Age verification: 25+ states now demand ID and face scans

Last October, a company that checks people's ages online lost seventy thousand photos of government I.D.s. Discord confirmed the breach. Those were driver's licenses and passports that people uploaded to prove how old they were.

If you've ever clicked "I'm over eighteen" on a

If you've ever clicked "I'm over eighteen" on a website, this story is about you. That click is turning into something much bigger. More than twenty-five U.S. states now require people to prove their age online. Some ask for a photo of your I.D. Some ask for a scan of your face. It started in Louisiana in 2022 with one law aimed at adult websites. Then the Supreme Court ruled that adults have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification. Since then, states have moved fast, and the rules now reach social media accounts and even the feeds that recommend videos to you. So what happens when proving who you are becomes the price of getting online?

Start with the breach, because it shows the problem most clearly. To prove you're an adult, you hand over the most sensitive paperwork you own. The company checking it now holds a pile of I.D. photos. Hackers know exactly what that pile is worth. Seventy thousand people trusted a verification system, and their documents walked out the door. You can't change your face the way you change a password.

Next, look at what people did when the rules arrived. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Florida saw demand for V.P.N.s jump by more than eleven hundred percent after its law took effect. A V.P.N. is a tool that hides where your internet traffic comes from. So the same law meant to protect people pushed huge numbers of them to hide from it. The U.K. saw the same pattern after its Online Safety Act rolled out. V.P.N. use soared. Critics also say news and journalism got swept up in the censorship.

Do these systems even work

Now, do these systems even work? Researchers who studied them say the effectiveness is more often assumed than proven. They found no tested method that reliably stands up to a determined person trying to get around it. Meanwhile, the privacy risks are real. Tech Policy Press also reports that these tools tend to be biased against trans people. That can lock them out of large parts of the internet. So the cost lands hardest on people who were already vulnerable.

And the scope keeps growing. Lawmakers have proposed bills that would require I.D. checks for things like skincare products and diet supplements. California's law goes a step further. It requires browsers and app stores to hold your birth date at the device level. Once that exists, who else asks for it? Could it get tied to your purchases, your searches, your social media? Could police request it someday?

The other side deserves a fair hearing. Children really are harmed by explicit content, and the mental health effects are documented. Lawmakers ask a fair question. How else do you keep kids out at scale? There's one promising idea. It lets you prove you're over eighteen without revealing who you are. But almost no one has adopted it.