, the parent company behind Pornhub, Brazzers, Redtube, and YouPorn, said the company supports keeping minors off adult sites. But he also argued that the current system simply does not work. According to him, site-based age checks are “flawed and counterproductive,” and the process of verifying each user is expensive, complicated, and unreliable.

Pornhub’s proposed solution shifts the responsibility to device makers. The company wants Apple, Google, and Microsoft to store a user’s age on their device and then share that information with websites through an API. If that happens, sites like Pornhub would no longer have to manage age checks themselves and would avoid the risk that comes with handling sensitive personal data.