404 Media

2026-05-05 14:11:49

UK iPhone and iPad Users Can Watch Porn Again

Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub and other major porn sites, announced today that in the UK, iPhone and iPad users will be able to access its sites again, ending an over three month ban that Aylo initially enacted because of the region’s age verification law.

As of Tuesday, following the iOS 26.4 rollout in the UK, users on the new operating system can visit Pornhub and Aylo’s other sites from their iPhones.

On April 29, Apple announced that it would start requiring mobile users to confirm ages on their devices to check if they’re 18 or older: “You can confirm your age with a credit card that belongs to you, or by scanning your passport, driving licence, or one of the following PASS-accredited Proof of Age cards: CitizenCard, My ID Card, TOTUM ID card or Young Scot National Entitlement Card. Debit cards and gift cards aren't supported,” according to Apple. Web content filters and communication safety tools are turned on automatically for children, as well as adults who haven’t confirmed their age, Apple wrote.

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In January, Aylo announced that starting February 2 it would restrict people visiting the site from the UK. Leadership at Aylo and Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), which acquired Aylo in 2023, said at the time that the UK’s Online Safety Act was a failure. Before January, UK-based visitors to Aylo sites—which include RedTube, YouPorn, Brazzers, and many more—had to verify their ages by entering a credit card or uploading a government ID or other identification to an age estimation system called All Pass Trust. After February, anyone in the UK not already verified was locked out of those sites.

Age Verification Laws Drag Us Back to the Dark Ages of the Internet
Invasive and ineffective age verification laws that require users show government-issued ID, like a driver’s license or passport, are passing like wildfire across the U.S.
404 MediaEmanuel Maiberg

Experts say site-based age verification is both ineffective at stopping minors from viewing harmful content as it drives them from lawful sites to harmful, unregulated ones, and also chills adults’ abilities to work online as adult performers and consume legal adult entertainment online. The adult industry has been lobbying for device-based verification and parental controls, which often already exists as an optional feature on most devices children might have access to, as an alternative. Device-level age verification remains controversial among free speech and internet access groups.

In the UK, the Online Safety Act, which went into effect in 2025, requires sites to implement age verification or face millions of dollars in fines and jail—or up to 10 percent of global revenues, whichever is higher. In the US, more than half of states have strict age verification laws in place, and in many of those states, Aylo blocks access and directs users to contact their representatives.

This is the first time Aylo has come back to a market after restricting access to its sites in response to age verification laws.

“As of about 30 minutes ago, we're now live again in the UK, accessible to Apple users who have updated to the most recent version of the iOS,” Alex Kekesi, VP Brand and Community at Aylo, said in a 9:30 a.m. EST call on Tuesday.

Visitors to the sites who are using a Windows PC, Android device, or other non-iPhone or other mobile Apple devices such as iPads that use iOS in the UK will still not have access.

“We have been reaching out to the operating system providers to emphasize the need for a highly effective device based solution, that includes Google, that includes Microsoft and Apple,” Solomon Friedman, partner and vice president of compliance at ECP, said on the call. “And on behalf of ownership, we're obviously delighted to see that Apple has instituted UK wide, effective device based age assurance.”

In November 2025, Pornhub’s parent company Aylo sent letters to Apple, Google, and Microsoft urging them to support device-based age verification in their app stores and operating systems.

Pornhub Is Urging Tech Giants to Enact Device-Based Age Verification

The company sent letters to Apple, Google, and Microsoft pushing for an alternative way to keep minors from viewing porn, as US and UK laws have caused its traffic to plummet.

^{Jason Parham (WIRED)}

404 Media

2026-04-06 15:30:47

Wisconsinites Can Keep Watching Porn After Governor Vetoes Age Verification Bill

Across most of the U.S., if you want to watch porn online, you have to hand over a government ID or submit to a biometric scan to determine you’re over 18 years of age. But people in Wisconsin can keep freely accessing porn sites—and any other website that hosts more than one third adult content—after Governor Tony Evers vetoed the state’s age verification bill on Friday.

A copycat of the dozens of bills that have passed in the U.S. since 2022, Wisconsin’s Assembly Bill 105 would have forced sites with more than one third “material harmful to minors,” defined as “depictions of actual or simulated sexual acts or body parts including pubic areas, genitals, buttocks, and female nipples,” to verify visitors’ ages by “using any commercially reasonable method that uses public or private transactional data gathered about the individual.” This means uploading an ID, showing their face for a biometric scan, uploading their credit card information, or combinations of these.

“I am vetoing this bill in its entirety because I object to this bill's intrusion into the personal privacy of Wisconsin residents,” Evers wrote in a letter to the members of the assembly, dated April 3. “While I agree that we should protect children from harmful material, this bill imposes an intrusive burden on adults who are trying to access constitutionally protected materials.”

Evers wrote that the bill doesn’t prevent platforms from giving collected personal data to third parties, such as the government or data brokers. “This is a violation of personal privacy,” he wrote.

“Additionally, I am concerned about data security and the potential for misuse of personally identifiable information. Identifiable information could be intercepted by or transmitted to a third party and used as the basis for blackmail or identity theft. Further, although the bill includes penalties for a business entity who violates the prohibition on retention of personal information, those penalties cannot undo the harm that may occur to an individual who is the victim of actions like blackmail or identity theft as a result of a bad actor obtaining their identity.”

Last year, after the UK’s Online Safety Act started requiring websites and platforms to verify users’ ages, Discord users’ age verification data—including selfies and identity documents—was exposed in a security breach. The hack was just one instance where users’ personal data has been required by a platform and then exposed to the whole internet: also last year, similar data was exposed by the Tea app, which made users provide selfies and identity documents to prove they’re women.

An earlier version of the bill attempted to ban Wisconsinites from accessing sites using virtual private networks (VPNs); lawmakers are increasingly pushing to restrict VPNs, but so far have faced pushback from citizens and civil liberties groups. Wisconsin state Sen. Van Wanggaard moved to delete that provision in the legislation, and the state assembly agreed to remove the VPN ban in February.

The adult advocacy group Free Speech Coalition wrote following the veto that Director of Public Policy Mike Stabile flew to Madison “to meet with legislators to discuss the legal and technological issues with the bill, including a ban on VPN traffic, and to advocate for device-based verification solutions.”

“Put simply, AB-105 raises significant concerns around privacy, surveillance, and the First Amendment,” the ACLU of Wisconsin wrote in testimony submitted in March. “While the ACLU of Wisconsin is sympathetic to the overarching goal of this legislation, we do not believe an appropriate trade-off is compromising the civil liberties of all Wisconsinites.”

Wisconsin is now one of only a handful of states left that allows access to porn without requiring users jump through invasive age verification hoops. “We can and should work to prevent minors from accessing adult content, but there are better solutions than the one offered by this bill,” Evers wrote in his veto letter. “For example, we can work with tech companies to implement device-based age verification that takes place on a user's phone or computer, which can be a more secure and effective method. Other states have been moving toward device-based solutions, and major tech companies are adopting these options as well.”

Wisconsin Governor Vetoes Age-Verification Bill — Free Speech Coalition

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers has vetoed AB 105 , the state age-verification bill that passed the Wisconsin legislature in early March, despite strong opposition from Free Speech Coalition and other civil liberties groups.

^{Free Speech Coalition}

404 Media

2025-03-25 14:27:34

Texans Might Soon Have to Show Photo ID to Buy a Dildo Online

A newly introduced bill in Texas would require online sellers to show a photo ID before buying a dildo.

SB 3003, introduced by Senator Angela Paxton (wife of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton), would criminally charge online retailers for selling “an obscene device” without verifying the buyers’ age. Sellers would have to require customers to submit their government-issued photographic identification, or use “third-party age verification services that use public records or other reliable sources to verify the purchaser's identity and age,” the bill says. Owning a credit card, which already requires the holder to be over 18 years of age, would not be enough.

Like the regressive and ineffective adult site age verification laws passing all across the country in the last few years, this law would drag Texans back to a not-so-distant time when sex toy sellers had to pretend vibrators were for “massage.”

Hallie Lieberman, journalist and author of Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy, sold sex toys in Texas in the early 2000s under the state’s “six dildo” law, which criminalizes the possession of six or more “obscene devices,” defined as "a device including a dildo or artificial vagina, designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs." That law is still on the books but is now considered unenforceable and unconstitutional. Lieberman told me sellers got around the law by claiming the toys were for “medical purposes.” This bill could send retailers back to that time.

“I can see something like that happening again, with people saying on their sex toy store websites that vibrators are for back massage and butt plugs are for rectal strengthening,” Lieberman said. “It's similar to how sex toys were marketed in the early 20th century to get around obscenity laws and the Comstock Act (which unfortunately still exists and may be used to prevent access to contraceptives and sex toys nationwide.) Butt plugs were sold as cures for asthma and vibrators for sciatica. We are literally going back in time with this law.”

Age Verification Laws Drag Us Back to the Dark Ages of the Internet
Invasive and ineffective age verification laws that require users show government-issued ID, like a driver’s license or passport, are passing like wildfire across the U.S.
404 MediaEmanuel Maiberg

Lieberman told me she had to call the clitoris “the man in the boat” at the time to avoid breaking the law. “When we can't speak openly about our bodies and sexual pleasure, when we're forced to use euphemisms, we not only are under informed about our bodies, but we also feel shame in seeking out pleasure,” she said.

Like age verification laws for websites, the bill would make buying sex toys online harder for everyone, not just minors, and would send consumers to less-safe retailers with lower-quality, possibly dangerous toys. And also like those laws, people who do upload their government ID or undergo other age verification measures could risk having their purchases exposed to a hostile government.

“The government should not have a record of what sex toys we buy. This isn't just a frivolous concern,” Lieberman said. “In a nation where the president has declared that there are only two genders and that transgender people don't exist, where trans people are erased from government websites and kicked out of the military, it would be dangerous for the government to have a record that you purchased sex toys designed for trans people. Imagine you're a school teacher at a public school in Texas and there's a record you purchased a sex toy designed for queer people in a state where a parental bill of rights bill was just passed prohibiting discussion of sexual orientation in schools.”

"We are literally going back in time with this law."

Texas legislators have been trying to limit access to sex toys for their constituents for years. In late 2024, Hillary Hickland, a freshman member of Texas’ Republican House, introduced a bill that would ban retailers in the state from selling sex toys unless they file paperwork to become sexually oriented businesses—effectively forcing stores like Walmart, CVS and Target, which sell vibrators and other sex toys, to take those products off their shelves and forcing brick-and-mortar boutiques to verify the ages of all customers. The bill was referred to Texas’ Trade, Workforce & Economic Development committee earlier this month.

Paxton’s bill would charge online retailers with a Class A Misdemeanor if they don’t verify ages, and would open them up to fines up to $5,000 for each violation.

Paxton did not respond to a request for comment.

Age Verification Laws Drag Us Back to the Dark Ages of the Internet

Invasive and ineffective age verification laws that require users show government-issued ID, like a driver's license or passport, are passing like wildfire across the U.S.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}