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.
If you think blocking access to knowledge about sexuality, atheism, or drugs is actually protecting children and not about a controlling and unpopular law I don’t know what to tell you. Because it’s clearly not actually intended to protect children as much as it is to block inconvenient information to help indoctrinate children to be compliant and unquestioning.
They want to bind your id with the device you use and restricting queer kids from discovering that they’re queer is the best thing you have in mind?