Utah is set to become the first state to prohibit the use of VPNs to avoid age-verification barriers after legislation goes into effect on Wednesday.
Senate Bill 73 will hold websites liable for people who mask their location while in Utah and will effectively treat anyone who connects to a Utah VPN as someone physically in Utah for age-verification purposes.
The legislation follows similar proposed bills from Wisconsin and Michigan and is seen as the first major US step toward regulating VPN use to avoid age verification.
However, privacy advocates warn that the legislation could lead to a blanket ban of all VPN addresses in a “technical whack-a-mole that likely no company can win”. The Electronic Frontiers Federation wrote that “if a website cannot reliably detect a VPN user’s true location and the law requires it to do so for all users in a particular state, then the legal risk could push the site to either ban all known VPN IPs, or to mandate age verification for every visitor globally.”
In the past year, both Australia and the UK have enacted age-verification measures to restrict access to “harmful content.” While Australia’s legislation has been called an “unmitigated disaster” by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, it’s been reported that children in the UK have been drawing on mustaches to get past age barriers.
Representatives for the EFF and the Utah Senate didn’t respond immediately to CNET’s request for more information.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Utah is set to become the first state to prohibit using VPNs to avoid age-verification barriers. Websites will be held liable for people who mask their location while in Utah, and anyone connecting through a Utah VPN will be treated as physically in Utah for age-verification purposes.
The legislation goes into effect on Wednesday.
Privacy advocates warn it could lead to a blanket ban of all VPN addresses, since a website that cannot reliably detect a VPN user's true location might either ban all known VPN IPs or mandate age verification for every visitor globally.
The Utah legislation follows similar proposed bills from Wisconsin and Michigan, and it is seen as the first major US step toward regulating VPN use to avoid age verification. Australia and the UK have also enacted age-verification measures in the past year.
