- Arizona is scheduled to enforce the mandatory age verification to access places only for adults from Friday, September 26
- Aylo, the owner of several content sites for large adults, has already announced his decision to block all its content for all Arizona headquarters
- While the law comes in an attempt to protect children online, some experts warn about privacy implications
People in Arizona should soon be ready to demonstrate that they are over 18 years to access places only for adults.
As of Friday, September 26, the Arizona HB 2112 will require that each site that shows at least 30% of the content only for adults scans an identification of the government or other “commercially reasonable method”, such as credit card checks, to verify the age of users.
Fines for non -compliance can be as high as $ 10,000 per day, with parents and guardians capable of requesting up to $ 250,000 if your child really access the prohibited content.
Arizona is only the last of the US states. In passing some form of age verification law, further feeding a debate on the balance between children’s safety, privacy and online safety.
The owner of several important sites only for adults, Aylo, considered that the law is “ineffective, casual and dangerous”, confirming his decision to block all their content for all users based in Arizona.
It is likely that this movement, together with concerns about privacy and security, push people in Arizona to resort to the best VPN services to continue accessing places only for adults without the need to give up their confidential data.
How the Arizona Age Verification Law threatens its privacy
“Any regulation that requires hundreds of thousands of adult sites collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information are endangering user security,” Aylo 10 Phoenix told Fox 10 Phoenix, commenting on his decision to leave the Arizona market.
These are recurring concerns when it comes to similar laws of age verification, both inside and outside the United States. Experts in the United Kingdom, for example, have also raised similar concerns, considering that the obligatory age of the United Kingdom verifies a “privacy compensation.”
Mandatory age controls mean that both minor and adults have to share confidential information with technology suppliers, either their biometric details, bank accounts or an identification issued by the Government.
This collection of massive data could not only lead to privacy violations, especially taking into account that both the United States and Arizona still lack comprehensive data protection rules, but also make citizens vulnerable to safety risks in case these data are pirate or leak.
It is true that, according to Arizona’s law, online platforms are prohibited from storing user data collected for age verification purposes. However, it is still not clear how this provision is supposed to be applied in practice.
Easy to overcome
In his official statement, Aylo also highlights something that many experts have argued for a long time: age verification is not only invasive, but mainly ineffective.
This is mainly because to avoid tools such as a virtual private network (VPN) could allow users to seem to be sailing from a completely different location and omit any of these geographical restrictions.
That is why Michigan is also pointing to the use of VPN with its new proposed adult content law. A result that would endanger the right of Americans to privacy and security.
When commenting on this point, Nordvpn’s privacy defender, Laura Tyrylyte, told Techradar: “Restricting access to these technologies not only endangers individual freedoms, but also establishes a worrying precedent for the increase in government control over open internet.”
While Arizona’s law does not plan to get so far, everything could change if it is shown that VPN services would cause mandatory age verification requirements to be completely ineffective.
