Policy
‘Scan your face’ laws for the web are having unexpected consequences

The age-verification laws rapidly expanding across the United States and United Kingdom are bringing with them some surprising downsides, including bursts of traffic to seedy parts of the web.

August 31, 2025 at 7:05 a.m. EDTYesterday at 7:05 a.m. EDT
11 min

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(Washington Post illustration; iStock)

By Drew Harwell
When the United Kingdom began requiring thousands of websites to verify their users’ ages last month, one group saw an enormous burst of traffic: pornography sites ignoring the law.

The sites that complied — by mandating that users show their government IDs or scan their faces through their webcams, so an algorithm could estimate whether they were adults — saw visits from British internet addresses collapse. But some of the biggest porn sites that disregarded the “scan your face” rule entirely have been rewarded with a flood of traffic, a Washington Post analysis found. Some have doubled or even tripled their audiences in August compared with the same time last year.

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