Pornhub, the video-sharing pornographic website, says it will block Floridians from accessing the site beginning Jan. 1, in response to an age verification law set to go into effect that very day.
HB 3, an act relating to online protections for minors, will require websites with adult content to verify all visitors are 18 years or older.
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WATCH HEREFree Speech Coalition, a group that advocates for the adult entertainment industry, is the lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit that aims to stop the law from taking effect over privacy and free speech concerns.
NBC affiliate WFLA spoke to Mike Stabile, public policy director with Free Speech Coalition. He said he was concerned about how that age verification will be done.
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“When you’re uploading an ID or when you’re doing this type of verification, nothing is ever secure,” Stabile said. “You are asking people who are legal adults to risk their privacy and risk possible surveillance to access the internet."
Meanwhile advocates for the law that passed with overwhelming bipartisan support argue that personal information will be protected.
“The Florida law includes, explicitly, a requirement for anonymous age verification done by a third-party. Our entire industry was created to prove your age online and not have to disclose your identity,” Ian Corby, the director of global group Age Verification Providers Association, told WFLA.
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Pornhub has already blocked access in 12 other states, including Texas, Virginia and several southern states.
In a statement, Pornhub's parent company Aylo said:
“First, to be clear, Aylo has publicly supported age verification of users for years, but we believe that any law to this effect must preserve user safety and privacy, and must effectively protect children from accessing content intended for adults.
Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide, including Florida, have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy. Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws.
This is not speculation. We have seen how this scenario plays out in the United States. In Louisiana last year, Pornhub was one of the few sites to comply with the new law. Since then, our traffic in Louisiana dropped approximately 80%. These people did not stop looking for porn. 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. In practice, the laws have just made the internet more dangerous for adults and children.
The best solution to make the internet safer, preserve user privacy, and prevent children from accessing adult content is performing age verification at the source: on the device. The technology to accomplish this exists today. What is required is the political and social will to make it happen. We are eager to be part of this solution and are happy to collaborate with government, civil society and tech partners to arrive at an effective device-based age verification solution.
In addition, many devices already offer free and easy-to-use parental control features that can prevent children from accessing adult content without risking the disclosure of sensitive user data.”
