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.
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.
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. :(
The problem is the silent majority.
And what counts as silent.
Because if you haven’t actually demonstrated, talked to, or written (with a letter) to a politician, you’re effectively silent.
Talking about it with friends and family and on the internet is tantamount to silence when it comes to influencing politics.
The other side, the raving lunatics who want total surveillance… they are loud as hell.
I’m assuming you’re in the USA. If this a correct assumption, then you’re not in a democracy, strictly speaking; but a republic.
I am not. I am from a country whose constitution starts with the statement that it is a democratic republic.
And you believe it?