As of today, about half of all U.S. states have some form of age verification law around. Nine of those were passed in 2025 alone, covering everything from adult content sites to social media platforms to app stores.
Right now, California’s Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) is all the rage right now, which targets not only websites and apps but also operating systems. Come January 1, 2027, every OS provider must collect a user’s age at account setup and provide that data to app developers via a real-time API.
Colorado is also working on a near-identical bill, which we covered earlier.
The EFF’s year-end review put it more bluntly: 2025 was “the year states chose surveillance over safety.” The foundation’s concern, which I concur with, is, where does this stop? Self-reported birthday today, government ID tomorrow? There appears to be no limit to these laws’ overreach.
Presumably even if Linux must provide a means of reporting an age, you can always modify that distro to always report the oldest age?
Yes
The California law is just "put this column in your DB and make a getAge() call.
sysctl user.legal_bullshit.pretend_age_quote_verification_unquote=99Watch that land on distros everywhere.
My Linux is not ever going to have any age verification.
I’m not living in those backwards contry and if that push ever comes to shove, there will always be way around it. It’s the beauty of open source, no entity is liable to comply. And we’re in the brink of ad-hoc internet which would render that stupid centralized and overgoverned shit to zero.
The thing about doing age verification at the OS level is the user could just install a crack that rewrites the necessary code. It’ll take some heavy DRM type stuff to block that. Possibly hardware support, like a specialised TPM.
No way can that be standardised and then rolled out quickly. If they rush it then it’ll be some proprietary power grab.
The alternative is each website and app does it separately which will be spotty and provide endless security breaches.
It’ll be a shitshow either way.
That security guard has a tiny head.
Let’s be absolutely clear here: The explosion of people being comfortable coming out as some stripe of LGBTQ+ has everything to do with an open internet where youth were not restricted from finding out about information related to how they felt inside. Instead of being made to feel like strangers in their own skin, with a world telling them that people like them didn’t or shouldn’t exist, they instead found community and self-love through internet forums and information which allowed them to pursue full, healthy lives as adults.
This “protect the children” malarkey is one more way for the religious groups who oppose LGBTQ+ culture to “protect the children” by restricting access to this kind of information, reducing their ability to find it in their formative years, in the name of protecting them while actually stunting their personal growth.
It extends beyond sexuality as well, although that is the most obvious since many religions are deeply censorious regarding sex.
It also affects subjects like atheism, as the various religious cultures generally do not want people contemplating the idea that there isn’t a god, especially not while they’re young, they want you long indoctrinated into belief before you can explore different ideas.
Further, when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, everything I knew about drugs was literally old wives tales meant to scare kids away from drugs, and then the internet came around and suddenly there was a boom of actual, verifiable scientific information about drugs so if you wanted to experiment with drugs, you knew what you were getting into. I once had a conversation with a girlfriend who was a bit older than me about her experiences with LSD as a teen, and she admitted that at the time she really didn’t understand on any scientific level what was happening or what the nature of hallucination was, she just knew she was having fun and seeing crazy shit.
This is a backdoor to restricting access to important information that youth need to have access to for making healthy decisions for themselves sexually, religiously, and in terms of what substances they put in their bodies.
The birth of the internet gave us a beautiful period where people could grow up with access to accurate, verifiable, worthwhile information that helped them navigate and understand the world they were growing up in and who they were within that world.
This kind of legislation intends to snuff out that openness and accessibility which led to increased openness and acceptance of LGBTQ+, atheism, and safe drug use (including the understanding that some illegal drugs like marijuana and LSD are probably safer than legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco).
Age Verification Laws
The most misleading title ever. They are surveillance laws
No, they are censorship laws aimed at preventing young people from accessing certain types of information that specific groups don’t want young people learning about, such as their sexuality, concepts like atheism, and safety information regarding drugs.
No. History taught me one thing only: if they say they want to protect kids, it’s never about the kids. It’s a slogan that helps to sell unpopular laws
If you think blocking access to knowledge about sexuality, atheism, or drugs is actually protecting children and not about a controlling and unpopular law I don’t know what to tell you. Because it’s clearly not actually intended to protect children as much as it is to block inconvenient information to help indoctrinate children to be compliant and unquestioning.
They want to bind your id with the device you use and restricting queer kids from discovering that they’re queer is the best thing you have in mind?
Exactly, they have all this already established laws to protect kids, but everyone seem pretty chill about pedofiles
In my youth I was taught that democracy meant that the government served the people.
What do any of these laws have to do with serving the people? Do they have anything to do with the will of the people?
The government serves the class that controls production and right now that class is really really concerned about what everyone does when they aren’t slaving away for them.
Billionaires are people.
They have the will to fuck everything that moves.
Billionaires certainly are people, but these laws don’t even serve billionaires in any meaningful sense, so that’s hardly an explanation without more elaboration.
Well, the billionaires that own age verification and surveillance services have gone from trying their best to stalk to world through tracking and analytics, despite pesky privacy laws, to forcing giant swaths of populations to hand over data by compulsion.
Yeah, they’re making a mint off us.
OK, that’s about the elaboration I was looking for…
Somehow I don’t think this is the central reason. I think governments are perfectly capable of doing bad things completely without billionaires having an interest in it. It especially doesn’t explain things like the California law that will regulate how we can or cannot program operating systems (hint: software code is a form of speech, meaning that this ought to be struck down as a violation of free speech), because no age verification services are involved in that.
I am Californian and that one snuck past me. I really didn’t hear anything about it until recently and I’m pretty pissed.
You can’t put the genie back into the lamp on biometrics. We needed real control over outlr digital data and biometrics before this became law. I hope it is repealed somehow, but the elite class don’t give a fuck.
As for business vs government, government is scrutinized closer but businesses get away with much more. It’s easier to get around red tape to outsource work to businesses than build government infrastructure to do things themselves.
I really didn’t hear anything about it until recently
Yes, I expressed the same sentiment here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/55959326/24302621
Is our entire information “ecosystem” so broken that we only pay attention to bad things after they’ve already happened, not before when there is still a chance to stop them?!
In my youth I was taught that democracy meant that the government served the people.
In your youth, your teachers lied to you.
Username checks out
It’s serving the will of prudes, religious fruitcakes, inattentive parents, the technologically illiterate, and anyone dumb enough to be taken in by the “think of the children!” Rhetoric of the control-freaks.
Unfortunately this is a rather large constituency.
I would find it very sad if they were a majority, anywhere. :(
Bet Microsoft is behind this.
Actually, when being grilled by congress, Mark Zuckerberg proposed exactly this solution: OS level age verification.
It’s actually being pushed by social media companies to take the heat and responsibility off of them.
