A new Utah law going into effect Wednesday will require websites featuring adult content to go even further in verifying a user’s age before granting access to the website.
SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — A new Utah law going into effect Wednesday will require websites featuring adult content to go even further in verifying a user’s age before granting access to the website.
Under Senate Bill 73, if more than 33% of a website’s content includes material harmful to children, it will be required to verify the user is at least 18 years of age.
While age mandates went into effect in 2023 with S.B. 287, the new law also impacts Utahns using Virtual Private Networks, who otherwise would have been able to bypass age verification.
A VPN is an encrypted connection that hides a user’s data, online activity and location from a website.
Aaron Mackey, the deputy legal director of the non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation suggests the new law impedes on privacy by piercing through those VPNs.
“What this law does is it sort of affects a fundamental change in that it requires … services to actually go behind those VPNs and actually intrude on that privacy and if they discover that you’re using these VPNs, they actually require you to provide information, to de-anonymize yourself or actually provide proof of age in ways in which the whole point of using the VPN in the first place was that you wouldn’t have to be identified online,” Mackey said.
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In a statement to ABC4.com, the bill’s sponsor Utah Republican Senator Cal Musselman said
S.B. 73 is about accountability, not censorship. It simply requires companies that profit from material that is harmful to minors to take reasonable steps to keep it out of children’s hands, just like we already do with alcohol, tobacco and gambling.
Children today are being exposed to harmful online content earlier and more often than ever before, and families are seeing the consequences in rising anxiety, depression and exploitation. Ignoring those realities is not responsible.
In Utah, we believe in putting families first, standing up for parents and protecting children. S.B. 73 is a commonsense approach that protects kids while preserving individual freedoms. If a company profits from content harmful to children, it has a responsibility to implement safeguards to help prevent minors from accessing it.
Mackey fears that the intended purpose of the new law may have a broader impact on Utahns who value privacy.
“So the consequences of this type of regulation, I think, are much broader … and will affect others who have no desire to access that type of content on the internet and I think that’s what’s unfortunate is like those folks who use [VPNs] every day to access content that is not sort of the subject of this core regulation,” Mackey said.
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Source: Utah News