Maryland wants to improve "child privacy" online through HB901 , a bill that follows in the footsteps of California’s Age Appropriate Design Code. Unfortunately, these new rules are riddled with unintended consequences. They will make the internet less private and less safe for both adults and children.

This flawed approach is not new. I’m writing from the U.K., where lawmakers are wrestling with a similar proposal called the Online Safety Bill. First proposed in May 2021, the bill has seen countless iterations. Its numerous and fundamental problems are well-known , but the government is determined to see it through. Bafflingly, U.S. legislators now seem intent on copying Britain’s strategy.

The Maryland and California "online safety" bills make many of the same mistakes as the British one. In seeking to protect children from harmful online content, they impose clumsy restrictions on internet usage that will disproportionately inconvenience and endanger adults while still failing to shield young eyes from mature content.

Maryland’s bill proclaims to prioritize privacy. It requires websites to verify their users’ ages. That means online service providers must impose verification checks, collecting identification from those who click on their website. Compelling internet users to hand over their personal information anytime they want to sign up for an online service is a bizarre way of promoting online "privacy," to say the least.

The internet is a powerful tool, but these rules threaten to make using it almost impossibly inconvenient. Imagine if you had to upload your driver's license every time you wanted to use a new online service. This would be an extreme and unprecedented level of government interference in our everyday lives.

Each day — in fact, each second — countless Americans use the internet to watch videos, shop, research, and much more. These laws would make that much more difficult by substantially increasing the administrative burden on ordinary people who just want to use the internet. Though the rules are targeted at children, they force websites to perform verification checks on all users. Everyone’s details would be collected and checked, both adults and children.

The security implications are obvious. Laws requiring websites to collect troves of personal data about their users is a dream scenario for hackers. It is already common for malicious actors to sell personal information such as email addresses and phone numbers in the darker corners of the web. Often, criminals buy and sell private information, which is then used for anything from intrusive marketing, such as cold calling, to identity theft.

The proposed regulations would make this problem much worse. They mandate unsecured data collection on a much wider scale than currently exists. The treasure chest of personal data vulnerable to hackers would be many times larger than it is now. It seems inevitable that cases of stolen details and hijacked identities will skyrocket if these bills pass into law.

Even with all this inconvenience and security risk, these new regulations still fail to achieve their goal of keeping children safe online. Age verification mandates are a typically simplistic, short-sighted government solution to a complex problem. Children these days are extremely adept online.

My seven-year-old cousin probably knows more about navigating the web than the average lawmaker. That’s not to say lawmakers don’t know what they’re talking about (although recent congressional questioning of TikTok and Facebook has raised some eyebrows in that area). Children will simply use VPNs and other tricks to get around the age verification wall, rendering them useless.

There’s a lot more we can do to protect children online, but a tide of "online safety" laws won’t help.

Jason Reed ( @JasonReed624 ) is the spokesperson at Young Voices and a U.K.-based writer and broadcaster on politics and policy for a wide range of outlets.