You know that pop-up. You click “yes” for each time. It asks you to verify that you are over 18. Sometimes, “you must be over 21 to access this site” is written in big, bold letters. Sometimes, at some critical moment, you are asked to go back for what seems like years as you find your birth year. Maybe you put your real age; maybe you’re lying and claiming to be younger than you are (who’s going to check, this stupid website?); Maybe you’re not old enough and want to find out what’s behind this easy-to-avoid pop-up. Either way, you’re going through it, and it’s easy.
Political consensus on protecting children online is almost universal. What Americans don’t agree on is whether the tools lawmakers have built are actually doing the job. A new survey from the digital security platform All About Cookies, conducted in February with responses from 1,000 US adults, reveals a surprising fact: strong public support for age verification laws, combined with general agreement that those laws will not work.
“A lot of kids, especially teenagers, are probably more tech-savvy than some of these adults,” Josh Koebert, reporter for All About Cookies, said. Good luck. “So if I can get around it, they can get around it.”
Adults want adults on the Internet—or at least they want kids to rely on themselves
Seventy-nine percent of Americans support age verification laws for adult content, and 74% back it for social media platforms. However 85%, the highest number of agreement in the entire survey, say that the current rules are too easy. More than half of users who have been asked to verify their age online admitted that they have found work, often by switching to a less moderated website (45%) or using a VPN (22%).
Koebert, who wrote the study, said: “The main takeaway is twofold. “Most people think that children need to be protected, but what we have is not working.”
A more revealing story for business leaders may be the data concerns that the analysis emerges from. Ninety-two percent of respondents expressed at least one concern about age verification laws, and the fear centered around business data management.
Seventy-nine percent are concerned about privacy and data security; 66% mention the risk of identity theft; and 41% fear being featured or added to an external list after verification is completed
Those fears are not hypothetical. Many age verification laws include provisions requiring companies to delete user data once verification is complete. But high-profile breaches — and incidents involving Discord’s third-party authentication vendors 5CA and Persona — have eroded confidence that the rules are being followed.
“People have been bitten every now and then,” Koebert said. “They gave information to a big company and ended up going broke. Of course they’re going to be reluctant to give out a government ID.”
The study also shows an unexpected aspect of the suppression strategy: sports betting. Ninety percent of respondents said that gambling platforms should face strict age verification, the highest number of any group tested, which is also high on social media.
Koebert says it’s due to market saturation. Since the Supreme Court issued a ruling in 2018 that opened up the possibility of legal betting in the country, betting businesses have been flooded with advertisements.
“It’s impossible to watch sports without being attacked,” he said. “Children are watching these sports with their parents, and people are thinking, ‘This is not a healthy life.'”
Despite widespread regulatory support, the public’s preferred solution is moving away from top-down directives. Fifty-five percent said that parental controls and monitoring tools, not government laws, were the best way to keep children safe online, while only one in five chose age verification laws as the right approach.
As authentication requirements expand to cover nearly half of US states, and as countries from Australia to Spain implement their own versions, the main challenge for lawmakers and platforms is changing: how to protect children online without creating privacy vulnerabilities that make adults distrustful of the internet.
Where does it stop? Where does it go next? What happens next? Koebert asked about how far the rules could go. “Questions I don’t think we have the answers to.”
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