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A critical look at the Telegram founder’s latest revelations and their potential implications for the online adult entertainment industry—if the allegations are true.

The European Union has unveiled a “privacy-friendly” age verification app with great fanfare—supposedly to protect minors from harmful content. Just a few hours later, according to Pavel Durov, it had already been hacked. In our last article, we highlighted the fundamental dangers of this EU initiative for the free distribution of legal adult content. Now, the Telegram founder provides the fitting follow-up: The app is not only flawed—it was also deliberately designed to be insecure. And that has far-reaching consequences for all players in the online adult entertainment industry.

“Hackable by design” – Durov’s scathing analysis

In a direct statement on his Telegram channel and on X (formerly Twitter), Durov breaks down the EU project into three clear steps:

„The ‘age verification app’ the EU wants to impose on the world got hacked in 2 minutes.
Step 1: Present a ‘privacy-respecting’ but hackable solution.
Step 2: Get hacked (you are here).
Step 3: Remove privacy to ‘fix’ it.
Result: a surveillance tool sold as ‘privacy-respecting’.“

And furthermore: The app simply relied on the user’s device—“that’s instant game over.” A simple file edit on Android is enough to bypass the age verification in under two minutes. Not an oversight by Brussels bureaucrats, but a calculated move—according to Durov. The “surprising” security flaw provides exactly the pretext the EU needs to turn the supposedly privacy-friendly solution into a genuine mass surveillance tool.

What does this mean for the adult entertainment industry—if it’s true?

For platforms, creators, and users of online adult content, anonymity is not a luxury—it is essential. Whether it’s OnlyFans models working under pseudonyms, Telegram channels with exclusive adult content, or traditional adult websites: many users deliberately choose services that do not require real names. Mandatory EU age verification, which may seem “harmless” at first glance, would:

• Leaving data trails that can later be expanded in any way—from simple age verification to comprehensive profiling of identity and movements.
• Deter legal adults who, for professional or personal reasons, do not want their real identity to be linked to adult content.
• Putting pressure on platforms that must either implement expensive, error-prone systems or leave the EU market—resulting in dramatic losses in revenue for European creators.
• Facilitating censorship: Once the infrastructure is in place, it’s only a small step to filtering out “problematic” (i.e., sexually explicit) content.

Durov calls it what it is: The EU is using child protection as a Trojan horse to tear down the last bastions of digital freedom. What is sold as youth protection ends up as blanket surveillance of all citizens—including, and especially, those who consume or produce consensual, legal adult content.

The next level of censorship?

The industry is already familiar with this pattern from previous attempts at regulation in France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Each time, the justification was: “It’s just to protect the children.” Each time, the measures were expanded to include adults. With the EU app that has now allegedly been exposed, this exact mechanism threatens to play out at the European level: first the “friendly” app, then the hack, then the call for “security”—and ultimately a requirement for real-name or device identification for everyone using social media platforms.

Telegram deliberately positions itself as an alternative model: no centralized age verification, no cooperation with mass surveillance. Durov’s open criticism is therefore not only technical but also strategic—it serves as a reminder to the entire industry that freedom and privacy can no longer be taken for granted.

Conclusion: According to Durov, the EU age verification app is not a tool for protecting minors. It is the first building block of a system that systematically erodes anonymity online—and with it, the free expression of sexuality and eroticism. Pavel Durov put it succinctly: Anyone who still believes this is only about children has failed to learn the lessons of recent years.

The online adult entertainment industry should take a close look. The next wave of regulation isn’t coming quietly—it’s coming with a “privacy-friendly” app icon.

Pavel Durov’s post on X: