online child safety

Back in the mid-1990s, when The Net was among the top box office draws and Americans were just starting to flock online in droves, kids had to swipe their parents’ credit cards or find a fraudulent number online to access adult content on the web. But today’s kids—even in states with the strictest age verification laws—know they can just use Google.

Last month, a study analyzing the relative popularity of Google search terms found that age verification laws shift users’ search behavior. It’s impossible to tell if the shift represents young users attempting to circumvent the child-focused law or adult users who aren’t the actual target of the laws. But overall, enforcement causes nearly half of users to stop searching for popular adult sites complying with laws and instead search for a noncompliant rival (48 percent) or virtual private network (VPN) services (34 percent), which are used to mask a location and circumvent age checks on preferred sites, the study found.

“Individuals adapt primarily by moving to content providers that do not require age verification,” the study concluded.

Although the Google Trends data prevented researchers from analyzing trends by particular age groups, the findings help confirm critics’ fears that age verification laws “may be ineffective, potentially compromise user privacy, and could drive users toward less regulated, potentially more dangerous platforms,” the study said.

The authors warn that lawmakers are not relying enough on evidence-backed policy evaluations to truly understand the consequences of circumvention strategies before passing laws. Internet law expert Eric Goldman recently warned in an analysis of age-estimation tech available today that this situation creates a world in which some kids are likely to be harmed by the laws designed to protect them.

Goldman told Ars that all of the age check methods carry the same privacy and security flaws, concluding that technology alone can’t solve this age-old societal problem. And logic-defying laws that push for them could end up “dramatically” reshaping the Internet, he warned.

Zeve Sanderson, a co-author of the Google Trends study, told Ars that “if you’re a policymaker, in addition to being potentially nervous about the more dangerous content, it’s also about just benefiting a noncompliant firm.”

“You don’t want to create a regulatory environment where noncompliance is incentivized or they benefit in some way,” Sanderson said.

Sanderson’s study pointed out that search data is only part of the picture. Some users may be using VPNs and accessing adult sites through direct URLs rather than through search. Others may rely on social media to find adult content, a 2025 conference paper noted, “easily” bypassing age checks on the largest platforms. VPNs remain the most popular circumvention method, a 2024 article in the International Journal of Law, Ethics, and Technology confirmed, “and yet they tend to be ignored or overlooked by statutes despite their popularity.”

While kids are ducking age gates and likely putting their sensitive data at greater risk, adult backlash may be peaking over the red wave of age-gating laws already blocking adults from visiting popular porn sites in several states.

Some states started controversially requiring checking IDs to access adult content, which prompted Pornhub owner Aylo to swiftly block access to its sites in certain states. Pornhub instead advocates for device-based age verification, which it claims is a safer choice.

Aylo’s campaign has seemingly won over some states that either explicitly recommend device-based age checks or allow platforms to adopt whatever age check method they deem “reasonable.” Other methods could include app store-based age checks, algorithmic age estimation (based on a user’s web activity), face scans, or even tools that guess users’ ages based on hand movements.

On Reddit, adults have spent the past year debating the least intrusive age verification methods, as it appears inevitable that adult content will stay locked down, and they dread a future where more and more adult sites might ask for IDs. Additionally, critics have warned that showing an ID magnifies the risk of users publicly exposing their sexual preferences if a data breach or leak occurs.

To avoid that fate, at least one Redditor has attempted to reinvent the earliest age verification method, promoting a resurgence of credit card-based age checks that society discarded as unconstitutional in the early 2000s.

Under those systems, an entire industry of age verification companies emerged, selling passcodes to access adult sites for a supposedly nominal fee. The logic was simple: Only adults could buy credit cards, so only adults could buy passcodes with credit cards.

If “a person buys, for a nominal fee, a randomly generated passcode not connected to them in any way” to access adult sites, one Redditor suggested about three months ago, “there won’t be any way to tie the individual to that passcode.”

“This could satisfy the requirement to keep stuff out of minors’ hands,” the Redditor wrote in a thread asking how any site featuring sexual imagery could hypothetically comply with US laws. “Maybe?”

Several users rushed to educate the Redditor about the history of age checks. Those grasping for purely technology-based solutions today could be propping up the next industry flourishing from flawed laws, they said.

And, of course, since ’90s kids easily ducked those age gates, too, history shows why investing millions to build the latest and greatest age verification systems probably remains a fool’s errand after all these years.

The cringey early history of age checks

The earliest age verification systems were born out of Congress’s “first attempt to outlaw pornography online,” the LA Times reported. That attempt culminated in the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

Although the law was largely overturned a year later, the million-dollar age verification industry was already entrenched, partly due to its intriguing business model. These companies didn’t charge adult sites any fee to add age check systems—which required little technical expertise to implement—and instead shared a big chunk of their revenue with porn sites that opted in. Some sites got 50 percent of revenues, estimated in the millions, simply for adding the functionality.

The age check business was apparently so lucrative that in 2000, one adult site, which was sued for distributing pornographic images of children, pushed fans to buy subscriptions to its preferred service as a way of helping to fund its defense, Wired reported. “Please buy an Adult Check ID, and show your support to fight this injustice!” the site urged users. (The age check service promptly denied any association with the site.)

In a sense, the age check industry incentivized adult sites’ growth, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney told the LA Times in 1999. In turn, that fueled further growth in the age verification industry.

Some services made their link to adult sites obvious, like Porno Press, which charged a one-time fee of $9.95 to access affiliated adult sites, a Congressional filing noted. But many others tried to mask the link, opting for names like PayCom Billing Services, Inc. or CCBill, as Forbes reported, perhaps enticing more customers by drawing less attention on a credit card statement. Other firms had names like Adult Check, Mancheck, and Adult Sights, Wired reported.

Of these firms, the biggest and most successful was Adult Check. At its peak popularity in 2001, the service boasted 4 million customers willing to pay “for the privilege of ogling 400,000 sex sites,” Forbes reported.

At the head of the company was Laith P. Alsarraf, the CEO of the Adult Check service provider Cybernet Ventures.

Alsarraf testified to Congress several times, becoming a go-to expert witness for lawmakers behind the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA). Like the version of the CDA that prompted it, this act was ultimately deemed unconstitutional. And some judges and top law enforcement officers defended Alsarraf’s business model with Adult Check in court—insisting that it didn’t impact adult speech and “at most” posed a “modest burden” that was “outweighed by the government’s compelling interest in shielding minors” from adult content.

But his apparent conflicts of interest also drew criticism. One judge warned in 1999 that “perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) noted.

Summing up the seeming conflict, Ann Beeson, an ACLU lawyer, told the LA Times, “the government wants to shut down porn on the Net. And yet their main witness is this guy who makes his money urging more and more people to access porn on the Net.”

’90s kids dodged Adult Check age gates

Adult Check’s subscription costs varied, but the service predictably got more expensive as its popularity spiked. In 1999, customers could snag a “lifetime membership” for $76.95 or else fork over $30 every two years or $20 annually, the LA Times reported. Those were good deals compared to the significantly higher costs documented in the 2001 Forbes report, which noted a three-month package was available for $20, or users could pay $20 monthly to access supposedly premium content.

Among Adult Check’s customers were apparently some savvy kids who snuck through the cracks in the system. In various threads debating today’s laws, several Redditors have claimed that they used Adult Check as minors in the ’90s, either admitting to stealing a parent’s credit card or sharing age-authenticated passcodes with friends.

“Adult Check? I remember signing up for that in the mid-late 90s,” one commenter wrote in a thread asking if anyone would ever show ID to access porn. “Possibly a minor friend of mine paid for half the fee so he could use it too.”

“Those years were a strange time,” the commenter continued. “We’d go see tech-suspense-horror-thrillers like The Net and Disclosure where the protagonist has to fight to reclaim their lives from cyberantagonists, only to come home to send our personal information along with a credit card payment so we could look at porn.”

“LOL. I remember paying for the lifetime package, thinking I’d use it for decades,” another commenter responded. “Doh…”

Adult Check thrived even without age check laws

Sanderson’s study noted that today, minors’ “first exposure [to adult content] typically occurs between ages 11–13,” which is “substantially earlier than pre-Internet estimates.” Kids seeking out adult content may be in a period of heightened risk-taking or lack self-control, while others may be exposed without ever seeking it out. Some studies suggest that kids who are more likely to seek out adult content could struggle with lower self-esteem, emotional problems, body image concerns, or depressive symptoms. These potential negative associations with adolescent exposure to porn have long been the basis for lawmakers’ fight to keep the content away from kids—and even the biggest publishers today, like Pornhub, agree that it’s a worthy goal.

After parents got wise to ’90s kids dodging age gates, pressure predictably mounted on Adult Check to solve the problem, despite Adult Check consistently admitting that its system wasn’t foolproof. Alsarraf claimed that Adult Check developed “proprietary” technology to detect when kids were using credit cards or when multiple kids were attempting to use the same passcode at the same time from different IP addresses. He also claimed that Adult Check could detect stolen credit cards, bogus card numbers, card numbers “posted on the Internet,” and other fraud.

Meanwhile, the LA Times noted, Cybernet Ventures pulled in an estimated $50 million in 1999, ensuring that the CEO could splurge on a $690,000 house in Pasadena and a $100,000 Hummer. Although Adult Check was believed to be his most profitable venture at that time, Alsarraf told the LA Times that he wasn’t really invested in COPA passing.

“I know Adult Check will flourish,” Alsarraf said, “with or without the law.”

And he was apparently right. By 2001, subscriptions banked an estimated $320 million.

After the CDA and COPA were blocked, “many website owners continue to use Adult Check as a responsible approach to content accessibility,” Alsarraf testified.

While adult sites were likely just in it for the paychecks—which reportedly were dependably delivered—he positioned this ongoing growth as fueled by sites voluntarily turning to Adult Check to protect kids and free speech. “Adult Check allows a free flow of ideas and constitutionally protected speech to course through the Internet without censorship and unreasonable intrusion,” Alsarraf said.

“The Adult Check system is the least restrictive, least intrusive method of restricting access to content that requires minimal cost, and no parental technical expertise and intervention: It does not judge content, does not inhibit free speech, and it does not prevent access to any ideas, word, thoughts, or expressions,” Alsarraf testified.

Britney Spears aided Adult Check’s downfall

Adult Check’s downfall ultimately came in part thanks to Britney Spears, Wired reported in 2002. Spears went from Mickey Mouse Club child star to the “Princess of Pop” at 16 years old with her hit “Baby One More Time” in 1999, the same year that Adult Check rose to prominence.

Today, Spears is well-known for her activism, but in the late 1990s and early 2000s, she was one of the earliest victims of fake online porn.

Spears submitted documents in a lawsuit raised by the publisher of a porn magazine called Perfect 10. The publisher accused Adult Check of enabling the infringement of its content featured on the age check provider’s partner sites, and Spears’ documents helped prove that Adult Check was also linking to “non-existent nude photos,” allegedly in violation of unfair competition laws. The case was an early test of online liability, and Adult Check seemingly learned the hard way that the courts weren’t on its side.

That suit prompted an injunction blocking Adult Check from partnering with sites promoting supposedly illicit photos of “models and celebrities,” which it said was no big deal because it only comprised about 6 percent of its business.

However, after losing the lawsuit in 2004, Adult Check’s reputation took a hit, and it fell out of the pop lexicon. Although Cybernet Ventures continued to exist, Adult Check screening was dropped from sites, as it was no longer considered the gold standard in age verification. Perhaps more importantly, it was no longer required by law.

But although millions validated Adult Check for years, not everybody in the ’90s bought into Adult Check’s claims that it was protecting kids from porn. Some critics said it only provided a veneer of online safety without meaningfully impacting kids. Most of the country—more than 250 million US residents—never subscribed.

“I never used Adult Check,” one Redditor said in a thread pondering whether age gate laws might increase the risks of government surveillance. “My recollection was that it was an untrustworthy scam and unneeded barrier for the theater of legitimacy.”

Alsarraf keeps a lower profile these days and did not respond to Ars’ request to comment.

The rise and fall of Adult Check may have prevented more legally viable age verification systems from gaining traction. The ACLU argued that its popularity trampled the momentum of the “least restrictive” method for age checks available in the ’90s, a system called the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS).

Based on rating and filtering technology, PICS allowed content providers or third-party interest groups to create private rating systems so that “individual users can then choose the rating system that best reflects their own values, and any material that offends them will be blocked from their homes.”

However, like all age check systems, PICS was also criticized as being imperfect. Legal scholar Lawrence Lessig called it “the devil” because “it allows censorship at any point on the chain of distribution” of online content.

Although the age verification technology has changed, today’s lawmakers are stuck in the same debate decades later, with no perfect solutions in sight.

SCOTUS to rule on constitutionality of age gate laws

This summer, the Supreme Court will decide whether a Texas law blocking minors’ access to porn is constitutional. The decision could either stunt the momentum or strengthen the backbone of nearly 20 laws in red states across the country seeking to age-gate the Internet.

For privacy advocates opposing the laws, the SCOTUS ruling feels like a sink-or-swim moment for age gates, depending on which way the court swings. And it will come just as blue states like Colorado have recently begun pushing for age gates, too. Meanwhile, other laws increasingly seek to safeguard kids’ privacy and prevent social media addiction by also requiring age checks.

Since the 1990s, the US has debated how to best keep kids away from harmful content without trampling adults’ First Amendment rights. And while cruder credit card-based systems like Adult Check are no longer seen as viable, it’s clear that for lawmakers today, technology is still viewed as both the problem and the solution.

While lawmakers claim that the latest technology makes it easier than ever to access porn, advancements like digital IDs, device-based age checks, or app store age checks seem to signal salvation, making it easier to digitally verify user ages. And some artificial intelligence solutions have likely made lawmakers’ dreams of age-gating the Internet appear even more within reach.

Critics have condemned age gates as unconstitutionally limiting adults’ access to legal speech, at the furthest extreme accusing conservatives of seeking to censor all adult content online or expand government surveillance by tracking people’s sexual identity. (Goldman noted that “Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025 and President Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, admitted that he favored age authentication mandates as a ‘back door’ way to censor pornography.”)

Ultimately, SCOTUS could end up deciding if any kind of age gate is ever appropriate. The court could perhaps rule that strict scrutiny, which requires a narrowly tailored solution to serve a compelling government interest, must be applied, potentially ruling out all of lawmakers’ suggested strategies. Or the court could decide that strict scrutiny applies but age checks are narrowly tailored. Or it could go the other way and rule that strict scrutiny does not apply, so all state lawmakers need to show is that their basis for requiring age verification is rationally connected to their interest in blocking minors from adult content.

Age verification remains flawed, experts say

If there’s anything the ’90s can teach lawmakers about age gates, it’s that creating an age verification industry dependent on adult sites will only incentivize the creation of more adult sites that benefit from the new rules. Back then, when age verification systems increased sites’ revenues, compliant sites were rewarded, but in today’s climate, it’s the noncompliant sites that stand to profit by not authenticating ages.

Sanderson’s study noted that Louisiana “was the only state that implemented age verification in a manner that plausibly preserved a user’s anonymity while verifying age,” which is why Pornhub didn’t block the state over its age verification law. But other states that Pornhub blocked passed copycat laws that “tended to be stricter, either requiring uploads of an individual’s government identification,” methods requiring providing other sensitive data, “or even presenting biometric data such as face scanning,” the study noted.

The technology continues evolving as the debate rages on. Some of the most popular platforms and biggest tech companies have been testing new age estimation methods this year. Notably, Discord is testing out face scans in the United Kingdom and Australia, and both Meta and Google are testing technology to supposedly detect kids lying about their ages online.

But a solution has not yet been found as parents and their lawyers circle social media companies they believe are harming their kids. In fact, the unreliability of the tech remains an issue for Meta, which is perhaps the most motivated to find a fix, having long faced immense pressure to improve child safety on its platforms. Earlier this year, Meta had to yank its age detection tool after the “measure didn’t work as well as we’d hoped and inadvertently locked out some parents and guardians who shared devices with their teens,” the company said.

On April 21, Meta announced that it started testing the tech in the US, suggesting the flaws were fixed, but Meta did not directly respond to Ars’ request to comment in more detail on updates.

Two years ago, Ash Johnson, a senior policy manager at the nonpartisan nonprofit think tank the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), urged Congress to “support more research and testing of age verification technology,” saying that the government’s last empirical evaluation was in 2014. She noted then that “the technology is not perfect, and some children will break the rules, eventually slipping through the safeguards,” but that lawmakers need to understand the trade-offs of advocating for different tech solutions or else risk infringing user privacy.

More research is needed, Johnson told Ars, while Sanderson’s study suggested that regulators should also conduct circumvention research or be stuck with laws that have a “limited effectiveness as a standalone policy tool.”

For example, while AI solutions are increasingly more accurate—and in one Facebook survey overwhelmingly more popular with users, Goldman’s analysis noted—the tech still struggles to differentiate between a 17- or 18-year-old, for example.

Like Aylo, ITIF recommends device-based age authentication as the least restrictive method, Johnson told Ars. Perhaps the biggest issue with that option, though, is that kids may have an easy time accessing adult content on devices shared with parents, Goldman noted.

Not sharing Johnson’s optimism, Goldman wrote that “there is no ‘preferred’ or ‘ideal’ way to do online age authentication.” Even a perfect system that accurately authenticates age every time would be flawed, he suggested.

“Rather, they each fall on a spectrum of ‘dangerous in one way’ to ‘dangerous in a different way,'” he wrote, concluding that “every solution has serious privacy, accuracy, or security problems.”

Kids at “grave risk” from uninformed laws

As a “burgeoning” age verification industry swells, Goldman wants to see more earnest efforts from lawmakers to “develop a wider and more thoughtful toolkit of online child safety measures.” They could start, he suggested, by consistently defining minors in laws so it’s clear who is being regulated and what access is being restricted. They could then provide education to parents and minors to help them navigate online harms.

Without such careful consideration, Goldman predicts a dystopian future prompted by age verification laws. If SCOTUS endorses them, users could become so accustomed to age gates that they start entering sensitive information into various web platforms without a second thought. Even the government knows that would be a disaster, Goldman said.

“Governments around the world want people to think twice before sharing sensitive biometric information due to the information’s immutability if stolen,” Goldman wrote. “Mandatory age authentication teaches them the opposite lesson.”

Goldman recommends that lawmakers start seeking an information-based solution to age verification problems rather than depending on tech to save the day.

“Treating the online age authentication challenges as purely technological encourages the unsupportable belief that its problems can be solved if technologists ‘nerd harder,'” Goldman wrote. “This reductionist thinking is a categorical error. Age authentication is fundamentally an information problem, not a technology problem. Technology can help improve information accuracy and quality, but it cannot unilaterally solve information challenges.”

Lawmakers could potentially minimize risks to kids by only verifying age when someone tries to access restricted content or “by compelling age authenticators to minimize their data collection” and “promptly delete any highly sensitive information” collected. That likely wouldn’t stop some vendors from collecting or retaining data anyway, Goldman suggested. But it could be a better standard to protect users of all ages from inevitable data breaches, since we know that “numerous authenticators have suffered major data security failures that put authenticated individuals at grave risk.”

“If the policy goal is to protect minors online because of their potential vulnerability, then forcing minors to constantly decide whether or not to share highly sensitive information with strangers online is a policy failure,” Goldman wrote. “Child safety online needs a whole-of-society response, not a delegate-and-pray approach.”