Most age-verification laws treat a VPN as a loophole to be tolerated. The SCREEN Act treats it as a signal.
The bill is S. 737 in the 119th Congress, and the Senate Commerce Committee is set to consider it. It would require online platforms to verify users' ages before granting access to sexually explicit content. That much sounds like the UK and Australian rules we have covered before. The mechanism is what makes it different.
What the bill actually requires
Three provisions matter, and they compound.
The scope is defined by content, not by business. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's reading of the text, the bill requires nearly any service hosting even a single piece of sexually explicit content to verify the ages of its users. The EFF names Netflix, Reddit, Discord and Bluesky as services that could be caught by that definition. A rule written for one category of website lands on general-purpose platforms, because general-purpose platforms host everything.
Self-declaration is explicitly ruled out. The text says that requiring a user to confirm that the user is not a minor shall not be sufficient. The click-through box that has served as age verification for twenty years is named and dismissed. What replaces it has to be tied to a real identity: a document, a card, a face.
Enforcement runs on IP addresses. The obligation applies unless the platform determines the user is outside the United States, and that determination is made from the IP address the platform sees.
The line that concerns anyone using a VPN
Put those three together and you get the provision that makes this bill different from every age-verification law we have written about.
The text specifically requires age verification on traffic coming from known VPN addresses.
Read that carefully, because it inverts the usual logic. If enforcement depends on knowing which country you are in, a VPN creates ambiguity, and the drafters resolved that ambiguity in one direction: when the platform cannot place you, it must check you. Connecting through a VPN does not put you outside the rule. It puts you inside it by default.
Why this is not the UK situation
We have been careful in our UK age verification guide to say that a VPN is not a magic bypass there either. But the two texts fail differently, and the difference matters:
- Under the UK rules, a VPN changes the country a platform detects, so it can sometimes avoid a country-specific prompt. Sometimes. Platforms can also key off your account region, payment country or SIM, or simply apply age assurance worldwide.
- Under the SCREEN Act as written, a VPN address is an explicit trigger. There is no ambiguity to exploit, because the ambiguity is what activates the check.
If you take one thing from this article: do not expect a VPN to answer this. It never could answer an ID request, and here it would not even avoid one.
The privacy objection, stated plainly
The EFF's criticism is not that age verification is impossible. It is what happens to the data.
The bill, in their reading, imposes no meaningful collection, use, or retention limits. Someone ends up holding a database that links real identities to categories of content viewed. That database is a target the day it exists, and the people most exposed are the ones who took steps to avoid being catalogued in the first place. As the EFF puts it, the text forces users who intentionally take steps to protect their privacy to identify themselves.
What is true today, and what is not
It is a bill. S. 737 has not passed. The Senate Commerce Committee is set to consider it. Nothing described here applies to you right now, and any article telling you to act today is selling something.
A VPN has not become useless. It still hides your traffic from your internet provider and from whoever runs the network you are on, it still protects you on hotel and airport Wi-Fi, and it still keeps your home IP address away from every site you visit. Those uses are untouched by this text.
What would change is narrower and worth naming precisely. On one category of site, in one country, a VPN would stop being a way to be left alone and start being a reason to be asked. That is a real shift in how lawmakers treat privacy tools, and it is worth watching for whether the idea spreads, rather than for what it does to you this week.
Sources
- Electronic Frontier Foundation, "The SCREEN Act Threatens Privacy Far Beyond Adult Websites", 31 July 2026.
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