Websites that publish a significant proportion of content harmful to minors must verify every user is over 18 through a reasonably effective method — such as reviewing a state-issued identification card — under a Tennessee law set to go into effect Wednesday.
Website operators who violate the law could face felony charges. That’s a distinguishing feature in a law that otherwise resembles several other measures going into effect in other jurisdictions, as governments in the U.S. and beyond move to keep minors away from easily-accessible online media deemed harmful or obscene.
A group representing pornography and sex shop interests sued late last month to block the Tennessee law on free speech and privacy grounds. They argued the law won’t actually keep minors away from harmful content, instead simply pushing them to darker and less-moderated corners of the internet. And they said the law will have a chilling effect on adult users reluctant to share personally identifying information or images of themselves with such websites.
The Tennessee law attempts to address privacy concerns in part by forbidding the websites from storing identifying information about a user whose age it has verified.
But it also requires websites to store anonymized records that demonstrate they have been systematically verifying users are more than 18 years old.