Porn Sites Face Strict EU Rules, Commission Says 36
Adult content companies Pornhub, Stripchat and XVideos will have to do risk assessment reports and take measures to address systemic risks linked to their services to comply with new EU online content rules, the European Commission said on Friday. From a report: The three companies were designated as very large online platforms last December under the Digital Services Act (DSA) which requires them to do more to remove illegal and harmful content on their platforms. Pornhub and Stripchat will have to comply with these DSA obligations, among the strictest, on April 21 and XVideos on April 23, the EU executive said. "These specific obligations include submitting risk assessment reports to the Commission, putting in place mitigation measures to address systemic risks linked to the provision of their services," it said in a statement.
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Guessing CP and Revenge Porn
Re:Pr0n Risks...? WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Abuse, human trafficking, underage 'actors', exposed credentials for users, potential leaks of credit card info, leaks of download history ...
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Porn companies should just tell the EU to go head and block them, knowing full well people will use a VPN anyway.
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If enough places do that, eventually there will be no exit nodes available in a non-restricted jurisdiction.
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Not an issue. Onion services are a thing. Facebook, for example, has offered its site as an onion-service for ages.
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The company still has to comply with the law over other protocols. It's only the end user lying that works.
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The most controversial risk will be that of minors accessing their websites at all. They will be required to prevent it. There is no particular mandate on how, and I expect it will be fought in court, but ultimately their sites will be blocked in the EU except to those willing to give up their anonymity (or use a VPN).
The EU isn't the US with funny accents. They know that if kids see a boob they're not going be turned into malformed monsters.
That kind of Puritanism is the domain of US (and occasionally British) conservatives. Honestly, they'll be more concerned with copyrights.
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These are "systemic risks"?
I mean, over half of what you mentioned is something ALL pay websites are at risk for....are all websites having to report these types of "systemic risks"?
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The summary specifically says it's because of their size.
Both the site with 10 paying users and 10 million paying users are at risk of leaking credit card credentials, but the problem is far higher for the big site - both in the scope of damages and in how attractive a target they are.
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Revenge porn too. Pornhub has already been in trouble for that, the result of which was deleting all user uploaded material and starting over.
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Are these two problems really something that mainstream sites like Pornhub would fail to take seriously? I mean, if I ran a site where anybody could browse, I sure wouldn't want to show someone that could be a search-hit in a database of abused/vulnerable people.
Unless Pornhub's owner is too busy sleeping on a pile of cash in a non-extraditable country to care...
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No amount of risk assessment will ever be good enough because they are a porn site, and porn sites are the go to boogeymen for the child predators and other societal malcontents we call "politicians."
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Porn sites can fuck off (Score:2)
and they will.
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Not just off, but on, sideways and upside down. They'll cater to more or less anything these days.
Suck it! (Score:4, Insightful)
If any company was well positioned to tell the EU to "suck it", it seems like a porn company would be at the top of that list.
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Which porn company? The world's third largest porn streaming site is based in the Czech Republic. The world's second largest porn streaming site is based in Cyprus. The world's largest porn streaming site has a proportional number of EU based users to it's North American home with similar levels of revenue and traffic North America as in the EU27. Stripchat is based in Italy.
Out of all of these only Pornhub is in a position to tell the EU to go suck something, but in doing so it would be interesting to see
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WOOSH!!!
Except they're not "very large online platforms" (Score:3)
...under the DSA's own definition, these companies don't have the EU userbase to qualify as VLOPs. So why are they getting singled out for special reacharound treatment?
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It's not binary. The bigger the site the more responsibility. Sites that carry particularly risky material like porn have additional requirements, from the basic age checks in performers upwards.
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Sorry, it is very much binary -- Under the DSA, you're either a VLOP, or you're not, and under the criteria laid out in the actual text of the DSA, PornHub etc is too small. [1] ...That's not to say that non-VLOPs don't have to follow various regulations as well, but as the article states, PornHub is being hit with stuff that only applies for VLOPs. So again, why the special treatment?
[1] As of January 31, 2024, Pornhub has 32 million average monthly recipients of the service in the European Union, calcula
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XVideos admitted to having 160 million monthly active users in the EU. It seems a little suspect for such a huge disparity between major platforms. When you have anonymous users who are potentially sharing an IP address (whether in a household or carrier grade NAT), you can find a lot of ways to manipulate the raw logs to say what you need it to say.
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...under the DSA's own definition, these companies don't have the EU userbase to qualify as VLOPs.
According to the Commission they do: https://ec.europa.eu/commissio... [europa.eu]
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And thanks to PornHub's lawsuit, I guess we'll eventually find out who's correct.
(It will be particularly ironic if the EC forces PornHub to collect and process *more* personal data about their users in order to defend themselves)
Back in the day (Score:1)
Back in the day there was this monstrosity known as "Windows 95." Microsoft was advertising the hell out of it. The PC manufacturers were advertising the hell out of it and their PCs. Internet in dorms was becoming a big thing. There were ads all over TV telling luddite parents that their kids had to have a Windows 95 PC to go off to college or they would FAIL!
Well, predictably, people did this in droves. They then went to their dorms (or did it at home) and hooked their non-firewalled Windows 95 machines
If they don't feel like writing the letter (Score:2)
Dear EU,
My servers aren't plugged in on your soil. Kindly fuck off.
Much love,
[INSERT NAME OF PORN COMPANY HERE]
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If they don't follow the rules, they'll get heavy fines through their local branch. They have business presence such as purchasing marketing campaigns, accepting payments from residents, paying tax on company income. The bigger porn companies are respectable businesses, they won't want to take legal risks and displease investors.
No such company (Score:2)