Chapter 1: What are the new online age verification laws in the U.S.?
Online age verification is growing up. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. As we close out 2025, we're looking back at some of the big tech trends that went mainstream this year. Today, age verification, where you have to prove your age online.
About half of states now require this step to prevent kids from accessing certain content, usually pornography, but in some cases, broader categories of adult content that include social media. Drew Harwell has been following this.
Chapter 2: How do age verification tools work in practice?
He's a tech reporter at The Washington Post. There's like a whole cottage industry now of contractors mainly that offer all kinds of different age verification tools. One of them is, you know, you'll be asked to hold up your ID next to your face in front of your computer webcam and it'll scan, you know, are you the face on the ID?
There's also a form of software called age estimation where you don't need your ID, but you just look into the webcam and it uses AI to... basically guess whether you're a kid or an adult. And so, you know, the big social media companies, websites will work with these contractors who run this software.
Chapter 3: What Supreme Court decision impacted age verification laws?
So you now have this additional security layer that you're seeing in a lot of places. And we've seen this age verification layer kind of building for several years. But this was the year that we got a very notable Supreme Court decision pertaining to state laws requiring it. What did the court decide and how did that decision affect the landscape for age verification?
Yeah, so it's really interesting. So at this point, we've now had basically half of the US, 25 states pass their own age verification laws.
Chapter 4: How have age verification requirements changed the internet experience?
And in one of the states in Texas, their explicit content age verification law went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that, yes, it is okay for states to demand that websites require this level of due diligence to make sure their users are of age. So that has, you know, in some ways,
settled the question in terms of what the tech companies can require and has basically encouraged a lot of lawmakers at the state and even at the federal level to kind of push forward and be more aggressive and requiring this be used by, you know, whichever tech companies they feel like requires it or deserves it. So half of states now require some form of age verification.
This year, the UK, just recently Australia, also added age verification regulations for various sites. How has this practically changed the Internet? Are we getting age verification popping up in places that don't require it?
Chapter 5: What are the privacy concerns surrounding age verification?
Is it something that's become more standard? It is something you're seeing in places that you wouldn't expect it, right? I think there's a social media platform called Blue Sky where they are hitting this challenge.
And in some states like Mississippi, they basically just had to cancel service to any user statewide because they worry about being designated as explicit or having a user post something that would be explicit and then the state coming after them. A lot of these laws... threaten very big fines against the platforms to, you know, ensure that they comply.
So, you know, the companies are being very careful. And it's really the smaller companies and websites that are nervous, not just about the law, but about the cost of the age verification, too. And, you know, these companies on the age verification, like contractor level, charge per scan, basically.
Chapter 6: Are these laws effectively protecting kids online?
So for a smaller website, it can be pretty prohibitively expensive. And just on the user level, I mean, you know, I think we've all gotten used to like the surfing the web reality of just like popping around different websites, not hitting really any like walls as we go.
But now, you know, you can be surprised by going to some random website that you just want to look at for a couple seconds and then being forced to basically prove you're an adult by, you know, again, scanning your face, giving a face print of yourself to some company that, you know, you've often never heard of and don't know what it's going to be used for in the future.
So in some ways, you know, the criticism has been that it's adding this weird layer of surveillance and almost privacy invasion to the just the standard reality of using the web. Some people that that really creeps them out. And some people feel like, hey, if it's worth, you know, keeping kids away from the darker parts of the web, I'm all for it. Right.
Chapter 7: What is the future of federal involvement in age verification laws?
I mean, what are some of the big concerns with this? Yeah, you know, this is the internet. We see data breaches, data leaks all the time. Even some of these contractors at the, you know, identity verification age assurance level, they have been, you know, compromised in cyber attacks. They've had leaks and breaches of, you know, information as sensitive as like images of your driver's license.
And so I think there's, you know, there's a concern that we're kind of sleepwalking into this new phase of the internet that could really leave people at risk.
And when we talked a couple of years ago, you brought up some cases where adults had been locked out of their accounts because there had been some kind of an error with their age verification process and they didn't pass, even though they are adults. Have you sort of seen any changes with the process or is this still an issue? It is still an issue.
So you're seeing companies like Google and OpenAI talk about we're going to basically make a reasonable guess of whether you're an adult or a kid by your behavior on our platform. You know, the people you're friends with or that you're following, the stuff you're searching for, the videos you're watching. So they're kind of using AI to estimate whether you're an adult.
So, you know, that just adds an extra layer. I think that creeps people out because they realize that what they're doing is always being sort of scanned for some, you know, guess of who they are. And, you know, we've always kind of expected and assumed that we have a sense of anonymity on the internet.
So that is kind of going away and we're creating all of these new potential issues basically to resolve this kid's safety concern. We'll be right back. You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. We're back with Drew Harwell, tech reporter at The Washington Post.
This seems like something that's potentially hard to measure, but do we have any sense of whether these policies have made, you know, the Internet safer for kids? It's a good question. I don't think there's any one specific benchmark to check it. We did a study in the UK where they brought on these age verification checks for porn sites. And we did the very odd journalistic thing of
going to a bunch of porn sites as a UK user and seeing kind of how they had changed. And what we had noticed is that the sites that were complying with the rules that were requiring age verification, the traffic to those sites was plunging, right? And it wasn't that users were suddenly spending their time online doing Bible study.
It was that they were going to seedier websites that weren't complying with the law, that were allowing anybody to see anything. And, you know, a lot of these websites were way worse, right? I mean, these were darker parts of the internet. So I think that's one of the things that, you know, we maybe don't think about when we start turning this technology on is that kids are creative.
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