You know that pop-up. The one you click “yes” for every time. The one that asks you to confirm you’re over 18. Sometimes, “you must be older than 21 to enter this site” is written in big, bold letters. Other times, in a somewhat sobering moment, you’re asked to scroll back for what seems like eons as you find the year of your birth. Maybe you put your real age; maybe you’re lying and claim to be younger than you are (who’s going to check, this silly little website?); maybe you are underage and want to access whatever’s behind this simple-to-circumvent pop-up. Either way, you’re getting through it, and easily at that.
The political consensus around protecting kids online is nearly universal. What Americans can’t agree on is whether the tools legislators have built actually do the job. A new survey from digital safety platform All About Cookies, conducted in February with responses from 1,000 U.S. adults, reveals a striking paradox: overwhelming public support for age verification laws, paired with near-universal consensus that those laws simply won’t work.
