- Mandatory age verification will be implemented in Missouri on November 30, 2025.
- All sites containing 33% “material harmful to minors” must comply
- Missouri is the latest US state to introduce age verification rules
Beginning November 30, 2025, Missouri residents will be required to prove they are 18 or older to access adult content online.
Missouri is the latest US state to pass an age verification law. This is likely to further fuel the debate about privacy and security risks associated with age protection methods and will likely lead to a further increase in the use of the best VPN apps.
Violations of the rule are considered “an unfair, fraudulent, deceptive or otherwise illegal practice” under Missouri law, and online services can be subject to fines of $10,000 per day for noncompliance.
Instead, these adult websites and online services may perform age verification using a digital ID, other government-issued identification documents, etc. Transaction Data.
Crucially, mobile operating systems with at least 10 million devices in the US must provide digital age verification “that allows a website or app to become compliant.”
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How age verification in Missouri can affect your privacy
Missouri law requires website and app providers to use all reasonable methods to protect user data and agree not to retain identifying information unless requested by law enforcement. However, experts do not believe that these safeguards can provide a real guarantee against data misuse or leakage.
Finally, in the UK we saw how sensitive age verification information could be compromised when the third-party service Discord was hacked and more than 70,000 government ID photos used to verify users’ ages were lost.
According to policy and advocacy expert John Perrino of the Internet Society, Missouri’s law is largely a “cut-and-paste version” of key provisions in similar laws in other parts of the country. This means that there are the same risks for surveillance, censorship and increased accessibility.
What’s new is that companies like google and apple must provide a secure digital identifier that websites can use to verify age. The problem? The big tech giants are not yet fully prepared for this, as these digital identification options are still limited to driver’s licenses and passport controls at airports.
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