Imagine if every website had a bouncer that demanded your ID, took a photo of it, and stored it in an online database that could be hacked at any moment. Unfortunately, this is now the reality for half of the United States. Half of the states in the US now require you to hand over your government ID or scan your face to access sites containing anything deemed "sexual content" (this sometimes includes things that are not explicitly sexual, such as health information for LGBTQ+ people and similar topics, usually labeled as content that is "harmful to minors"). A handful of states also require you to hand over such identification when signing up for social media websites. While these laws are aimed at protecting children, they end up endangering them by stripping them of their digital anonymity and creating treasure troves of their personal information for hackers to access.
Your government ID is a "keys to the kingdom" asset for hackers to have access to. With access to your government ID they can contact companies and request they change your password, sign up for online accounts as you, and even ruin your credit score. By requiring everyone online to upload their valid government identification to a multitude of for-profit companies, these laws are putting this critical information at high risk of being hacked, breached, or otherwise exposed.
Age verification may sound simple and easy to enforce: if the person is viewing a pornography website, ask for proof that they are indeed overage before allowing them to continue. However, these laws have dangerous consequences unforeseen by legislators, such as deanonymizing the internet, allowing hackers to access sensitive government identification for millions of people, and even worse, putting the very children the laws are supposed to protect at risk via data breaches.
On top of the security risks, these laws have seen some reputable VPN companies receiving a 1400% spike in signups, showing that the laws are likely not even effective on any child that has the technical know-how to install a VPN app off of the app store (which is something that many children are already doing anyway in order to avoid school internet blocks).
Some proponents of age verification laws say that it could solve the dead internet theory, however even they admit these laws are problematic, stating "I want to make something very clear: Online age and ID verification has a number of problems. Very, very real problems that every single person is right to be concerned about. What verification data will be collected and stored (and how)? What additional security concerns are created because of ID verification? Will the burden of that verification be too much for some sites to handle? How will those verification systems be abused by corporations and governments? And those are just off the top of my head." (A quote from Brian Lunduke of the Lunduke Journal). An issue with this argument is that adding ID verification will not stop bots. The bots will just pretend to sign up from a jurisdiction without age verification, or just leverage the troves of stolen IDs publicly available online for anyone to access.
Another issue with age verification is how some states include content that they deem "harmful to minors" as something that needs verification. This includes health information for LGBTQ+ people. This is really dangerous because it risks the outing of LGBTQ+ individuals to a community or family where such people may not be welcomed. This could end up in the queer person being kicked out of the community, and in extreme cases even physically harmed.
In conclusion, you should keep yourself safe. If you find yourself in a jurisdiction where age verification is mandated, you should use a VPN or other privacy solution (such as the Tor network) to avoid sending off your personal information. You should also contact your local representatives, and ask them to not allow these laws to ever go through and advocate for laws that actually protect the individuals they target. If you want to have a bigger impact, volunteer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.