Protecting children from online pornography is a laudable goal, but some lawmakers are using it to push intrusive policies which would dramatically compromise the right to privacy on the Internet while failing to keep kids safe.

John Bel Edwards, Louisiana’s Democratic governor, has signed Act 440 into law. The new law states that any company which “fails to perform reasonable age verification methods to verify the age of individuals” who try to look at adult material, such as pornography, on its website “shall be held liable.” In other words, to avoid being prosecuted for accidentally showing porn to kids, porn sites will now need to demand everyone who visits their sites upload proof of ID.

There are a myriad of problems with this, the most obvious of which concerns privacy. There are countless stories of big companies falling victim to cyber-attacks and losing control of sensitive consumer data. Already this year, T-Mobile suffered a substantial data breach in which a hacker accessed the personal data of 37 million customers.

Even those companies that pride themselves on security are not exempt. LastPass, a secure app for storing passwords, recently announced “an unauthorized party” had stolen customer account information and sensitive vault data, leading to alarming headlines like “LastPass Customers Need to Change All of Their Passwords,” from the folks over at CNET.

How, then, should anyone feel comfortable being compelled by a state governor to hand over their passport or driver’s license to access anything politicians deem ‘adult material,’ with the knowledge that their data could disappear, and their identity be stolen at any moment?

Such a heavy-handed regulation creates a dream scenario for those who operate outside the law by hacking websites’ user databases, compiling stolen private information about people, and then selling it to identity thieves in the darkest corners of the Internet. If Pornhub – one of the most popular websites in the world – is legally compelled to collect passports and driving licenses from everyone who clicks, the result will be millions of people’s IDs conveniently collected in one place for a hacker to reach in and swipe in one go.

But the biggest pitfall of this regulatory approach is that it won’t work. Today’s kids are already adept at tricking online service providers into thinking they are on the other side of the world. VPNs (virtual private networks) are widely accessible and easy to use. Many – including children – use them for non-malicious reasons, such as accessing another country’s Netflix offering.

Tools like VPNs help users skirt websites’ entry requirements. Mandating age verification for huge swathes of the Internet will only make those tools even more commonplace than they are now. Ironically, politicians’ desire to make us verify our identities online could well end up making the Internet a much more anonymous place.

Louisiana is not the only state to make this mistake. The desire to shield children’s eyes from harmful content online often leads well-meaning policymakers to push through ill-considered clumsy legislation which causes more problems than it solves. Similar content moderation bills are also in the works in states including California, Minnesota, and Tennessee. And countries like Australia are already attempting to go this route to protect children from the ills of online pornography.

Those concerned about the unintended effects of these laws could write entire libraries on the problems with each of them (and in some cases, they have). The trend of overregulating the Internet shows no signs of slowing, and if it does not stop, Americans will be much less safe online as a result.

Perhaps even more worryingly, this might only be the beginning. Once governments get a taste, which part of the Internet will they cordon off next? Inconvenient political opinions, perhaps? Let’s not normalize politicians getting to decide which websites we can visit.