The growing debate on the expansion of age verification legislation

Technologists and decision makers expect a generational -defining problem on the Internet: While it may be a revolutionary strength of unprecedented education and connection across the globe, it can also pose dangers of children when they have completely unbound access.

However, there is no simple way to monitor children’s Internet access without monitoring adults paving the way for disastrous violations of privacy.

While some advocates praise these laws as victories for children’s safety, many security experts warn that these laws are proposed and adopted with defective implementation plans, which also pose dangerous security risks for adult users. In the United States alone, 23 states have adopted age verification legislation from last month, with two more states that follow in September. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s online security law, which came into force in July, requires many online platforms to verify users’ identities before giving access.

Here is a primer about where the debate on age and identity verification stands.

What exactly is the age verification?

When we talk about age verification legislation, we are not talking about when you made a neopets account as a child and marked a box to confirm that you were at least 13 years old. In the United States, these types of age control are a result of the Law on Children’s Online Privacy Protection (COPPA), an Internet Security Act passed in 1998. But as you already know if you had a Neopets account when you were 10 years old, the Coppa era’s age control is very easy to navigate around. You just click on a box that says you’re 13.

In connection with the laws cut up during the 2020s, age verification usually refers to a user who uploads an official ID to a third -party verification system to prove who they are. Users can also upload biometric facial scans, such as those flowing facial id on iPhones.

What is the poenget with age verification?

Of course, internet security is not really about preventing children from playing games like neopets. Parents and legislators are concerned about children gaining access to content potentially dangerous to minors, such as online pornography, information about illegal drug use and social media sites where they may encounter strangers with poor intentions.

These concerns are not unfounded. Parents have approached legislators to share terrible stories about how their children died after buying fentanyl-corded drugs on Facebook, or how they took their own lives after facing incessant bullying on Snapchat.

As the technology becomes more sophisticated, the problem gets worse: Metas AI -Chatbots have reportedly flirted with children while character.ai and Openai face lawsuits on suicide for children allegedly encouraged by the companies’ chatbots.

However, we know that the internet is not all bad. Without leaving your home or spending any money, you can learn to play guitar or write code. You can forge meaningful friendships with people from the other side of the world. You can access specialized Telehealth care even if you live a place where no doctor is trained in your diagnosis. You can find the answer to almost any question you want at any given time (Madagascar’s capital is Antananarivo, by the way).

This is how global legislators have reached what they believe is a healthy compromise: They will not nuke the whole Internet, but they will just put a specific content behind a gate that you can only unlock if you can prove that you are an adult. But in this case, you are not just clicking on a box to confirm your age – you upload your government’s ID or scan your biometric data to prove that you can access a specific content.

Is it safe to verify your identity by uploading a government’s ID or a biometric scan?

The safety of any digital security measure depends on its implementation.

Apple builds products like Face ID, so these biometric scans of your face never leaves your iPhone – they are never shared over the cloud, which massively limits the potential for hackers to access.

However, when any kind of connection to another network gets involved, it is when identity verification can be fished. We have already seen how these measures can play poorly when technology is anything but rock solid.

“No method of age verification is both protective protective and accurate,” writes the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “These methods do not fit somewhere on a spectrum of ‘safer’ and ‘less safe’ or ‘more accurate’ and ‘less accurate.’ Rather, they each fall on a spectrum of ‘dangerous in a way’ to ‘dangerous in another way.’ “

In recent memory, we have some strong examples of how bad things can go when a company slides up on its safety.

On tea, an app that women use to share information about men they encounter on dating apps, users must upload selfies and photos of their IDs to prove that they are who they say they are. But users at 4chan, a misogynist web forum, found that TEA left users ‘data exposed, which means bad actors could access tens of thousands of users’ government IDs, selfies and even direct messages on the platform where women shared sensitive information about their dating experiences. What was once claimed to be an app for women’s security ended up exposing its users to vicious harassment, giving bad actors access to personal information as their home addresses.

These hacks were possible despite Tea’s promise that these images were not stored anywhere and were deleted immediately (obviously these allegations were fake).

This kind of thing happens all the time – just look at TechCrunch’s security coverage. But it doesn’t just happen with new apps like tea. World government and trillion dollars tech giants are certainly not exempt from data violations.

Does it really have something if I lose my anonymity on the internet? I’m not doing anything shady.

These laws have inspired a lot of setbacks, but it’s not just because people are shy about linking their porn to their government’s id.

In places where people can be prosecuted for political speech, anonymity is crucial to allowing people to meaningfully discuss current events and criticize the powerful without fear of retaliation. Business whistles could not be able to report a company’s wrongdoing if all their online activity is linked to their identity, and victims of home violence will have it even more difficult to escape from dangerous situations.

In the United States, the idea of ​​being prosecuted for one’s political conviction is less theoretically theoretically. President Trump has threatened to send his political opponents into prison, and the government has revoked Visa from international students who have criticized the Israeli government or participated in protests against the country’s military actions.

What age verification legislation has needed in the United States?

In the United States, twenty -three states have passed age verification legislation from August 2025, while two more states have laws intended to take effect at the end of September 2025.

These laws mostly affect sites hosting certain percentages of “sexual material detrimental to minors”, which vary from state to state.

In practice, this means that pornographic sites must verify a user’s identity before they can access the site. But some places, like Pornhub, have chosen to simply block traffic from certain states.

“Since age verification software requires users to transfer extremely sensitive information, it opens the door to the risk of data violations,” Pornhub wrote on its blog. “Whether your intentions are good or not, the governments have historically struggled to secure this data.”

What counts as “sexual material harmful to minors”?

The definition of this term varies depending on who enforces the law.

At a time when LGBTQ rights are under attack in the United States, activists have warned that laws like this could be used to classify non-pornographic information about the LGBTQ community as well as basic sex education, as “sexual material that is harmful to minors.” These concerns appear well-founded, given that President Trump’s administration has removed referrals to civil rights movements and LGBTQ history from some government sites.

Texas’ Age Verification Act-AS was maintained in a Supreme Court Warrant in June was passed around the same time that the state imposed other legal restrictions on the LGBTQ community, including limits on public drag shows and ban on gender-affirming care of minors. The Drag Show Act was later considered constitutional for violating the first amendment.

What happens to age verification in the UK?

The United Kingdom passed the Online Security Act in July 2025, which required many online platforms to verify a user’s identity before allowing them access. If a user is identified as a minor, they will not be granted permission for certain sites. The law applies to search engines, social media platforms, video sharing platforms, instant messaging services, cloud storage-stored-sized seen wherever you can encounter media or talk to someone.

In practice, this means that sites like YouTube, Spotify, Google, X and Reddit require British users to verify their identity before accessing a specific content. These requirements not only apply to pornographic or violent content – people in the UK have been prevented from seeing vital education and news sources, making it difficult to access information without exposing potential concerns about privacy.

The United Kingdom does not use a specific way of verifying one’s identity – individual sites can decide which mechanism to use, and ofcom, the UK’s communication regulator, is assumed to supervise this implementation. But as we explained with the tea example, we cannot trust that a given approval tool will be safe.

Now, users who are subject to identity verification must decide whether they will freely access information or whether they want to expose themselves to privacy.

Does the British Age Verification Act affect me if I live elsewhere?

Even if you do not live in the UK, you may be affected by tech platforms that are prior to these rules.

In the US, YouTube has already started rolling out technology to estimate users’ ages based on their activity, no matter what age they have listed when registering their account.

Can’t you just use a VPN to get around these barriers?

Yes, and the App Store charts in the UK prove it -after the Online -Security Act came into force, half of the ten free apps on iOS VPNs (Virtual Private Network) were. We also saw VPN -Downloads Spike after Pornhub Access was blocked in many US states.

When Pornhub was suspended in France, Protonvpn said registrations were spiked by 1000% within half an hour – the company said this was a bigger spiking than when Tiktok temporarily blocked US users.

You may have used a VPN before if you logged in to your Office Desktop Computer External or if you fed your location so you could see British Sitcoms FREE from USA

This introduces another problem: Free VPNs do not always have great privacy practices, even if they are advertised as such.

If you want to learn more about VPNs, TechCrunch has guides what you need to know about VPNs and how to decide if you need one.