Age verification
Laws that require you to prove your age, often by uploading a government ID or submitting to a face scan, before you can view lawful content.
Our mission
Censorship Tracker is an independent, community-sourced map of the laws reshaping who gets to use the internet freely. The goal is simple: show the public, clearly and factually, how online age-verification, digital-ID, VPN, and content-blocking rules are spreading, and what they cost in privacy and free expression.
What we track
Every entry is tied to a real statute or bill and a primary source, across all 50 US states plus Washington, D.C. and more than 170 countries. We follow four overlapping fronts:
Laws that require you to prove your age, often by uploading a government ID or submitting to a face scan, before you can view lawful content.
Government identity systems that tie your real-world name to your online activity and turn access to ordinary services into an identity check.
Rules that ban or limit the tools people rely on to keep their browsing private, the same tools that make age and ID checks easy to bypass.
Minimum-age and parental-consent mandates that pull more of the internet, and more people, into identity verification.
Why it matters
These laws are marketed as child protection. In practice they build the infrastructure of a surveilled internet: your identity becomes a database entry, anonymous reading ends, and the checks rarely stop at the sites they were first written for.
We track them so the trend stays visible while it is still being decided, not after it has quietly become the default everywhere.
A community project
The map is only as current as its sources. Laws change every week: a bill gets signed, a court blocks one, a new country joins. If you spot something we have missed or that needs updating, send us the source. Every submission is reviewed against the original text before anything changes on the map.