- Ohio should apply compulsory age verification from September 30, 2025
- Citizens must prove their age each time they wish to access the content deemed “obscene or harmful for juveniles”
- Ohio joins over 20 American states to apply a certain form of compulsory origin of age verification
Ohio has joined the list of states to age certain forms of content in the name of children’s online security.
From Tuesday, September 30, 2025, the citizens of Ohio are required to prove that they are over 18 years old to access websites reserved for adults and other platforms hosting “obscene or harmful to minors”.
This means that adults and minors should be ready to share their most sensitive information with these online services to grant access. A requirement that has pushed users into other jurisdictions to the best VPN applications to protect their confidentiality and their safety.
Ohio follows Arizona and more than 20 additional American states to adopt a form of age verification law.
So far, these new obligations have fueled a debate on the balance between digital security and child life.
Ohio age verification law – a long -awaited step
The law of Ohio age verification is an important step that legislators have been trying to pass for years. However, after having reintroduced the provision this summer in its budget bill of more than 3,000 pages, compulsory age verification was finally approved in June. Two months later, it is the law.
In accordance with the provision of Ohio HB 96, citizens are required to submit a photo identity document or transactional data, such as employment or education files, to grant access to the content deemed “obscene or harmful for minors”. For current accounts, platforms must check the age of users every two years.
As a superior expert expert and advocacy of the Internet company, John Perrino has told Techradar, although it is reasonable to demand websites for adults and social media platforms to take measures to prevent children from achieving explicit content, these types of laws also make people vulnerable to the risks of confidentiality and security.
He said: “This is another thing to demand that everyone in a state was putting an identity document and risks confidentiality and online security to access legal material.”
Critics also fear that the wave label around what constitutes “harmful” content may also eventually censor significant online resources, such as health or sex education equipment.
On the whole, Perrino believes that age verification requirements do not keep people in safety by themselves.
“Age-based security measures that provide default protections and give people control the content type they want to see are better alternatives,” he added.
“A geofence system”
Online service providers are also required to use “a geofence system” to monitor the geolocation of all Internet users by trying to access informal content.
This means that when the location of users displays Ohio, online platforms are necessary to block the content until “the age of a person has been verified using reasonable age verification methods”.
Although an IP address is not the only detail that can be used to determine the location of an online person, it is certainly the most used.
If this is the case in Ohio, the bypass of tools as a virtual private network (VPN) could allow citizens to seem that they are traveling a completely different location and bypass one of these geo-restaurants.
The ease of bypassing compulsory age controls is exactly the reason why Michigan also targets the use of VPN with its new law on the content of adults offered. A result that would endanger the right of Americans in privacy and security more in danger.
Commenting on this point, the defendant of the privacy of NordVPN, Laura Tyrylyte, told Techradar: “restrict access to these technologies not only individual freedoms endangers, but also establishes a worrying precedent for increased government control on the open Internet”.
Although the Ohio law does not include any VPN blocking requirements, this could change if the VPN should end up making this provision ineffective.
