Citizens of the Sunshine State will no longer be able to peruse popular adult entertainment platform Pornhub starting next year.
The XXX website’s parent company, Aylo, announced that people residing in Florida will be blocked from the site once a new state law that requires age verification to visit explicit web content and other materials deemed “harmful to minors” goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2025.
Aylo explained its concerns while addressing the new policy in an email to Florida Politicspublished on Wednesday.
“Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide, including Florida, have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard and dangerous,” the statement read.
“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,” it continued.
“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 statement added.
Aylo maintained that the onus of age verification should be on smartphone manufacturers and not adult websites.
“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 company wrote.
Aylo concluded its statement by saying it would be “happy to collaborate with government, civil society and tech partners” to reach a solution.
Florida will be one of many states where potential Pornhub visitors are delivered to an error page that reads, “403 — This state is not whitelisted,” according to CBS News.
