Age verification mandates are spreading rapidly, and they’re creating a new era of online surveillance, censorship, and exclusion—affecting everyone, not just young people. These laws generally require websites and apps to collect sensitive data from all users, often through invasive methods like ID checks, biometric scans, or questionable “estimation” tools, before granting access to content. Lawmakers present these laws as a solution to “kids’ online safety,” but they actually wall off large parts of the web, build new surveillance infrastructure, increase data breach risks, and threaten the anonymity vital for support, exploration, and community building.
Join EFF’s Rindala Alajaji and Alexis Hancock, along with Hana memon from Gen-Z for Change and Cynthia Conti-Cook from Collaborative Research Center for Resilience, for a discussion about what we stand to lose as governments increasingly push to age-gate the web. We’ll explain how these laws work, who they exclude, and how they threaten privacy and free expression for people of all ages. The conversation will be followed by a live Q&A.
EFFecting Change Livestream Series:
The Human Cost of Online age Verification
Thursday, January 15th
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM Pacific
This event is LIVE and FREE!
Accessibility
This event will be live-captioned and recorded. EFF is committed to improving accessibility for our events. If you have any accessibility questions,please contact events@eff.org.
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Recording
We hope you can join us live! If you can’t make it, we’ll post the recording on YouTube and the Internet Archive!
