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notTooFarGone 2026-02-23 15:08 UTC link

>Some observers present privacy-preserving age proofs involving a third party, such as the government, as a solution, but they inherit the same structural flaw: many users who are legally old enough to use a platform do not have government ID.

So there is absolutely no way to change that and give out IDs from the age of 14? You can already get an ID for children in Germany https://www.germany.info/us-de/service/reisepass-und-persona...

This is a problem that has to be solved by the government and not by private tech companies.

This is a lazy cop out to say "we have tried nothing and we are all out of ideas"

enjoykaz 2026-02-23 15:19 UTC link

Most of this debate makes more sense if the actual goal is liability reduction, not child safety. If it were genuinely about protecting kids, you'd regulate infinite scroll and algorithmic engagement optimization, not who can log in.

armchairhacker 2026-02-23 15:25 UTC link

Age verification is very hard, because parents will give their children their unlocked account, and children will steal their parents' unlocked account. If that's criminalized (like alcohol), it will happen too often to prosecute (much more frequently than alcohol, which is rarely prosecuted anyways). I don't see a solution that isn't a fundamental culture shift.

If there's a fundamental culture shift, there's an easy way to prevent children from using the internet:

- Don't give them an unlocked device until they're adults

- "Locked" devices and accounts have a whitelist of data and websites verified by some organization to be age-appropriate (this may include sites that allow uploads and even subdomains, as long as they're checked on upload)

The only legal change necessary is to prevent selling unlocked devices without ID. Parents would take their devices from children and form locked software and whitelisting organizations.

agentultra 2026-02-23 15:38 UTC link

There are alternatives to ID verification if the goal is protecting children.

You could, for example, make it illegal to target children with targeted advertising campaigns and addictive content. Then throw the executives who authorized such programs in jail. Punish the people causing the harm.

TimPC 2026-02-23 15:38 UTC link

Big tech likes this because there are a lot more face recognition technologies in the wild in real life and being able to connect all real life data to online data is quite valuable. It's also quite possibly the largest training set ever for face recognition if ids are stored and given how ids and images are sold across many companies it seems very high probability that some company will retain the data rather than delete after use.

jonstaab 2026-02-23 15:41 UTC link

Why is no one talking about using zero knowledge proofs for solving this? Instead of every platform verifying all its users itself (and storing PII on its own servers), a small number of providers could expose an API which provides proof of verification. I'm not sure if some kind of machine vision algorithm could be used in combination with zero-knowledge technology to prevent even that party from storing original documents, but I don't see why not. The companies implementing these measures really seem to be just phoning it in from a privacy perspective.

Cthulhu_ 2026-02-23 15:46 UTC link

> And the only way to prove that you checked is to keep the data indefinitely.

This is a false premise already; the company can check the age (or have a third party like iDIN [0] do it), then set a marker "this person is 18+" and "we verified it using this method at this date". That should be enough.

[0] https://www.idin.nl/en/

aqme28 2026-02-23 15:51 UTC link

If we're going to do this at all, it should be on the device, not the website/app. Parents flag their child's device or browser as under 18, and websites/apps follow suit. Parents get the control they're looking for, while service providers don't have to verify or store IDs. I guess it's just more difficult to pressure big dogs like google/apple/mozilla for this than pornhub and discord.

julianozen 2026-02-23 16:21 UTC link

There is missing a solution.

Give our personal devices have the ability to verify our age and identity securely and store on device like they do our fingerprint or face data.

Services that need access only verify it cryptographically. So my iPhone can confirm I’m over 21 for my DoorDash app in the same way it stores my biometric data.

The challenge here is the adoption of these encryption services and whether companies can rely on devices for that for compliance without having to cut off service for those without it set up.

JohnMakin 2026-02-23 16:34 UTC link

We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume.

In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web.

Yes, children are clever - I was one once. If you want to actually protect children and not create the surveillance state nightmare scenario we all know is going to happen (using protecting children as the guise, which is ironic, because often these systems are completely ineffective at doing so anyway) - then give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools and empower them to protect their children. They are in a much better and informed position to do so than a creepy surveillance nanny state.

That is, after all, the primary responsibility of a parent to begin with.

rafaelero 2026-02-23 17:01 UTC link

I have no idea where this idea that Internet is toxic to children is coming from. Is that some type of moral panic? Weren't most of you guys children/adolescents during the 2000's?

kuon 2026-02-23 17:09 UTC link

Even if you design the perfect system, kids will just ask parents for an unlocked account, many parents will accept, myself included. My kids have full access to the internet and I never used parental control, I talk to them. Of course, I don't want to give parenting advice, that would be presumptuous. But, my point is that a motivated kid will find a way, you have to "work" on that motivation.

Many of the worst present on the internet is not age gated at all, you have millions of porn websites without even a "are you over 18" popup. There are plethora of toxic forums...

Of course it's a complex problem, but the current approach sacrifice a lot of what made the internet possible and I don't like it.

trashb 2026-02-23 17:40 UTC link

I would like to take the discussion in the other direction. How about we offer safe spaces instead of banning the unsafe spaces for kids.

Similar to how there is specific channels for children on the TV. Perhaps the government can even incentivize such channels. It would also make it easier for parents to monitor and set boundaries. Parents would only need to monitor if the tv is still tuned to disney channel or similar instead of some adult channels.

Similarly this kind of method could be applied to online spaces. Ofcourse there will be some kids that will find ways around it but they will most likely be outliers.

antitoxic 2026-02-23 17:46 UTC link

I work at a European identity wallet system that uses a zero knowledge proof age identification system. It derives an age attribute such as "over 18" from a passport or ID, without disclosing any other information such as the date of birth. As long as you trust the government that gave out the ID, you can trust the attribute, and anonymously verify somebodies age.

I think there are many pros and cons to be said about age verification, but I think this method solves most problems this article supposes, if it is combined with other common practices in the EU such as deleting inactive accounts and such. These limitations are real, but tractable. IDs can be issued to younger teenagers, wallet infrastructure matures over time, and countries without strong identity systems primarily undermine their own age bans. Jurisdictions that accept facial estimation as sufficient verification are not taking enforcement seriously in the first place. The trap described in this article is a product of the current paradigm, not an inevitability.

arn3n 2026-02-23 18:13 UTC link

Parents are competing with multi-trillion dollar companies who have invested untold amounts of cash and resources into making their content addictive. When parents try to help their children, it's an uphill battle -- every platform that has kids on it also tends to have porn, or violence, or other things, as these platform generally have disappointingly ineffective moderation. Most parents turn to age verification because it's the only way they can think of to compete with the likes of Meta or ByteDance, but the issue is that these platforms shouldn't have this content to begin with. Platforms should be smaller -- the same site shouldn't be serving both pornography and my school district's announcement page and my friend's travel pictures. Large platforms are turning their unwillingness to moderate into legal and privacy issues, when in fact it should simply be a matter of "These platforms have adult content, and these ones don't". Then, parents can much more easily ban specific platforms and topics. Right now there's no levers to pull or adjust, and parent s have their hands tied. You can't take kids of Instagram or TikTok -- they will lose their friends. I hate the fact that the "keep up with my extended family" platform is the same as the "brainrot and addiction" one. The platforms need to be small enough that parents actually have choices on what to let in and what not to. Until either platforms are broken up via. antitrust or until the burden of moderation is on the company, we're going to keep getting privacy-infringing solutions.

If you support privacy, you should support antitrust, else we're going to be seeing these same bills again and again and again until parents can effectively protect their children.

Wobbles42 2026-02-23 18:21 UTC link

The purpose of a system is what it does.

Undermining data protection and privacy is clearly the point. The fact that it's happening everywhere at the same time makes it look to me like a bunch of leaders got together and decided that online anonymity is a problem.

It's not like kids having access to adult content is a new problem after all. Every western government just decided that we should do something about it at roughly the same time after decades of indifference.

The "age verification" story is casus belli. This is about ID, political dissent, and fears of people being exposed to the wrong brand of propaganda.

nye2k 2026-02-23 18:32 UTC link

I worked for a decade in what I would consider the highest level of our kids' privacy ever designed, at PBS KIDS. This was coming off a startup that attempted to do the same for grownups, but failed because of dirty money.

Every security attempt becomes a facade or veil in time, unless it's nothing. Capture nothing, keep nothing, say nothing. Kids are smart AF and will outlearn you faster than you can think. Don't even try to capture PII ever. Watch the waves and follow their flow, make things for them to learn from but be extremely careful how you let the grownups in, and do it in pairs, never alone.

stevenjgarner 2026-02-24 04:28 UTC link

Looking at actual data regarding Australia's landmark legislation setting a minimum age of 16 for social media access with enforcement starting on December 10, 2025 indicates weakened data protection. The Australian data suggests that while the legislation has successfully cleared the decks of millions of underage accounts (4.7 million account deactivations together with increased VPN usage and "ghost" accounts to bypass restrictions), it has simultaneously forced platforms to rely on third-party identity vendors, with the following failures so far:

1) Persona (Identity Vendor) Exposure (Feb 20, 2026): researchers discovered an exposed frontend belonging to Persona, an identity verification vendor used by platforms like Discord. This system was performing over 260 distinct checks, including facial recognition and "adverse media" screening, raising massive concerns about the scope creep of age verification.

2) Victorian Department of Education (Jan 2026): a breach impacting all 1,700 government schools exposed student names and encrypted passwords. This is a primary example of how child-related data remains a high-value target.

3) Prosura Data Breach (Jan 4, 2026): this financial services firm suffered a breach of 300,000 customer records.

4) University of Sydney (Dec 2025): a code library breach affected 27,000 people right as the new legislation was rolling out.

Kazik24 2026-02-24 13:27 UTC link

Shouldn't the verification be other way around? That is, you need to prove that you are a child. Then the site can present you more strictly filtered content. Parent can sign child's device on first boot, token stored in TPM so that it's hard to remove.

It's basically the same type of enforcement on sites, as they need to verify and filter content for children, or just block them. Most of the internet users are adults, why not make internet for adults by default.

lunias 2026-02-24 14:17 UTC link

When I was a kid, my parents installed Net Nanny on our home computer. I installed a keylogger. No more Net Nanny; lots more EverQuest.

I don't like age verification in general, for anything. The age gates in our society are very subjective.

Many times my Dad would buy alcohol at the grocery store w/ me (underage) in tow, but they never asked for my ID or refused to sell to him. Now, when I go buy alcohol as an adult with my wife (we are both in our mid-late 30s) they ask to see her ID as well as mine? If she leaves her ID at home then she has to wait in the car because they will refuse the sale if she comes into the store and cannot prove her age.

Buying a case of beer with a group of 8 year olds? No problem. Bottle of wine for you and your wife? Let me get both IDs.