The two are very different. Flashing an ID at a grocery store leaves no data trail. You don’t worry about ID theft, surveillance or exposure and extortion. Flashing an ID is seamless and free, whereas online verification is expensive and difficult to comply with: ID uploads, face scans, background checks. Consumers hate it and most refuse to do it, for good reason.

That’s a nice theory, but has almost no basis in reality. Have you met the internet? Biometrics and identity information is some of the most valuable information online — a honeypot for hackers. Anytime you upload personal information, it can be intercepted. Everything you do leaves a trace. What’s more, most age-verification providers rely on other public and private databases, including government databases, which can keep a record.
Age-verification is a new, for-profit industry with little oversight and we’ve already seen examples of providers and databases being hacked.

For better or worse, the internet is global. Adult content is readily available on sites outside US jurisdiction, on non-adult sites (and thus outside the purview of these laws) or through the use of a VPN. Because adult content is easy to access on social media sites and thousands of unregulated sites outside of the US, ICMEC, the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, has suggested these laws may, paradoxically, make the internet more dangerous for children.

While some adult sites have pulled out of states where age-verification laws have passed, over concerns about data security and privacy, there’s no evidence that it’s meaningfully more difficult for minors to access adult content, which is widespread on the internet.

When sites have attempted to comply, they’ve seen they’re consumers abandon them in favor of sites outside the United States, or evade restrictions through the use of VPNs. [INFOGRAPHIC]

No, they haven’t. District courts in Texas and Indiana have blocked the law, saying it’s clearly unconstitutional. Of course, those decisions have been appealed by the states. For more than 20 years, the Supreme Court has said such laws are a violation of the 1st Amendment. Our Texas challenge will be heard by the court on January 15, 2025.

And we can. Just because these laws are bad doesn’t mean there are no solutions. Devices on a minor’s phone or laptop block every major adult site — they’re easy to turn on and much harder to get around that state-level legislation. Want to see how it can be done legislatively? The International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC) have drafted model legislation.