- Texas House Bill 1181 requires age verification for users trying to access websites offering adult content.
- After lower courts ruled it unconstitutional, the Supreme Court has upheld the bill in a 6–3 ruling.
- States are now free to force websites to demand a copy of your ID, raising substantial privacy concerns.
Being asked to prove who you are is just an everyday part of going online: select all the bicycles if you’re not a robot; click this box affirming you’re 21 before you browse these bongs for sale. But the vast majority of the time, all that info is offered up on the honor system, without any kind of meaningful checks to do hard verification. If you’d prefer that not change, and don’t like the idea of sharing a copy of your ID with all these websites, we’ve got some bad news for you, and you’ve the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) to blame.
The issue at hand concerns Texas House Bill 1181, which required that websites offering a substantial amount of content harmful to minors verify the identity of visitors to establish they’re of a suitable age (via TechCrunch). The Free Speech Coalition sued in response, characterizing the law as an unconstitutional restriction on free speech — an argument that had been used successfully in the past. And indeed, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.