Adult platforms have never been more visible to regulators than they are right now. For years, the industry operated in a gray zone: enormous traffic, massive data volume and minimal oversight. Those days are over.
Readers of XBIZ are likely familiar with age verification requirements now on the books in about half of all U.S. states, and with the U.K.’s Online Safety Act. However, this article will focus specifically on the European Union, where enforcement of both the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been accelerating.
If your compliance posture is ‘We’ll respond to takedown emails,’ you’re already behind. Adult platforms are required to engineer safety and accountability into the product, and prove it with audits, risk assessments and data access for regulators.
Let’s look at why it’s time to get serious about DSA and GDPR requirements, and what effective compliance looks like.
Porn Platforms in the DSA Crosshairs
The DSA is fundamentally a risk-governance law — and adult services score high on every DSA risk category. For instance, adult sites are considered high-risk for CSAM activity, nonconsensual material, sextortion and trafficking-related content. When regulators are looking for easy, high-impact enforcement wins, this makes porn sites a natural first stop.
The European Commission has set forth guidelines for DSA compliance in areas such as systemic risk, protecting minors and transparency. The DSA doesn’t just say “Don’t host illegal content.” It demands fast takedowns, trusted-flagger processing and systemic prevention, not just reactive moderation. If your compliance posture is “We’ll respond to takedown emails,” you’re already behind. Adult platforms are required to engineer safety and accountability into the product, and prove it with audits, risk assessments and data access for regulators.
The DSA also explicitly targets dark patterns and friction-based noncompliance. Sites that bury reporting tools, make opt-out painful or funnel users into tracking-heavy flows are therefore inviting regulatory scrutiny. Finally, algorithmic amplification matters. Tube sites with recommendation engines must assess whether ranking and feeds amplify harmful or illegal sexual-content pathways.
Investigations can lead to fines of up to 6% of global annual turnover and binding remediation orders. Enforcement efforts initially targeted mainly the highest-traffic porn services, which are designated as “very large online platforms” (VLOPs) and assigned heightened obligations. In May 2025, for example, the Commission opened coordinated DSA investigations into Pornhub, Stripchat, XNXX and XVideos, explicitly focusing on insufficient risk mitigation and failures to keep minors off platforms. However, all signs point to increasing oversight of smaller operators as well.
Common GDPR Missteps
The GDPR has set rigorous standards for how companies must handle user data. In investigations of adult platforms, three GDPR fault lines show up again and again:
- Lawful basis and real consent for tracking. Many adult platforms don’t use a consent-management platform at all, and those that do often deploy one that leads with “Accept All” while burying controls several layers deep. Under GDPR, that isn’t consent; it’s a violation waiting to happen. Consent for pixels, retargeting and other adtech must be freely given, specific, informed and easily refused.
- Age assurance that overshoots the law. Regulators want “robust” age verification, but GDPR still requires data minimization and purpose limitation. If a platform is storing passports, retaining selfies indefinitely or quietly repurposing age-check data for profiling, it may satisfy one regulator but provoke another.
- Security. Adult platforms remain high-value targets for attackers, and a single breach can expose sexual preferences, purchase histories, chat logs or subscription records, amplifying harm and pushing penalties toward the top of the GDPR range.
GDPR enforcement has tightened considerably as well. Fines are growing in both number and size — and adult platforms are structurally high-risk, since regulators are concentrating on sectors that handle sensitive data at scale. Once again, adult sites are a prime enforcement target since by their very nature, they process special-category data: inferences about sexuality and sexual preferences are built into the service itself. That means every GDPR misstep lands harder and carries higher risk.
The Representative Requirement
Both the GDPR and the DSA require non-EU adult operators to appoint EU legal representatives. If you are based outside the EU but offer adult services there, or you monitor EU users’ behavior through tracking, personalization or analytics, the GDPR applies extraterritorially, triggering the representative requirement. The same is true with the U.K. GDPR.
Under this provision, non-EU/U.K. controllers and processors must designate a representative located where their affected users are. The role is a formal contact point for regulators and data subjects, required to receive and relay communications about compliance.
In theory, there are exemptions. Adult platforms rarely qualify, however, since the carve-out applies only to processing that is occasional, genuinely low-risk and does not involve large-scale special-category data.
The DSA also requires an EU legal representative, distinct from the GDPR representative. This rep serves as the platform’s formal point of contact for DSA obligations, including notice-and-action procedures, systemic-risk mitigation inquiries, data-access requests from regulators and enforcement actions. For adult platforms, which the DSA explicitly treats as higher-risk services, failing to appoint this representative is a conspicuous compliance gap.
EU supervisory authorities have already issued material fines solely for failing to appoint an EU GDPR representative — often paired with periodic penalty payments that accrue until the requirement is met. Under the DSA, the European Commission and national digital services coordinators have broad investigative powers and can escalate non-appointment into significant administrative penalties. The U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has taken a similarly strict stance in regards to the U.K. GDPR.
For regulators, these omissions are easy wins: simple to verify and indicative of deeper compliance issues. If your privacy notice or DSA disclosures lack EU or U.K. representative details, you are effectively advertising the violation.
The practical takeaway is straightforward. If you have meaningful EU or U.K. user volume, don’t wait for a complaint or an inquiry. Appoint qualified GDPR representatives in both jurisdictions, designate a compliant EU legal representative under the DSA, publish their contact information and ensure they can route regulator and user inquiries quickly. This is one of the least expensive steps to eliminate several very costly enforcement risks.
The DSA/GDPR Double Bind
What will define compliance going forward is that the DSA and GDPR now collide on the same operational surface. The DSA pushes platforms to verify and protect minors — while the GDPR simultaneously restricts how much identity data you can collect or reuse to accomplish that. Any workable compromise will require implementing privacy-preserving age assurance.
In practice, that means using tokenized or third-party verification, storing only pass/fail signals where possible instead of raw IDs, separating age signals from marketing and recommendation systems, and conducting data protection impact assessments (DPIAs) that explicitly address both age assurance and adtech. Platforms that cannot strike the appropriate balance by implementing age assurance without unnecessary data retention are the ones regulators will be eager to make examples of.
What “Getting Serious” Looks Like in Practice
If your current level of “compliance” involves little more than a terms-of-service page and a takedown request inbox, pay close attention.
On the DSA side, real readiness begins with a systemic-risk assessment that explicitly models minors’ access, illegal-content pathways and recommender-system harms — and ties each risk to concrete mitigation measures. It also requires a credible audit trail, fast, intuitive reporting interfaces that regulators can verify through audit trails, and functioning trusted-flagger workflows. Regulators will expect to see clear moderation policies, measurable response targets and minor-protection design controls that work in practice, not just in policy documents.
On the GDPR side, “serious” means having a lawful-basis map for every data flow: ads, subscriptions, payments, moderation, analytics and age checks. It means consent for cookies and trackers that actually qualifies as consent, not a dark-pattern nudge. It means strict minimization and retention limits for verification data, paired with a security program calibrated for high-sensitivity breach scenarios. Finally, it means reliable data subject access request (DSAR) and deletion handling, because users of adult services request erasure more frequently and with higher emotional stakes.
The Business Case for Revenue — and Survival
The old calculus of “Compliance costs too much and nobody enforces” collapsed for good in 2025. This past year made it clear that adult brands are subject to fines for noncompliance, while payment processors, hosts and ad partners have begun tightening their own standards to avoid secondary liability.
Noncompliance no longer just risks penalties. It can trigger the loss of card processing, removal from app stores, ISP blocking, partner off-boarding and reputational damage that is uniquely difficult to claw back in the adult sector. Those outcomes happened to operators this year — not as hypotheticals, but as enforcement reality. The “We’ll fix it later” window has closed.
The bottom line: If you operate an adult site accessible in Europe, and you’re still treating DSA and GDPR compliance as a nice-to-have rather than a must-have, you’re sitting on a land mine. Heading into 2026, effective DSA and GDPR compliance is not about adding more policy pages. It is about engineering for safety, privacy and provability — before someone else engineers a case file around your platform.
This article does not constitute legal advice and is provided for information purposes only.
Corey D. Silverstein is the managing and founding member of Silverstein Legal, which represents all areas of the adult industry. His clientele includes hosting companies, affiliate programs, content producers, processors, designers, developers, operators and more. He is licensed in numerous jurisdictions. Contact him via MyAdultAttorney.com, corey@silversteinlegal.com or 248-290-0655.