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
CensorshipTracker.com is an independent, community-sourced atlas of the laws and systems reshaping who gets to use the internet freely, and of the places pushing back. We map age-verification, digital-ID, VPN, and censorship laws across all 50 US states and more than 170 countries, and we track where communities and whole countries have removed, paused, or restricted the mass surveillance those laws lean on. The goal is simple: keep the trend visible, clearly and factually, while it is still being decided.
What we map
Every entry is tied to a real statute, bill, court ruling, or government action and a primary source, across all 50 US states plus Washington, D.C. and more than 170 countries. On the law side 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.
Where people push back
Age and ID checks run on the same machinery as mass surveillance: cameras, biometrics, and databases that follow people through public life. So we also track that surveillance directly: where it is being proposed, where it is being misused, and where people push it back.
The surveillance map tracks where US cities, counties, and agencies have removed, paused, denied, or restricted automated license plate readers like Flock, and where countries worldwide have banned, fined, or legally challenged facial recognition and biometric surveillance. Flip the toggle on the map to move between the US and global views. It is a map of the wins: the moments people decided they did not want to be watched by default.
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.
How we keep it honest
Nothing goes on a map from memory. Every entry is checked against a primary source -- a bill page, a court ruling, an official statement, or reputable reporting -- before it appears, and it is classified by what actually happened, not by the headline. A council "considering" a cancellation is not the same as one that voted it down, and a contract renewal dressed up as a defeat gets flagged for what it is.
When a source is thin or a date is uncertain, we say so rather than guess.
What you are allowed to say
The newest front is the law reaching past who you are and into what you are allowed to say. Our speech map tracks online-speech and censorship laws across US states and the wider world: takedown mandates, platform duties, content bans, and the criminalization of speech, including the cases where people are arrested, charged, or jailed over posts.
Each entry is marked by its real-world outcome -- in force, pending, blocked, struck down, or repealed -- and many carry a full history so you can follow a law from proposal to enforcement or defeat. Flip the toggle to move between the US and global views, the same as the other maps.
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 city pulls its cameras, 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 before anything changes on the map.
Work with us
We do not take donations and we do not pass a hat. What keeps this project moving is partnership: people and organizations who already care about a free and private internet and want more eyes on what is happening to it. If that is you, we want to hear from you.
We are looking for sponsors and strategic partners who share the goal of informing the public about online censorship, age verification, digital ID, and mass surveillance: influencers and creators who can carry the maps to a wider audience, and companies or products whose work lines up with that mission. In return you stand behind a credible, primary-sourced project and take a place in the fight while it is still being decided. Reach out and tell us what you have in mind.