- Ohio is ready to enforce the mandatory age verification as of September 30, 2025
- Citizens must prove their age every time they wish to access content that is considered “obscene or harmful to minors”
- Ohio joins more than 20 US states to enforce some form of mandatory age verification requirements
Ohio has joined the list of states at the door of age some forms of content in the name of children’s online security.
As of Tuesday, September 30, 2025, Ohio citizens must demonstrate that they are over 18 years to access websites only for adults and other platforms that house “obscene or harmful to minors.”
This means that both adults and minors should be ready to share their most confidential information with these online services to give access. A requirement that has pushed users in other jurisdictions towards the best VPN applications to protect their privacy and security.
Ohio follows Arizona and more than 20 more states in the US. When approving some form of age verification law.
Until now, these new obligations have fed a debate on the balance between the digital security and the privacy of children.
Ohio Age Verification Law: a long -awaited milestone
Ohio’s age verification law is a milestone that legislators have been trying to approve for years. However, after reintroducing the provision this summer on its budget bill of more than 3,000 pages long, the mandatory verification of age was finally approved in June. Two months later, it is the law.
According to the provision of OHIO HB 96, citizens must send an identification with photo or transactional data, such as employment or education records, to grant access to the content that is considered “obscene or harmful to minors.” For current accounts, platforms must verify the ages of users every two years.
As an expert in policy and defense of the Internet society, John Perrino told Techradar, while it is reasonable to demand that adult websites and social media platforms take measures to prevent children from reaching explicit content, these types of laws also make people vulnerable to privacy and security risks.
He said: “Another thing is to demand that everyone in a state deliver an identification and risk their privacy and online safety to access legal material.”
Critics are also concerned that vague writing around what constitutes the “harmful” content could also end up censoring important online resources, such as health material or sexual education.
In general, Perrino believes that age verification requirements do not keep people safe.
“Age -based security measures that provide default protections and provide people control over the type of content they want to see are better alternatives,” he added.
“A Geofce system”
Online service providers must also use “a geophic system” to monitor the geolocation of all Internet users who try to access the age activated by age.
This means that, when user location shows Ohio, online platforms are required to block the content until “the age of a person has been verified using reasonable age verification methods.”
While an IP address is not the only detail that can be used to determine the location of a person online, it is undoubtedly the most used.
If that is the case in Ohio, avoiding tools such as a virtual private network (VPN) could allow citizens to seem to sail from a completely different location and omit any of these geostrictions.
The ease of omitting mandatory age controls is exactly the reason 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 Ohio’s law does not include any VPN blocking requirement, this could change if the VPN ended up making this provision ineffective.
