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Comment by mediocrejoker | Hacker News Reader

>So wait, as a UK citizen I can use Pornhub's VPN to circumvent the UK Government's "Porn Filter", a system that's run by..... Pornhub.

I had no idea that PornHub is in charge of filtering adult content for the UK government. Got any more info about this relationship?

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A scheme, where other porn companies can pay them - and if they can't afford it, go out of business.

I don't really understand how a country can ask a website to comply with its laws if the content is not hosted in that country. I guess it could be asked to comply under threat of being blocked in response to non-compliance.

It's such a weird area.

If you change ‘website’ to ‘business’ and ‘hosted’ to ‘headquartered’ it’s straightforward and just as accurate.

You could also argue it's like a shoe company based in the US, where UK people are ordering from them and asking them to ship it to the UK, while UK government threats to set up import restrictions.

GDPR cough

GDPR is not issued by a country though, but a commission.

Duckduckgo 'Mindgeek age verification UK'

Mindgeek has an age verification product to comply with the UK law but by no means is in charge of age verification in the UK, there are several competitors with their own age verification products.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/porn-age-verificati...

> AgeID, has been developed by MindGeek, a company that also owns several pornographic websites including Pornhub, RedTube and YouPorn.

> AgeID currently uses official documents such as driver's licences and passports to verify a person's age - but submitting a mobile number tied to a contract phone could be another option.

> The tool is due to be implemented from April 2018 across all adult sites within the UK in accordance with The Digital Economy Act 2017 that was laid out by the government.

It will be regulated by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC).

The third point is incorrect. It will be implemented on Mindgeek sites and any other sites that wish to use it instead of the competing age verification products.

Such site should be illegal. I find it extraordinary that government lets private company record such sensitive information.

Now tell me how you feel about US credit rating agencies, which were started by former FBI agents after the FBI was restricted from keeping dossiers without cause.

It would be so much less overhead to require adult sites and user content driven sites to simply add the RTA adult header and put the responsibility on parents to use parental control software.

It looks like this:

    rating RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA