We have a few different things going on here. First, age verification requires sharing a lot of PII with some of the dodgier companies on the web. Pornhub’s bus

We have a few different things going on here. First, age verification requires sharing a lot of PII with some of the dodgier companies on the web. Pornhub’s business past is shady…and they may be the least shady of the lot. Second, things like gay rights aren’t a solved problem. The most awful fact in all of this is that people can be killed for watching gay porn in many countries. If a country changes its policy dramatically, porn sites will have a database of people who have watched gay porn in their country. When someone physically checks my ID, I can be reasonably sure that it’s not going to be in a database. You could do age verification without a database, but it would be one hell of a lot easier with a database. And again, we’re looking at some of the dodgiest businesses on the web.