Age Verification Is Coming For the Internet. We Built You a Resource Hub to Fight Back.

EFF update
21 hours 9 minutes ago

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.

Molly Buckley

The Best Big Media Merger Is No Merger at All

EFF update
1 day ago

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. 

Katharine Trendacosta

EFF Launches Age Verification Hub as Resource Against Misguided Laws

EFF update
1 day 3 hours ago
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
Josh Richman

【出版界の動き】12月 コンテンツ産業支援に予算350億円

日本ジャーナリストクラブ（JCJ）
1 day 4 hours ago
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