Online age verification is growing up.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

As we close out 2025, we're looking back at some of the big tech trends that went mainstream this year.

Today, age verification, where you have to prove your age online.

About half of states now require this step to prevent kids from accessing certain content,

usually pornography, but in some cases broader categories of adult content that include social media.

Drew Harwell has been following this. He's a tech reporter at the Washington Post.

There's like a whole cottage industry now of contractors mainly that offer all kinds of different

age verification tools. One of them is, you know, you'll be asked to hold up your ID

next to your face in front of your computer webcam and it'll scan, you know, argue the face on the

ID. There's also a form of software called

age estimation where you don't need your ID, but you just look into the webcam and it uses

AI to basically guess whether you're a kid or an adult. And so, you know, the big social media

companies' websites will work with these contractors who

run this software.

So you now have this additional security layer that you're seeing in a lot of places.

And we've seen this age verification layer kind of building for several years.

But this was the year that we got a very notable Supreme Court decision pertaining to

state laws requiring it. What did the court decide, and how did that decision affect the

landscape for age verification? Yeah, so it was really interesting. So at this point, we've now had

basically half of the U.S. 25 states pass their own age verification laws. And in one of the states in Texas, their explicit content age verification law went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that, yes, it is okay for states to demand that websites require this level of due diligence to make sure their users are of age.

...