If you spend your free time on dirty websites, you will soon need your ID before you’re allowed access.

Tennessee is one step closer to making it a law that would require a photo ID to access porn websites. The legislation was just approved by the Senate Finance committee and will go to the full Senate for next approval.

“Protect Tennessee Minors Act” will hold porn sites criminally liable if they don’t age verify users through photo matching using a valid form of identification. Senator Becky Duncan Massey, out of Knoxville, introduced the bill and said if we have to have age-verification for alcohol sites, the same needs to be done for pornography.

It can cause damage, it can cause mental health issues. There’s a lot of data that supports it’s not good for people under 18 (via WATE).

The bill would also require these sites to keep the age-verification information for seven years, anonymously.

Pornhub’s parent company responded to this bill saying its ineffective and puts peoples personal information at risk.

Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy. Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws.

This type of legislation isn’t anything new. Currently, nine states have an age-verification law in place and 19 others have introduced something similar.

If passed in Tennessee, it could go into effect on January 1, 2025.