- Arizona should apply compulsory age verification to access adult sites from Friday, September 26
- Aylo, the owner of several major adult content sites, has already announced his decision to block all its content for all users based in Arizona
- While the law comes to protect children online, some experts warn against the implications of privacy
Residents of Arizona must soon be ready to prove that they are over 18 years old to access the sites reserved for adults.
From Friday, September 26, the Arizona HB 2112 will require that each site displays at least 30% of the content reserved for adults to scan a government identifier or another “commercially reasonable method”, such as credit card checks, to check the age of users.
Non-compliance fines can reach $ 10,000 a day, parents and tutors are able to request up to $ 250,000 if their child really accesses the prohibited content.
Arizona is only the last American states to adopt a form of age verification law, further supplying a debate on the balance between security, privacy and child safety.
The owner of several major adult sites, Aylo, judged the law “ineffective, random and dangerous”, confirming his decision to block all its content for all users based in Arizona.
This decision, alongside concerns about confidentiality and security, is likely to push people into Arizona to turn to the best VPN services to continue accessing adult sites without the need to abandon their sensitive data.
How the law of the age of Arizona threatens your privacy
“Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites collect large amounts of very sensitive personal information put the safety of user in danger,” Aylo at Fox 10 Phoenix told his decision to leave the Arizona market.
These are recurring concerns with regard to similar laws of age verification, both in the United States and outside. Experts from the United Kingdom, for example, have also raised similar concerns, considering that the compulsory age of the age of the United Kingdom a “confidentiality compromise”.
Compulsory age checks mean that minors and adults must share sensitive information with technology providers – whether it be their biometric details, their bank accounts or their identifiers issued by the government.
This mass data collection could not only lead to privacy violations – especially since the United States and Arizona still have no complete data protection rules – but also make citizens vulnerable to security risks in the event that these data is hacked or disclosed.
It is true that, under the Arizona law, online platforms are prohibited from storing data from users collected for age verification purposes. However, we still do not know how this provision is supposed to be applied in practice.
Easy to bypass
In his official declaration, Aylo also highlights something that many experts have long argued – age verification is not only invasive, but above all ineffective.
It is mainly because the bypass of tools as a virtual private network (VPN) could allow users to seem that they are traveling a completely different location and bypass one of these geo-registration.
This is why Michigan also aims to use 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 Arizona’s law does not yet provide as far, everything could change if it is proven that the VPN services would render the mandatory requirements to verify the age completely ineffective.
