Fact check: What are the legal age of consent laws in different countries and states?

Executive Summary — Quick Answer Up Front

The provided materials do not deliver a comprehensive catalogue of age-of-consent laws worldwide or across U.S. states; instead they repeatedly highlight two narrow threads: ^[1] age-verification and privacy rules affecting online services, and ^[2] Maryland’s statutory framework where the age of consent is 16 and related privacy protections for minors. The documents show policy spillovers—privacy laws and platform compliance influence access and enforcement online—while leaving large gaps about comparative national or state consent ages ^{[3] [4] [5]}.

1. Why the documents sidestep the big question and focus on online verification drama

The collections emphasize age‑verification laws and platform responses rather than compiling statutory ages of consent across jurisdictions; headlines point to services blocking content and the practical friction for platforms trying to verify ages online. Multiple entries describe regulatory pressure and technical challenges for online services but do not enumerate consent ages or provide jurisdictional comparisons. That framing suggests the sources are oriented toward digital policy impacts—privacy, commerce and censorship—rather than criminolegal summaries or comparative family‑law research ^[3].

2. One clear datapoint: Maryland’s age-of-consent framework and related offenses

Among the sources, the only specific criminal-law figure is Maryland’s statutory position: age of consent at 16, with distinct offenses and enhanced penalties when adult offenders occupy a “position of authority.” That source gives tabulated offense categories and penalties, signaling detailed local guidance useful for Maryland residents and practitioners, but it does not illustrate how Maryland compares to other U.S. states or countries ^[4].

3. Privacy laws are reshaping who counts as a protected minor online

Several items describe privacy law changes that intersect with age issues: the Maryland Online Data Privacy Act of 2024 prohibits companies from selling personal data of consumers under 18 without consent, and other pieces outline constraints on data collection and commercial targeting of minors. These statutes affect platform behavior—age gating, access blocking, and content moderation—even when they don't change the criminal age of consent. The privacy age thresholds (commonly 13 or 18 in various laws) can therefore diverge from criminal-consent ages and create enforcement complexity ^[5].

4. Platform-level consequences: access restrictions and enforcement outsourcing

Reporting shows commercial platforms reacting to age-verification statutes by restricting or blocking access in certain areas rather than building verification systems. The result is de facto regulation by private actors, who balance legal risk, technical costs, and public relations. This dynamic shifts enforcement from public prosecutors to platform compliance teams, with implications for inequitable access and enforcement transparency that the sources highlight without offering a legal-comparative map ^[3].

5. Missing comparative data: what the sources don’t tell you

None of the supplied analyses present a consolidated list of ages of consent by country or state, nor do they provide reliable cross‑jurisdictional comparisons. The gaps include the range of consent ages worldwide, statutory exceptions (close-in-age, marriage, authority positions), and criminal penalties by jurisdiction. This omission undermines any attempt to answer the user’s original broad question solely from these materials and indicates the need for specialized legal compendia or government sources for a complete picture ^{[3] [6] [7]}.

6. Conflicting policy priorities: child protection, privacy, and digital commerce

The materials reveal competing agendas: legislators prioritize child protection (criminal law), privacy advocates push limits on data use for minors (privacy statutes), and platforms focus on operability and liability avoidance. These tensions explain why statutes and platform policies diverge in age thresholds—criminal law may set one age while privacy law or platform terms impose another—creating legal and practical incoherence for users and regulators ^{[5] [3]}.

7. How to reliably answer the original question given these limits

To construct a trustworthy comparative table of age-of-consent laws, one must consult multiple, jurisdiction-specific legal sources—statutes, government legal codes, and vetted legal databases—because the present documents only provide Maryland specifics and policy context for online services. The current corpus suggests the proper approach: combine criminal‑law compilations with privacy statutes and platform policies to portray both legal rules and real-world access outcomes ^{[4] [5] [3]}.

8. Practical takeaway and recommended next steps for the user

From these materials, you can confidently cite Maryland’s age of consent as 16 and summarize that age‑verification and privacy laws are reshaping online enforcement, but you cannot produce a global or multi‑state list of consent ages without additional sources. For a comprehensive answer, request or gather jurisdictional legal codes or authoritative legal compilations (state statutes, the U.S. Model Penal Code comparisons, and international legal databases); only then can one reconcile statutory ages, exceptions, and enforcement practices across countries and states ^{[4] [3] [5]}.