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Pornhub has been playing a game of chicken with a bunch of state legislatures for a while now.
That’s right, Texans are now officially barred from the sacred halls of Pornhub, unless they’re crafty enough with a VPN to sneak past the digital bouncers.
In a twist that surprises exactly no one, Pornhub isn’t thrilled about asking its patrons to flash their digital IDs at the door.
Pornhub is not exactly a startup, so why are we featuring this front and center in the Startups Weekly newsletter?
Texas residents can no longer access Pornhub — without a VPN.
As of Thursday, when people in Texas try to access any of the porn sites owned by Aylo, formerly MindGeek, they’ll instead see a long message in opposition to age verification laws.
Laws requiring age verification on adult entertainment sites have already gone into effect in states including Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, Utah, Montana and North Carolina.
“Since age verification software requires users to hand over extremely sensitive information, it opens the door for the risk of data breaches,” Pornhub wrote on its blog.
At first, Pornhub complied with age verification via the state-run LA Wallet app, which connects to a Louisiana resident’s ID.
Pornhub’s parent company Aylo Holdings will pay $1.8 million to the U.S. government to resolve a charge of profiting off of sex trafficking.
In the worst cases, this can mean that victims of sex trafficking are portrayed in these adult videos against their will, or even without their knowledge.
By 2019, a federal grand jury in the Southern District of California indicted GDP for sex trafficking, among other charges.
But it wasn’t until several months after GDP was found guilty of sex trafficking that the network’s videos were removed from Pornhub and other Aylo sites.
Among other safety measures, the act requires platforms to comply with certain child protection provisions.
