Noah Apthorpe, Brett Frischmann, Yan Shvartzshnaider

The recent surge in regulation seeking to establish age-based governance online is part of a decades-long attempt to establish online zoning. It is  driven by active development of technologies to estimate or verify user age based on various characteristics of users, their credentials, or their activities. These developments have heightened prevailing concerns that online age gating technology will inevitably be abused and misused to cause a variety of privacy harms and rights infringements. This paper examines this ongoing debate by bridging technical and legal scholarship to explore the current state of online age gating. We discuss the current legal and policy landscape, the current status of online age gating technologies, and provide recommendations to guide legal and technological scholarship and practice. Our interdisciplinary assessment is particularly important and timely, given the recent flurry of state and federal laws that aim to implement age gating online and ongoing litigation challenging such laws.