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Age verification laws are proliferating fast across the United States and around the world, creating a dangerous and confusing tangle of rules about what we’re all allowed to see and do online. Though these mandates claim to protect children, in practice they create harmful censorship and surveillance regimes that put everyone—adults and young people alike—at risk.

The term “age verification” is colloquially used to describe a wide range of age assurance technologies, from age verification systems that force you to upload government ID, to age estimation tools that scan your face, to systems that infer your age by making you share personal data. While different laws call for different methods, one thing remains constant: every method out there collects your sensitive, personal information and creates barriers to accessing the internet. We refer to all of these requirements as age verification, age assurance, or age-gating.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by this onslaught of laws and the invasive technologies behind them, you’re not alone. It’s a lot. But understanding how these mandates work and who they harm is critical to keeping yourself and your loved ones safe online. Age verification is lurking around every corner these days, so we must fight back to protect the internet that we know and love. 

That’s why today, we’re launching EFF’s Age Verification Resource Hub (EFF.org/Age): a one-stop shop to understand what these laws actually do, what’s at stake, why EFF opposes all forms of age verification, how to protect yourself, and how to join the fight for a free, open, private, and yes—safe—internet. 

Why Age Verification Mandates Are a Problem

In the U.S., more than half of all states have now passed laws imposing age-verification requirements on online platforms. Congress is considering even more at the federal level, with a recent House hearing weighing nineteen distinct proposals relating to young people’s online safety—some sweeping, some contradictory, and each one more drastic and draconian than the last.

We all want young people to be safe online. However, age verification is not the silver bullet that lawmakers want you to think it is.

The rest of the world is moving in the same direction. We saw the UK’s Online Safety Act go into effect this summer, Australia’s new law barring access to social media for anyone under 16 goes live today, and a slew of other countries are currently considering similar restrictions.

We all want young people to be safe online. However, age verification is not the silver bullet that lawmakers want you to think it is. In fact, age-gating mandates will do more harm than good—especially for the young people they claim to protect. They undermine the fundamental speech rights of adults and young people alike; create new barriers to accessing vibrant, lawful, even life-saving content; and needlessly jeopardize all internet users’ privacy, anonymity, and security.

If legislators want to meaningfully improve online safety, they should pass a strong, comprehensive federal privacy law instead of building new systems of surveillance, censorship, and exclusion.  

What’s Inside the Resource Hub

Our new hub is built to answer the questions we hear from users every day, such as:

• How do age verification laws actually work?
• What’s the difference between age verification, age estimation, age assurance, and all the other confusing technical terms I’m hearing?
• What’s at stake for me, and who else is harmed by these systems?
• How can I keep myself, my family, and my community safe as these laws continue to roll out?
• What can I do to fight back?
• And if not age verification, what else can we do to protect the online safety of our young people?

Head over to EFF.org/Age to explore our explainers, user-friendly guides, technical breakdowns, and advocacy tools—all indexed in the sidebar for easy browsing. And today is just the start, so keep checking back over the next several weeks as we continue to build out the site with new resources and answers to more of your questions on all things age verification.

Join Us: Reddit AMA & EFFecting Change Livestream Events

To celebrate the launch of EFF.org/Age, and to hear directly from you how we can be most helpful in this fight, we’re hosting two exciting events:

1. Reddit AMA on r/privacy

Next week, our team of EFF activists, technologists, and lawyers will be hanging out over on Reddit’s r/privacy subreddit to directly answer your questions on all things age verification. We’re looking forward to connecting with you and hearing how we can help you navigate these changing tides, so come on over to r/privacy on Monday (12/15), Tuesday (12/16), and Wednesday (12/17), and ask us anything!

2. EFFecting Change Livestream Panel: “The Human Cost of Online Age Verification”

Then, on January 15th at 12pm PT, we’re hosting a livestream panel featuring Cynthia Conti-Cook, Director of Research and Policy at the Collaborative Research Center for Resilience; Hana Memon, Software Developer at Gen Z for Change; EFF Director of Engineering Alexis Hancock; and EFF Associate Director of State Affairs Rindala Alajaji. We’ll break down how these laws work, who they exclude, and how these mandates threaten privacy and free expression for people of all ages. Join us by RSVPing at https://livestream.eff.org/.

A Resource to Empower Users

Age-verification mandates are reshaping the internet in ways that are invasive, dangerous, and deeply unnecessary. But users are not powerless! We can challenge these laws, protect our digital rights, and build a safer digital world for all internet users, no matter their ages. Our new resource hub is here to help—so explore, share, and join us in the fight for a better internet.

The state of streaming is... bad. It’s very bad. The first step in wanting to watch anything is a web search: “Where can I stream X?” Then you have to scroll past an AI summary with no answers, and then scroll past the sponsored links. After that, you find out that the thing you want to watch was made by a studio that doesn’t exist anymore or doesn’t have a streaming service. So, even though you subscribe to more streaming services than you could actually name, you will have to buy a digital copy to watch. A copy that, despite paying for it specifically, you do not actually own and might vanish in a few years. 

Then, after you paid to see something multiple times in multiple ways (theater ticket, VHS tape, DVD, etc.), the mega-corporations behind this nightmare will try to get Congress to pass laws to ensure you keep paying them. In the end, this is easier than making a product that works. Or, as someone put it on social media, these companies have forgotten “that their entire existence relies on being slightly more convenient than piracy.” 

It’s important to recognize this as we see more and more media mergers. These mergers are not about quality, they’re about control. 

In the old days, studios made a TV show. If the show was a hit, they increased how much they charged companies to place ads during the show. And if the show was a hit for long enough, they sold syndication rights to another channel. Then people could discover the show again, and maybe come back to watch it air live. In that model, the goal was to spread access to a program as much as possible to increase viewership and the number of revenue streams.  

Now, in the digital age, studios have picked up a Silicon Valley trait: putting all their eggs into the basket of “increasing the number of users.” To do that, they have to create scarcity. There has to be only one destination for the thing you’re looking for, and it has to be their own. And you shouldn’t be able to control the experience at all. They should.  

They’ve also moved away from creating buzzy new exclusives to get you to pay them. That requires risk and also, you know, paying creative people to make them. Instead, they’re consolidating.  

Media companies keep announcing mergers and acquisitions. They’ve been doing it for a long time, but it’s really ramped up in the last few years. And these mergers are bad for all the obvious reasons. There are the speech and censorship reasons that came to a head in, of all places, late night television. There are the labor issues. There are the concentration of power issues. There are the obvious problems that the fewer studios that exist the fewer chances good art gets to escape Hollywood and make it to our eyes and ears. But when it comes specifically to digital life there are these: consumer experience and ownership.  

First, the more content that comes under a single corporation’s control, the more they expect you to come to them for it. And the more they want to charge. And because there is less competition, the less they need to work to make their streaming app usable. They then enforce their hegemony by using the draconian copyright restrictions they’ve lobbied for to cripple smaller competitors, critics, and fair use.  

When everything is either Disney or NBCUniversal or Warner Brothers-Discovery-Paramount-CBS and everything is totally siloed, what need will they have to spend money improving any part of their product? Making things is hard, stopping others from proving how bad you are is easy, thanks to how broken copyright law is.  

Furthermore, because every company is chasing increasing subscriber numbers instead of multiple revenue streams, they have an interest in preventing you from ever again “owning” a copy of a work. This was always sort of part of the business plan, but it was on a scale of a) once every couple of years,  b) at least it came, in theory, with some new features or enhanced quality and c) you actually owned the copy you paid for. Now they want you to pay them every month for access to same copy. And, hey, the price is going to keep going up the fewer options you have. Or you will see more ads. Or start seeing ads where there weren’t any before.  

On the one hand, the increasing dependence on direct subscriber numbers does give users back some power. Jimmy Kimmel’s reinstatement by ABC was partly due to the fact that the company was about to announce a price hike for Disney+ and it couldn’t handle losing users due to the new price and due to popular outrage over Kimmel’s treatment.  

On the other hand, well, there's everything else. 

The latest kerfuffle is over the sale of Warner Brothers-Discovery, a company that was already the subject of a sale and merger resulting in the hyphen. Netflix was competiing against another recently merged media megazord of Paramount Skydance.  

Warner Brothers-Discovery accepted a bid from Netflix, enraging Paramount Skydance, which has now launched a hostile takeover.  

Now the optimum outcome is for neither of these takeovers to happen. There are already too few players in Hollywood. It does nothing for the health of the industry to allow either merger. A functioning antitrust regime would stop both the sale and the hostile takeover attempt, full stop. But Hollywood and the federal government are frequent collaborators, and the feds have little incentive to stop Hollywood’s behemoths from growing even further, as long as they continue to play their role pushing a specific view of American culture.    

The promise of the digital era was in part convenience. You never again had to look at TV listings to find out when something would be airing. Virtually unlimited digital storage meant everything would be at your fingertips. But then the corporations went to work to make sure it never happened. And with each and every merger, that promise gets further and further away.  

Note 12/10/2025: One line in this blog has been modified a few hours post-publication. The substance remains the same. 

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EFF Also Will Host a Reddit AMA and a Livestreamed Panel Discussion

SAN FRANCISCO—With ill-advised and dangerous age verification laws proliferating across the United States and around the world, creating surveillance and censorship regimes that will be used to harm both youth and adults, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a new resource hub that will sort through the mess and help people fight back. 

To mark the hub's launch, EFF will host a Reddit AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) next week and a free livestreamed panel discussion on January 15 highlighting the dangers of these misguided laws. 

“These restrictive mandates strike at the foundation of the free and open internet,” said EFF Activist Molly Buckley. “While they are wrapped in the legitimate concern about children's safety, they operate as tools of censorship, used to block people young and old from viewing or sharing information that the government deems ‘harmful’ or ‘offensive.’ They also create surveillance systems that critically undermine online privacy, and chill access to vital online communities and resources. Our new resource hub is a one-stop shop for information that people can use to fight back and redirect lawmakers to things that will actually help young people, like a comprehensive privacy law.” 

Half of U.S. states have enacted some sort of online age verification law. At the federal level, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee last week held a hearing on “Legislative Solutions to Protect Children and Teens Online.” While many of the 19 bills on that hearing’s agenda involve age verification, none would truly protect children and teens. Instead, they threaten to make it harder to access content that can be crucial, even lifesaving, for some kids. 

It’s not just in the U.S.  Effective this week, a new Australian law requires social media platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under the age of 16 from creating or keeping an account. 

We all want young people to be safe online. However, age verification is not the panacea that regulators and corporations claim it to be; in fact, it could undermine the safety of many. 

Age verification laws generally require online services to check, estimate, or verify all users’ ages—often through invasive tools like government ID checks, biometric scans, or other dubious “age estimation” methods—before granting them access to certain online content or services. These methods are often inaccurate and always privacy-invasive, demanding that users hand over sensitive and immutable personal information that links their offline identity to their online activity. Once that valuable data is collected, it can easily be leaked, hacked, or misused.  

To truly protect everyone online, including children, EFF advocates for a comprehensive data privacy law. 

EFF will host a Reddit AMA on r/privacy from Monday, Dec. 15 at 12 p.m. PT through Wednesday, Dec. 17 at 5 p.m. PT, with EFF attorneys, technologists, and activists answering questions about age verification on all three days. 

EFF will host a free livestream panel discussion about age verification at 12 p.m. PDT on Thursday, Jan. 15. Panelists will include Cynthia Conti-Cook, Director of Research and Policy at the Collaborative Research Center for Resilience; a representative of Gen Z for Change; EFF Director of Engineering Alexis Hancock; and EFF Associate Director of State Affairs Rindala Alajaji. RSVP at https://www.eff.org/livestream-age. 

For the age verification resource hub: https://www.eff.org/age 

For the Reddit AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/  

For the Jan. 15 livestream: https://www.eff.org/livestream-age  

 

Tags: age verificationage estimationage gatingContact:  MollyBuckleyActivistmollybuckley@eff.org

◆日販赤字16億円　物流費高騰　日販の25年4～9月期の連結決算は、売上高1633億円(前年同期比12%減)、営業損益16億円の赤字(前年同期は2400万円の赤字)。本業の取次事業でトラックなどの運搬物流コストが高騰、赤字幅が広がったことが要因。　純利益は前年同期比3倍の3億3600万円。コンビニエンスストア向けの雑誌配送をトーハンに順次移管し、6月にコンビニ向けの物流から完全撤退。そのため閉鎖した物流拠点の不動産売却益21億円の計上が大きい。◆トーハンも３年ぶり8億円赤字　..

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This blog also appears in our Age Verification Resource Hub: our one-stop shop for users seeking to understand what age-gating laws actually do, what’s at stake, how to protect yourself, and why EFF opposes all forms of age verification mandates. Head to EFF.org/Age to explore our resources and join us in the fight for a free, open, private, and yes—safe—internet.

EFF is against all mandatory age verification. Not only does it turn the internet into an age-gated cul-de-sac, but it also leaves behind many people who can’t get or don’t have proper and up-to-date documentation. While populations like undocumented immigrants and people experiencing homelessness are more obviously vulnerable groups, these restrictions also impact people with more mundane reasons for not having valid documentation on hand. Perhaps they’ve undergone life changes that impact their status or other information—such as a move, name change, or gender marker change—or perhaps they simply haven’t gotten around to updating their documents. Inconvenient events like these should not be a barrier to going online. People should also reserve the right to opt-out of unreliable technology and shady practices that could endanger their personal information.

But age restriction mandates threaten all of that. Not only do age-gating laws block adults and youth alike from freely accessing services on the web, they also force users to trade their anonymity—a pillar of online expression—for a system in which they are bound to their real-life identities. And this surveillance regime stretches beyond just age restrictions on certain content; much of this infrastructure is also connected to government plans for creating a digital system of proof of identity.

So how does age gating actually work? The age and identity verification industry has devised countless different methods platforms can purchase to—in theory—figure out the ages and/or identities of their users.  But in practice, there is no technology available that is entirely privacy-protective, fully accurate, and that guarantees complete coverage of the population. Full stop.

Every system of age verification or age estimation demands that users hand over sensitive and oftentimes immutable personal information that links their offline identity to their online activity, risking their safety and security in the process.

But in practice, there is no technology available that is entirely privacy-protective, fully accurate, and that guarantees complete coverage of the population. Full stop.

With that said, as we see more of these laws roll out across the U.S. and the rest of the world, it’s important to understand the differences between these technologies so you can better identify the specific risks of each method, and make smart decisions about how you share your own data.

Age Assurance Methods

There are many different technologies that are being developed, attempted, and deployed to establish user age. In many cases, a single platform will have implemented a mixture of methods. For example, a user may need to submit both a physical government ID and a face scan as part of a liveliness check to establish that they are the person pictured on the physical ID. 

Age assurance methods generally fall into three categories:

1. Age Attestation
2. Age Estimation
3. ID-bound Proof

Age Attestation Self-attestation 

Sometimes, you’ll be asked to declare your age, without requiring any form of verification. One way this might happen is through one-off self-attestation. This type of age attestation has been around for a while; you may have seen it when an alcohol website asks if you’re over 21, or when Steam asks you to input your age to view game content that may not be appropriate for all ages. It’s usually implemented as a pop-up on a website, and they might ask you for your age every time you enter, or remember it between site accesses. This sort of attestation provides an indication that the site may not be appropriate for all viewers, but gives users the autonomy and respect to make that decision for themselves.

An alternative proposed approach to declaring your own age, called device-bound age attestation, is to have you set your age on your operating system or on App Stores before you can make purchases or browse the web. This age or age range might then be shared with websites or apps. On an Apple device, that age can be modified after creation, as long as an adult age is chosen. It’s important to separate device-bound age attestation from methods that require age verification or estimation at the device or app store level (common to digital ID solutions and some proposed laws). It’s only attestation if you’re permitted to set your age to whatever you choose without needing to prove anything to your provider or another party—providing flexibility for age declaration outside of mandatory age verification.

Attestation through parental controls

The sort of parental controls found on Apple and Android devices, Windows computers, and video game consoles provide the most flexible way for parents to manage what content their minor children can access. These settings can be applied through the device operating system, third-party applications, or by establishing a child account. Decisions about what content a young person can access are made via consent-driven mechanisms. As the manager, the parent or guardian will see requests and activity from their child depending on how strict or lax the settings are set. This could include requests to install an app, make a purchase on an app store, communicate with a new contact, or browse a particular website. The parent or guardian can then choose whether or not to accept the request and allow the activity. 

One survey that collected answers from 1,000 parents found that parental controls are underutilized. Adoption of parental controls varied widely, from 51% on tablets to 35% on video game consoles. To help encourage more parents to make use of these settings, companies should continue to make them clearer and easier to use and manage. Parental controls are better suited to accommodating diverse cultural contexts and individual family concerns than a one-size-fits-all government mandate. It’s also safer to use native settings–or settings provided by the operating system itself–than it is to rely on third-party parental control applications. These applications have experienced data breaches and often effectively function as spyware.

Age Estimation

Instead of asking you directly, the system guesses your age based on data it collects about you.

Age estimation through photo and facial estimation

Age estimation by photo or live facial age analysis is when a system uses an image of a face to guess a person’s age.

A poorly designed system might improperly store these facial images or retain them for significant periods, creating a risk of data leakage. Our faces are unique, immutable, and constantly on display. In the hands of an adversary, and cross-referenced to other readily available information about us, this information can expose intimate details about us or lead to biometric tracking.

This technology has also proven fickle and often inaccurate, causing false negatives and positives, exacerbation of racial biases, and unprotected usage of biometric data to complete the analysis. And because it’s usually conducted with AI models, there often isn’t a way for a user to challenge a decision directly without falling back on more intrusive methods like submitting a government ID. 

Age inference based on user data and third party services

Age inference systems are normally conducted through estimating how old someone is based on their account information or querying other databases, where the account may have done age verification already, to cross reference with the existing information they have on that account.

Age inference includes but not limited to:

• Partnering with data brokers to gather data associated with an email, like utility use or mortgage purchases, or associated with a name, such as transaction history from a credit bureau;
• Other AI model-assisted deployments that infer age based on existing account or web activity, such as account age or “happy birthday” messages;
• Credit card ownership checks.

In order to view how old someone is via account information associated with their email, services often use data brokers to provide this information. This incentivizes even more collection of our data for the sake of age estimation and rewards data brokers for collecting a mass of data on people. Also, regulation of these age inference services varies based on a country’s privacy laws.

ID-bound Proof

ID-bound proofs, methods that use your government issued ID, are often used as a fallback for failed age estimation. Consequently, any government-issued ID backed verification disproportionately excludes certain demographics from accessing online services. A significant portion of the U.S. population does not have access to government-issued IDs, with millions of adults lacking a valid driver’s license or state-issued ID. This disproportionately affects Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, immigrants, and individuals with disabilities, who are less likely to possess the necessary identification. In addition, non-U.S. citizens, including undocumented immigrants, face barriers to acquiring government-issued IDs. The exclusionary nature of document-based verification systems is a major concern, as it could prevent entire communities from accessing essential services or engaging in online spaces.

Physical ID uploaded and stored as an image 

When an image of a physical ID is required, users are forced to upload—not just momentarily display—sensitive personal information, such as government-issued ID or biometric identifiers, to third-party services in order to gain access to age-restricted content. This creates significant privacy and security concerns, as users have no direct control over who receives and stores their personal data, where it is sent, and how it may be accessed, used, or leaked outside the immediate verification process.

Requiring users to digitally hand over government-issued identification to verify their age introduces substantial privacy risks. Once sensitive information like a government-issued ID is uploaded to a website or third-party service, there is no guarantee that it will be handled securely. The verification process typically involves transmitting this data across multiple intermediaries, which means the risk of a data breach is heightened. The misuse of sensitive personal data, such as government IDs, has been demonstrated in numerous high-profile cases, including the breach of the age verification company AU10TIX, which exposed login credentials for over a year, and the hack of the messaging application Discord. Justifiable privacy and security concerns may chill users from accessing platforms they are lawfully entitled to access.

Device-bound digital ID

Device-bound digital ID is a credential that is locally stored on your device. This comes in the form of government or privately-run wallet applications, like those offered by Apple and Google. Digital IDs are subject to a higher level of security within the Google and Apple wallets (as they should be). This means they are not synced to your account or across services. If you lose the device, you will need to reissue a new credential to the new one. Websites and services can directly query your digital ID to reveal only certain information from your ID, like age range, instead of sharing all of your information. This is called “selective disclosure."

There are many reasons someone may not be able to acquire a digital ID, preventing them from relying on this option. This includes lack of access to a smartphone, sharing devices with another person, or inability to get a physical ID. No universal standards exist governing how ID expiration, name changes, or address updates affect the validity of digital identity credentials. How to handle status changes is left up to the credential issuer.

Asynchronous and Offline Tokens

This is an issued token of some kind that doesn’t necessarily need network access to an external party or service every time you use it to establish your age with a verifier when they ask. A common danger in age verification services is the proliferation of multiple third-parties and custom solutions, which vary widely in their implementation and security. One proposal to avoid this is to centralize age checks with a trusted service that provides tokens that can be used to pass age checks in other places. Although this method requires a user to still submit to age verification or estimation once, after passing the initial facial age estimation or ID check, a user is issued a digital token they can present later to to show that they've previously passed an age check. The most popular proposal, AgeKeys, is similar to passkeys in that the tokens will be saved to a device or third-party password store, and can then be easily accessed after unlocking with your preferred on-device biometric verification or pin code.

Lessons Learned

With lessons pulled from the problems with the age verification rollout in the UK and various U.S. states, age verification widens risk for everyone by presenting scope creep and blocking web information access. Privacy-preserving methods to determine age exist such as presenting an age threshold instead of your exact birth date, but have not been mass deployed or stress tested yet. Which is why policy safeguards around the deployed technology matter just as much, if not more. 

Much of the infrastructure around age verification is entangled with other mandates, like deployment of digital ID. Which is why so many digital offerings get coupled with age verification as a “benefit” to the holder. In reality it’s more of a plus for the governments that want to deploy mandatory age verification and the vendors that present their implementation that often contains multiple methods. Instead of working on a singular path to age-gate the entire web, there should be a diversity of privacy-preserving ways to attest age without locking everyone into a singular platform or method. Ultimately, offering multiple options rather than focusing on a single method that would further restrict those who can’t use that particular path.