Will age verification laws really stop young people watching adult content online?
Age verification laws are here, but they bring considerable risks for questionable reward.
History is littered with well-meaning undertakings which ended up backfiring, failing to achieve their original objectives or creating more problems than they solved.
On paper, the forthcoming introduction of age verification checks on websites hosting adult content seem entirely fair and reasonable.
No parent would want their child being exposed to some of the content which is currently one click of an “I am over 18” button away.
Yet the UK Government’s attempts at increasing online safety through age verification laws already look doomed. They could even make online safety a great deal worse.
Here’s what you need to know.
Age shall not weary them
The Online Safety Act has been trundling through Parliament for several years now.
It will require website owners to set appropriate age restrictions with checks that are “technically accurate, robust, reliable and fair.”
Adults wishing to access some of the world’s most popular sites and apps will soon have to upload photo ID, credit card information or other age-identifying data.
This will be stored by the adult website owners indefinitely, ostensibly for age confirmation purposes but potentially also as part of a wider cache of customer data.
The OSA is intended to stop the estimated eight per cent of 8-14 year olds who view online pornography in any given 28-day period.
While the British tend to be coy about our knowledge of this industry, we all know much of its output is graphic. The idea of primary school children seeing such material is horrifying.
A less than cunning plan
Unfortunately, the Online Safety Act’s focus on age verification laws is deeply flawed and could easily (if unwittingly) generate more harm than it averts.
Firstly, few consumers will be willing to supply photo ID to an overseas pornographic website, after the tsunami of data thefts in recent years.
Even supposedly trustworthy industry leaders like Ticketmaster, M&S and Apple have suffered huge data breaches and the loss of sensitive customer data.
The consequences of adult sites having data stolen tend to be even worse. The Ashley Madison hack a decade ago led to suicides, divorces and countless ruined lives.
Secondly, the OSA only applies to websites with average monthly active UK users exceeding three million. Some criteria relate only to sites receiving 34 million monthly UK visitors.
These tend to be the well-moderated mainstream platforms. Extreme or niche sites will inevitably have lower user numbers, exempting them from age checks.
No teenager will encounter an age verification block on Website A and simply give up. They’ll move onto Website B, with lower monthly user numbers and (quite possibly) more graphic content.
Alternatively, resourceful youngsters will spend two minutes installing a free VPN tool on their smartphone, laptop or tablet, cloaking their geolocation to dodge UK restrictions.
They might even install the Tor browser and start exploring the Dark Web, where truly dreadful content hides in plain sight.
If mainstream adult content is firewalled, VPNs and Tor provide obvious workarounds for tech-savvy kids, beyond the reach of any domestic legislation and harbouring far greater horrors.
What should I do?
Given the endemic data thefts afflicting online service providers, we can’t recommend anyone uploads personally identifiable information to the owners of adult websites.
By their own calculations, these sites will lose 90 per cent of their existing audience, and the costs of age verification may lead them to block UK IP addresses altogether.
According to research by online data tracker Semrush, Pornhub received almost 4.5 billion global visits in May 2025 alone, so it could easily survive without British traffic.
Its place will be taken by the millions of other pornographic websites whose monthly visitor traffic is below three million, or by people using VPNs, or people installing Tor.
For parents, that necessitates rigorous and ongoing checks of any devices used by children and teenagers to ensure these gateways to extreme content aren’t enabled.
It requires periodic web history searches and frank, honest conversations about safe and unsafe online content – however uncomfortable this may be.
Finally, speak to your ISP about parental control settings and content filters to see what they can do to block traffic at source.
