Writing for FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), Sarah McLaughlin makes a blunt argument about the wave of online age-verification mandates: "Age verification is identity verification."
The concern is mechanical, not hypothetical. To prove you're old enough to see a page, you increasingly have to prove who you are — uploading an ID or a face scan to reach content that used to be one click away. Do that across enough sites and anonymous browsing quietly disappears.
It's an opinion piece, and reasonable people weigh child-safety goals differently. But the privacy tradeoff it names is real and worth watching as these laws spread.
Source: Expression / FIRE