Redditor accidentally reinvents discarded ’90s tool to escape today’s age gates – Ars Technica
2025-04-30T11:00:41Z
The ’90s called. They want their flawed age verification methods back.
Back in the mid-1990s, when The Net was among the top box office draws and Americans were just starting to flock online in droves, kids had to swipe their parents’ credit cards or find a fraudulent number online to access adult content on the web. But today’s kids—even in states with the strictest age verification laws—know they can just use Google.
Last month, a study analyzing the relative popularity of Google search terms found that age verification laws shift users’ search behavior. It’s impossible to tell if the shift represents young users attempting to circumvent the child-focused law or adult users who aren’t the actual target of the laws. But overall, enforcement causes nearly half of users to stop searching for popular adult sites complying with laws and instead search for a noncompliant rival (48 percent) or virtual private network (VPN) services (34 percent), which are used to mask a location and circumvent age checks on preferred sites, the study found.
“Individuals adapt primarily by moving to content providers that do not require age verification,” the study concluded.
Although the Google Trends data prevented researchers from analyzing trends by particular age groups, the findings help confirm critics’ fears that age verification laws “may be ineffective, potentially compromise user privacy, and could drive users toward less regulated, potentially more dangerous platforms,” the study said.
The authors warn that lawmakers are not relying enough on evidence-backed policy evaluations to truly understand the consequences of circumvention strategies before passing laws. Internet law expert Eric Goldman recently warned in an analysis of age-estimation tech available today that this situation creates a world in which some kids are likely to be harmed by the laws designed to protect them.
Goldman told Ars that all of the age check methods carry the same privacy and security flaws, concluding that technology alone can’t solve this age-old societal problem. And logic-defying laws that push for them could end up “dramatically” reshaping the Internet, he warned.
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