The aged verification march continues, with South Carolina getting in on the action:

The law, sponsored by Rep. Brandon Guffey (R-York), requires covered platforms to repeatedly estimate and verify the age of every South Carolina account holder.

However, the South Carolina bill introduces a new twist where platforms are required to perform continual monitoring of users' ages.

Once an account holder hits 25 cumulative hours on a platform within six months (the “first trigger date”), the platform has 14 days to estimate whether that person is over 15, with 80% confidence.

At 50 hours (the “second trigger date”), the confidence requirement jumps to 90%. After that, the platform must update its estimate every 100 hours of use, or whenever it runs data analytics on the user for any other reason, whichever comes sooner.

The penalties are pretty rough:

A platform that guesses wrong faces $10,000 per violation. A platform that overinvests in behavioral profiling to avoid those fines faces no penalty at all. The incentive structure points in one direction.

And if the platform thinks you are a minor it must obtain parental consent to remove restrictions like:

Platforms cannot show children profile-based feeds, profile-based advertising, or any “addictive interface features,” a category that includes infinite scrolling, auto-play video, push notifications, and display of personal metrics like reaction counts.

But of course proving a parental relationship is going to involve uploading government identification.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Also, note that these kind of laws are very popular with legislators.

The bill passed with almost no opposition, clearing the House 115-0 and the Senate 42-1. It takes effect January 1, 2027, and it brings with it a surveillance apparatus aimed at all users.

The days of an open internet are quickly coming to a close. I don't see why governments will stop at these age verification laws, when it is ever so much more convenient for their enforcement arms to just insert themselves between users and internet access in general -- or deputize the the private sector a la the bank secrecy act.