Tens of millions of Americans are locked out of Pornhub amid a fight over privacy laws.
Pornhub’s parent company Aylo has blocked people in 17 states from visiting the adult site due to new age verification laws.
The 17 states, all located in the South or Midwest, recently began requiring users to provide state-approved identification, such as a passport or driver’s license, to prove they are over 18 to access the content.
States first began introducing the legislation in 2023 due to growing political concerns about minors viewing inappropriate material online.
But Pornhub and other critics argue that the age verification requirement violates user privacy and puts their personal data at risk.
The states where Pornhub is blocked are: Montana, Idaho, Utah, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Indiana, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Missouri, Alabama, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Florida.
“Aylo has publicly supported user age verification for years,” a company spokesperson said.
‘But we believe that any law in this regard must preserve user security and privacy, and must effectively protect children from accessing content intended for adults.
Tens of millions of Americans unable to access Pornhub amid fight over privacy laws
‘Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions around the world, including Florida, have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, messy, and dangerous.
“Any regulation that requires hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety at risk.”
When users in any of the blocked states try to access Pornhub or similar sites, they see a message from adult performer Cherie Deville stating that access is blocked for their own safety.
But it seems that residents of locked down states are already looking for a loophole, namely through the use of VPNs.
Pornhub is now inaccessible in 17 US states, where 18+ age verification laws have led the site’s parent company, Aylo, to completely block access to its sites.
A VPN, or virtual private network, is an online service that encrypts your data and masks your IP address to create a more secure connection between your device and the Internet.
VPNs allow users to mask their real locations and pretend to be somewhere they are not by routing their web traffic through a server in that alternate location.
A VPN user in Florida can trick a website into thinking they are in New York or anywhere else in the world. Therefore, this is the most effective solution for people who live in states where Pornhub is banned.
A report from VPNMentor’s cybersecurity and research lab found that VPN usage in Florida increased by as much as 1,150 percent just hours after the state’s age verification law went into effect on January 1.
Similar, although smaller, spikes have occurred in other affected states, including a 967 percent increase in Utah and a 234 percent increase in Texas in 2023.
But there are some data and device security risks associated with using VPN.
While these networks are generally secure, you can’t trust all of them. Data sent through a third-party server is always at risk of being compromised and the VPN software itself may contain malware or viruses, according to the IT company. devoted team.
More states may see age restriction legislation on adult entertainment go into effect after President-elect Donald Trump takes office later this month.
Project 2025, produced by the far-right Heritage Foundation think tank, details plans to criminalize and ban pornography under the Trump administration.
The document argues that pornography has no First Amendment rights protections, going so far as to say that producers and distributors of pornography should be jailed and the technology companies that spread it should be shut down.
It remains to be seen whether the Trump administration will actually seek to achieve this and succeed.
DailyMail.com has contacted Pornhub and Aylo for comment.