--- title: "How Many Turn Back at the Age Gate" description: "A new survey lets a law professor count the ‘balk rate’ — the Americans who simply walk away from the ID checkpoint" author: "Jan Sokol" published: 2026-10-14T16:46:19Z modified: 2026-10-15T16:23:20Z url: https://rews.cc/a/how-many-turn-back-at-the-age-gate-612ed2 language: en tags: ["privacy", "regulation", "ai", "security", "law", "tech"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # How Many Turn Back at the Age Gate *A new survey lets a law professor count the ‘balk rate’ — the Americans who simply walk away from the ID checkpoint* By Jan Sokol · October 14, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/how-many-turn-back-at-the-age-gate-612ed2 ## In brief - An All About Cookies survey finds 72% of Americans have low trust in age-verification firms, 40% with none at all - Only 31% said they would complete age verification; Goldman reads a minimum “balk rate” of 11% - The report claims users in law states are 7x more likely to give up and 4x more likely to use a VPN - Over two-thirds were uncomfortable sharing a scanned selfie; nearly nine in ten a credit card - Goldman warns high balk rates will hit new market entrants hardest Every law needs its clerk at the door. The artificial intelligentsia has lately been furnishing him, in the parable of the sealed white room where a machine consults its checklist and refuses. The same clerk is now being posted at the edge of the ordinary web. State after state in America has begun compelling websites to demand proof of age before admission, and a law professor named Eric Goldman has taken up the accountant’s position by the gate, counting how many travellers simply turn around and walk back into the desert. [Writing on his blog this week](https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2026/10/some-new-data-on-age-authentication-balk-rates.htm), Goldman gives the phenomenon a name: the “balk rate” — the share of users who stop at a government-compelled age authentication wall, whether because they turn away or because they cannot get through the process. His new numbers come from a study by All About Cookies titled “72% of Americans Don’t Trust the Companies Verifying Their Age Online.” ## Seventy-two per cent The survey’s headline finding, as its authors qualify it, is that “72% of Americans express low levels of trust in the companies and services handling age verification data, including 40% who do not trust them at all.” The remaining 32% report only “slight” trust in the authenticators. Distrust of the clerk, in other words, is nearly universal; what varies is its depth. ![A person clutches a document while a large shadowy hand reaches toward them from a doorway in an oversized identification card.](https://rews.cc/img/abebb3a7a33d9dac6730c0ccf74dca752ac1c57c.webp) Then comes the turnstile data. Asked what they would do when confronted with an age verification wall, only 31% of consumers said they would authenticate at all. The rest chose from among the exits: going to a different site, abandoning the effort altogether, or pulling on the invisibility cloak of a VPN. Because respondents could select multiple options, Goldman cautions, the three rejection choices — which sum to 32% — cannot simply be stacked against the 31% who comply. But even the most conservative reading of the chart, he writes, yields a balk rate of at least 11%: “that’s still a lot of disruption of existing user activity.” The report itself draws a sharper comparison, if a poorly documented one: “Age verification laws don’t get more people to verify: 31% complete verification in states with and without laws. Instead, people in law states are 7x more likely to give up entirely and 4x more likely to use a VPN.” The survey published no supporting data for the 7x figure, Goldman notes, but he reads it as a warning shot about what happens as more state mandates take effect. The clerk multiplies; the balks multiply faster. ![Black silhouettes walk along a winding cream path across a yellow background toward a turnstile, with one person already beyond the barrier.](https://rews.cc/img/bb0490e8df6f04e5b57ac107d2273a2d1a83d087.webp) ## The price of the pass What, exactly, must the traveller hand over? The survey asked how comfortable users would be surrendering specific items of data. The “least” troubling option was an automatically scanned selfie — and more than two-thirds were still uncomfortable with it. Credit card authentication, the 1990s benchmark for age checks that has since been discredited, made nearly nine of ten consumers uneasy. The cheapest passport is still more than most people are willing to pay. Goldman concedes the discomfort may erode with time, as checkpoints become ubiquitous and travellers grow numb to the routine invasion. Zero-knowledge proofs could someday verify age without revealing an ID’s contents — though that road runs through a government-issued digital ID on every device, and Goldman is blunt about his own position: “Personally, I’m a hard ‘no’ on digital IDs.” The economics follow from the psychology. A user weighing discomfort against an unknown benefit — a new site, a new service — will often simply leave. In his “Segregate-and-Suppress” work, Goldman argues that these shifts in consumer behaviour will fall hardest on new market entrants and on the dynamism of the market itself. The great platforms can absorb a toll; the newcomer at the border post cannot. ![A small wilted plant and a large flourishing tree sit in dark pots against a blue background, each bearing a cream tag with a person icon.](https://rews.cc/img/d1ab54928b7cf8bc538258e8fd4e5aef52a481e1.webp) There is precedent for the exodus. When Louisiana enforced its law, the company behind Pornhub reported that [its traffic in the state dropped approximately 80 percent](https://www.govtech.com/biz/data/can-states-without-digital-ids-manage-age-verification-laws), insisting the audience had not vanished but “migrated to darker corners of the Internet” that verify nothing at all. The catalogue of mandates keeps growing — from [Texas’s app store law to Ohio’s “Innocence Act”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_age_verification_laws_in_the_United_States) — and the courts keep discovering, as [Utah learned that VPNs do not respect borders](https://rews.cc/a/utah-learns-that-vpns-do-not-respect-borders-6a2be3), that the map of the web was not drawn for checkpoint geometry. Goldman’s conclusion is that of a man who has done the arithmetic and disliked the sum: he does not see how anyone — especially the government regulators who ordered the gates built — can look at the emerging balk-rate data and conclude that the internet will be just fine. The clerk at the door is diligent, incorruptible, multiplying. It is the travellers who are declining to show their papers.