A Utah age verification law targeting VPN users goes into effect this week
Overview & Key Takeaways
It's the first US state to explicitly target VPN use with its age check legislation.
Age verification is an especially hot topic in the US right now. A California law will go into effect next year that requires operating systems to verify the user's age at account setup and the "Parents Decide Act" may introduce similar requirements to the entire nation. There are well-documented concerns from experts about the form age verification is taking right now, but put those aside for a moment, because Utah has some ideas of its own on how to tackle all this.
Enter Senate Bill 73, the state's Online Age Verification Amendments legislature. It goes into effect May 6, and will make Utah the first US state with age verification laws that specifically target VPN use. Websites with "a substantial portion of material harmful to minors" will be required to check users' ages, and the site is still on the hook if users get around it with a VPN.
"An individual is considered to be accessing the website from this state if the individual is actually located in the state, regardless of whether the individual is using a virtual private network," the bill reads, going on to state that affected websites also can't give instructions on how to use a VPN.
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If you've used a VPN before, the problem with this probably seems obvious: this software is specifically designed to obfuscate your location. In a statement shared with TechRadar, NordVPN said reliably identifying and blocking Utah-based VPN users trying to bypass age verification would be "technically impossible" and creates a "liability trap" for affected businesses.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy nonprofit, criticized the law as presenting no clean way out for adult sites and potentially paving the way for a dangerous precedent. "The legal risk could push the site to either ban all known VPN IPs, or to mandate age verification for every visitor globally. This would subject millions of users to invasive identity checks or blocks to their VPN use, regardless of where they actually live."
The foundation shared a similar sentiment when other US states proposed full-on crackdowns on VPN software, and while the Utah law is not a ban, it raises understandable privacy concerns for anyone not keen on sharing their data with third parties.
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