A bill advanced through the Senate Judiciary committee Monday with bipartisan support that would require Pennsylvanians to provide proof of their age, such as state identification documents, when accessing websites with at least one-third of their material consisting of adult content. The goal, according to the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Cris Dush (R-Jefferson), is to protect minors.
“When it comes to the protection of children from exposure to pornography, the only verification measure, if any, is clicking a button indicating you’re 18 years old,” Dush said in committee. “Why should we not protect our kids from pornography websites the same way we protect them from online gambling?”
But experts warn that, while such measures may be intended to protect children, they can ultimately wind up burdening adults, posing data privacy concerns, and restricting access to First Amendment-protected material.
“We believe [these laws] burden adults’ rights to access lawful speech, that they can destroy people’s ability to be anonymous online, and that they are privacy and data security disasters waiting to happen,” said Aaron Mackey, the deputy legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital civil liberties. “In the name of protecting children, you are making it such that people have a pretty difficult, if not impossible, time avoiding providing information that directly or indirectly identifies them.
The bill is one of several to advance in recent years that would age gate parts of the internet in Pennsylvania, and require all users, including adults, to provide additional, sensitive data to affected websites.
In 2024, a Democrat-backed bill that would have required what’s called age assurance for social media sites passed the House, but stalled in the Senate. “Age assurance” is less restrictive than “age verification,” allowing companies to employ a broader set of tactics to ensure the age of its users, but it still would have required social media companies to collect sensitive data.
That bill was opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and others.
According to Megan Iorio, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), any transmission of sensitive data over the internet carries inherent risk, though lawmakers can require safer practices. As it stands, Dush’s bill would require adult sites not to retain age verification data, but does not get into specifics.
“If a company collects that information and stores it in an insecure way, then it’s subject to, potentially, data theft,” she said. “And if they use that information in other ways, like to profile users or to sell that information, those are other privacy concerns.”
Sen. Maria Collett (D-Montgomery) was one of two lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee to vote against the bill Monday. Both supported the measure’s aims, but specifically cited the bill’s lack of specifics on data privacy in its current form.
“I think with the proliferation of Flock cameras, Ring cameras, and people sort of being online all the time no matter what, our data is increasingly not becoming our own,” she told the Capital-Star.
Collett had another concern as well about what it might mean to give sensitive information to a website providing adult content.
“Who among us hasn’t gotten a scam email from someone that says, ‘I’ve seen what you look at online. I’ll tell everyone you know unless you send me $1,000 in cryptocurrency,” she said. “These scams are just ubiquitous, they are everywhere, and they will target every population. If you’re someone who is lawfully visiting a site that you’re looking at adult material, and you’re using it in an appropriate manner, we have to be mindful that that data collection can’t then be used as a tool to exploit you further.”
Sen. Steven Santarsiero (D-Bucks) shared Collett’s data privacy concerns, but said he would vote to advance the bill anyway, though he would like to see it amended down the line.
“It’s important for us to send a message to these content sites that we are serious about this issue,” he said, though he noted he would like to see the bill changed before final passage. “I suspect this will not be the last word on this and we’ll be back.”
Courts have ruled against most online age verification requirements. A Supreme Court ruling changed the landscape.
Pennsylvania is not alone. Around the country, laws requiring age verification to access parts of the internet, whether social media or adult content, have become more common in recent years.
But according to Mackey, lawmakers have been attempting to require age verification to prevent minors from accessing certain websites for decades. Though court precedent has largely prevented that.
“Legislators’ and lawmakers’ desire to age gate the internet essentially did not come long after widespread adoption of the internet,” he said. “It has long been a claim that, in the name of protecting children, rather than having parents have responsible conversations about what content their kids can access online, or having the states promote allowing parents to have access to tools like content filtering and monitoring … the state should set a default — a restrictive one.”
While states passed laws, many were, and some still remain, held up in litigation. But a 2025 U.S. Supreme Court decision in a case called Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton allowed a Texas law requiring age verification for pornography to stand. While the decision noted such laws would be subject to heightened scrutiny, it opened a door for other states to require ID checks for adult content.
Numerous bills modeled after Texas’ law were introduced around the country. According to Trace Mitchell, an attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Dush’s bill is one of them, but it has a unique quality.
“Unlike [Texas’] law, which was enforced by a state attorney general, this law is enforced by a private right of action, which means that every website that is even arguably covered faces the threat of a lawsuit,” he said. “The cheapest way to avoid that is to put up an ID check.”
Mitchell added that another component of the bill is almost bound to lead to such lawsuits. That’s the clause noting that a website must employ age verification if more than one-third of its content is considered pornographic.
“There’d be no way for a website to prove they fell outside the scope of this bill without first going through discovery,” he said. “Discovery is almost always the most expensive part of a lawsuit, so even if you win, you’ve already paid for most of the lawsuit.”
“The predictable result is far more age gating, even by websites that may not fall within the scope of the bill, and significantly greater burdens on adults’ constitutionally protected speech and expression,” he added. “Anonymity is incredibly important. It’s often what makes speech possible and allows people to engage in free expression without worrying it will be used against them … The Supreme Court itself has long recognized that.”
