What started as age gates on adult websites has quietly crept into app stores and operating systems.

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.

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
    43·
    4 hours ago

    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?

    • ComradeSharkfucker@lemmy.mlEnglish
      27·
      4 hours ago

      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.

    • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
      6·
      4 hours ago

      In my youth I was taught that democracy meant that the government served the people.

      In your youth, your teachers lied to you.

      • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
        10·
        4 hours ago

        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.

        • Ebby@lemmy.ssba.com
          12·
          3 hours ago

          Well, the billionaires that own age verification and surveillance services have gone from trying their best to stalk to world through tracking and analytics, despite pesky privacy laws, to forcing giant swaths of populations to hand over data by compulsion.

          Yeah, they’re making a mint off us.

          • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
            8·
            4 hours ago

            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.

            • Ebby@lemmy.ssba.com
              5·
              4 hours ago

              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.

    • FaceDeer@fedia.io
      5·
      4 hours ago

      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.