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.
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 I hope it is repealed somehow, but the elite class don’t give a fuck.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.
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?!
The non-stop flood of bad things happening makes it very difficult to keep up with anything, even the topics that are most important to us. Which makes it all the easier for new local laws that strip away our rights to be slipped past the citizens who care enough to stop them.
The information overload is the system working as intended for those who seek to exploit us.