Pinterest, Pornhub, Others Also Pushed for App Store Age Verification

The push for app store age verification isn’t exclusive to Meta. Others like Pinterest and Pornhub are also pushing the same thing.

In a debate that was once centred around the idea that porn sites should be employing age verification technology, some companies are pushing for a “surveil and censor ’em all!” approach. This by pushing for the implementation of age verification on the app stores so that everyone is subject to government censorship and surveillance. All of this under the comically fake “protect the children” banner.

Now, obviously, this has nothing to do with protecting the children. After all, it has long been established that age verification is a broken technology that can easily be circumvented or hacked. What’s more, the push for age verification has led to basically robbing younger users the ability to access the communities they have long enjoyed through social media websites. The damage this will cause to younger users is undeniable, but it should make this debate crystal clear: this has nothing to do with protecting children in any way shape or form.

What this is is a loosely disguised attempt to insert a whole new layer of surveillance onto users. Government can easily use this technology to better monitor the activity of users and have greater power to crack down on certain communities that some right wingers deem “immoral”. A fantastic example is the LGBTQ+ community.

So, it is of little surprise that censorship creep has been a constant problem with these pushes. First, this was supposed to be about age verification specifically for websites that specialize in adult content. Then, some legislative pushes (such as the UK’s Online Safety Act) threw in the term “harmful content” into the mix so as to have the ability to start slapping the technology on a much broader range of websites. There’s, of course, the aforementioned social media ban on younger users. In fact, things have gotten so bad, there are talks of expanding age verification to include VPN services on top of it all.

Over top of this is the push to directly implement age verification on app stores as well. The idea behind this is, of course, to try and implement age verification on a major chunk of the user base. That is, anyone who uses a cell phone must submit their government ID or biometric information before even using the internet at all. It’s a horrifying escalation that is happening in real time. Such pushes have been happening at least as far back as 2024, but in recent months, there have been a much stronger push to make this government surveillance for all approach a reality.

The push is, of course, heavily involving the large platforms who seek to corrupt the age verification debate further. This by pretending to support the idea of age verification, but placing the onus on cell phone makers. This so that they don’t have the burden of implementing a non-existent technology and whatever liabilities will invariably crop up will no longer be their problem. To be clear, this is about the only “problem” this proposal “solves”. The technology is still broken and prone to hacking. If anything, you are consolidating all that personal information into one giant repository for criminals to swipe. One successful compromise and you have pretty much everyone’s personal information – or, at least everyone who decided to “get it over with” or feel that they have nothing to hide (the latter being a pretty typical security mistake, really).

Last week, Meta renewed their calls to implement age verification at the app store level. The company, rightfully, got a lot of flack for their push especially given their history of selling out the internet to protect their bottom line. The thing is, they aren’t the only ones doing this. Pinterest is also pushing for this as they support an app store age verification bill. From The Hill:

Pinterest announced Monday it is backing the App Store Accountability Act, a bill that would require app stores to verify user ages.

The legislation, put forward by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. John James (R-Mich.), is among a slate of kids’ online safety-related bills set to be considered by the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday.

“Pinterest is proud to endorse the App Store Accountability Act,” Pinterest CEO Bill Ready said in a statement. “Parents need a single, privacy-preserving solution to verify their child’s age and know they’re safe online.”

“Making the app store a one-stop shop for age verification ensures children are protected from the moment they start using a device,” he continued. “We urge Congress to pass this important law.”

The report notes that others, like X/Twitter, is supporting this legislative effort. In a separate report on Wired, the efforts to lock down app stores with these surveillance measures is also backed by the likes of Apple, Pornhub, Microsoft, and the “just be evil” company, Google. From Wired:

In letters sent to Apple, Google, and Microsoft this week, Pornhub’s parent company urged the tech giants to support device-based age verification in their app stores and across their operating systems, WIRED has learned.

“Based on our real-world experience with existing age assurance laws, we strongly support the initiative to protect minors online,” reads the letter sent by Anthony Penhale, chief legal officer for Aylo, which owns Pornhub, Brazzers, Redtube, and YouPorn. “However, we have found site-based age assurance approaches to be fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.”

The letter adds that site-based age verification methods have “failed to achieve their primary objective: protecting minors from accessing age-inappropriate material online.” Aylo says device-based authentication is a better solution for this issue because once a viewer’s age is determined via phone or tablet, their age signal can be shared over its application programming interface (API) with adult sites.

Technically, the companies aren’t wrong when they say that website based age verification is a failed concept. The problem is that they want to replace that failed concept with the other failed concept of app store age verification. Indeed, such a thing is also easily circumvented. A great example is that users will simply flock to websites that don’t ask for such information. As a result, having an app store that can confirm your age won’t really make much of a difference. Unless all devices are mandated to have age verification before even unlocking, then this problem is going to persist. Even if you do lock down devices in such a way, this is only going to result in an explosion of demand to have the devices jailbroken to evade such technology in the first place.

Either way, the system is invariably going to collapse one way or another. People will eventually realize that app store level age verification is no better than website based age verification. In fact, I would argue that it is worse given that you are consolidating all that personal information into one giant silo for hackers to steal or break into afterwards. It’s just a bad idea all around.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.