Pornhub owner broke law by not getting ‘valid’ consent for content: watchdog

Canada’s privacy watchdog says the operator of Pornhub and other pornographic websites broke the law by allowing intimate images and video of a woman to be shared on its platforms without obtaining the woman’s consent.

The privacy commissioner’s final report on its years-long investigation into Montreal-based Aylo, formerly known as MindGeek, released Thursday found “significant” issues with the way the company obtains consent for the uploading of amateur pornographic content, which the office says had “devastating” effects on the complainant and other victims that Aylo has refused to take responsibility for.

“I call this ‘image-based abuse,'” Privacy Commissioner Philippe Dufresne said at a press conference following the report’s release.

The investigation was launched after a complaint from a woman whose ex-boyfriend had uploaded an intimate video and other images of her to Aylo websites without her permission in 2015.

Despite getting the company to remove the video and images from its platforms, the report says the woman’s images had been shared to several other unassociated websites “and is likely still available online” despite her employing a professional takedown service.

“The permanent loss of control over her intimate images has had a devastating effect on the Complainant, who alleged that it caused her to withdraw from her social life, lose an employment opportunity and live in a constant state of fear and anxiety,” the report says.

The report says Aylo did not seek out the woman’s consent for her intimate images to be shared, instead relying on the uploader — her ex-boyfriend — to assure that he had obtained her consent. The privacy commissioner said that consent model “does not constitute reasonable efforts to