Is this freedom?

Oh look, Gilead is back in the news. What a shithole. Beautiful state but the people are awful.

Praise Jesus. #FreedomSurveillance

As a Utahn I'd missed this. But reading what applies... how would a company realize I'm in Utah and be forced to age verify me? My guess is this is actually mostly targeted at sports betting. I don't know a lot about how people are using VPNs there but I'd be surprised if they're running them on their phone constantly.

Not saying I'm okay with it, but the headline made me think I was in for issues using my VPN. What seems to really be coming is a liability rats nest for websites that makes no sense.

The Utah legislature is dominated by white Mormon men, who care more about protecting the Mormon church and lining their own pockets than anything else.

The new law explicitly addresses VPN use in Section 14, which amends Section 78B-3-1002 of existing Utah statutes in two primary ways:

Regulation based on physical location: Under the law, an individual is considered to be accessing a website from Utah if they are physically located there, regardless of whether they use a VPN, proxy server, or other means to disguise their geographic location.

Yeah, that part's gonna get killed by the courts when it inevitably gets challenged, because the US is never going to accept the same doctrine in reverse, where, for example, a Utah company would be subject to, say, liability under sharia law because someone in Iran is accessing it and they touch a Utah-based company that doesn't conform to sharia law, though it looks like they're coming from Salt Lake City.

Utah puts mayonnaise on their tacos.