As of February 2, PornHub will start restricting access to UK users.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.privacyguides.org/news/2026/01/29/pornhub-withdraws-from-uk-over-online-safety-act
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.privacyguides.org/news/2026/01/29/pornhub-withdraws-from-uk-over-online-safety-act
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Will it work? 4chan also IP-banned UK users, yet they still got fined by Ofcom
Probably not to stop the fines if the UK decides to fine them. Like 4chan, Iām not sure what jurisdiction the UK actually has over PornHub though.
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The British Commonwealth? PH is Canada based. Thatās the only connection I can think of.
I want to say that I agree with this one in the name of the mental health of porn addicts and teens, but still fucked up shit. 
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Aylo has been advocating for device-based verification rather than requiring services to handle user data, arguing that it is more effective and safer
Thoughts on this? Id detest government-mandated age verification software running on my personal device, but thereās a case to be made that itās more secure than trusting some remote megacorpo database to protect PII until the sun explodes
It goes without saying, no government-mandated age verification is the preferred solution
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Iād rather do it once than on every service I use. Iām not sure how that works though I havenāt seen any age verification using something like that in the wild yet.
Check this out - Play seems to be rolling out an age prediction API based on your local device content. Just stumbled across this earlier on another forum
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Are they also going to block the US states that require ID?
Iād rather we return to parents parenting their kids instead of the government.
Parental controls have existed even in the 90s. This is ridiculous and itās saddening to see even people on this forum appeasing this authoritarian overstep.
Its also almost like parents donāt need to be buying their kids a bazillion internet devices. I have yet to hear a valid reason why kids canāt get by with a dumbphone and a locked down desktop for schoolwork with parental controls for truly concerned parents.
If I had a kid, Iād give them a blank desktop, a library card, and tell them to install Arch or Gentoo. If they can manage to get it working, they can watch as much internet porn as they want. After that, make it more interesting by threatening to hack their computer, online accounts, etc and that Iāll show everyone the stuff I find. Then watch my porn obsessed depraved kid become a privacy and security superstar. Thatās called parenting!
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Being part of the Commonwealth is just a political thing. The UK doesnāt control or govern Canada anymore.
Yes, I am aware. I was joking.
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They already do.
Seems like a privacy law could get it done. Post office can sell a ādigital tokenā to an adult, proving age. Adult shows website token.
Website doesnāt know adult name.
Post office knows adult name and token. Maybe a law states post office can only keep name and that a token was sold, canāt by law keep token itself.
A law saying a warrant is needed for post office to release name?
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Thatās not a sufficient solution, since the token could still be used to track activity, even if the person behind it initially is not known. You would need a solution which proofs your age, without allowing to track you. Basically unlinkabilty.
i hate when they pull out, just ruins it for me
How about not giving the government an immutable record of our browsing history.
There is no way to do age verification and maintain anonymity from everyone including governments.
Thatās just the facts. What we need are parents to actually parent their children instead of trying to get a nanny state to do it for them at the expense of everyone elseās rights.
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Donāt get me wrong i agree with you
but this isnāt a solution lol. This statement just tells people what needs to be done. It doesnt say anything about how to get there. Itās very nice and easy to tell off parents that they need to be better. But so what? What if they donāt do better? Thatās how you get into situations like this in the first place where parents let the internet raise their children. They end up in wild places where we dont want them.
We want parents to have the right to raise their children however they want. We donāt want a ānanny stateā, as youāve dubbed, controlling our devices and deciding how to parent our children.
But at the same time we also want children a guaranteed standardized threshold for a good life. Examples of this includes education, preventing children from buying alcohol or cigarettes, preventing them from viewing harmful content like porn or violent movies, protection from abuse, free food for when their parents donāt make enough money, so on and so forth.
Of course parents need to do better, but the issue is what happens when they dont. Where is the safety net so that we dont have a pandemic of children raised on the internet? Thatās why we have laws about child abuse and all that jazz mentioned above. Itās a safety net. This is a difficult conversation because safety nets on the internet is so foreign and new to us. I do not have the answer to this social issue. But I just wanted to say that itās not as simple as āparents need to do better,ā
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I donāt think there is any crisis here that needs to be addressed. There has been porn on the internet since there was an internet. Only in the last few years has there suddenly been a clamor to put draconian spyware on every device āto save the childrenā.
If you want real practical steps for social media; the best thing you can do is ban smartphones in schools or anywhere children congregate. If you break the screen addiction, cold turkey, with brute force youāll solve 80% of whatever problem actually exists. No spyware needed.
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Yea this is a more reasonable response. I do beg to differ that porn isnāt an issue. I agree that itās not a crisis or anything like that, but itās also something that I think we will inevitable have to look at, whether now or in the future. I have some things to say on the cold turkey thing for social media, but itās not gonna amount to much here so Iāll just keep it to myself.
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