Understanding Age Verification

Governments across the world have taken a renewed interest in online safety, and age-based restrictions are often the default solution. As a parent, online safety is an issue that I care about. It is also a constant source of frustration, as tech companies and regulators often miss the mark on matters that would actually improve safety online. Worse, some of these measures actually make kids less safe.

If online safety is a topic that matters to you or if you just want to understand the issues being discussed in the news, we’re going to walk you through the good, the bad, and the ugly of age verification systems.

How do you verify age on the internet?

If you’ve been on the internet for a while, you probably know that anonymity, for better or for worse, is a core feature of online interactions. There’s a good chance the obnoxious posters in your comments section are typing from an office building in St. Petersburg while they try to make their quota, and those emails in your spam box are definitely not from a Nigerian prince.

If a platform wants to verify your age, there are a few different ways it can do it. It can collect your government ID, it can perform biometric scans, it can try to analyze your behavior on the platform, or it can employ a third-party digital ID company to handle your data.

Regardless of the method, age verification requires users to hand over much more information than just their age. This causes a lot of additional problems, not the least of which is the fact that none of these approaches is foolproof. As such, every verification method is a balancing act of the potential benefits it could provide vs. the potential harms it could cause.

The utility of age restrictions

Despite being controversial, there are some situations where most people agree that some form of age verification is a net positive. A good offline example of age verification is the MPAA movie ratings. Movie ratings were initially introduced by the Motion Picture Association of America in 1968.

While there is still plenty to criticize about the ratings system, it provides a useful shorthand for understanding the content of a film for both parents and audiences more generally. And while it prevents kids from seeing content that might be inappropriate for them, it ultimately leaves the decision with parents. If you want your 15-year-old to be able to see Oppenheimer or Deadpool in theatres, you just have to go with them. The ratings give parents information, but parents get to make their own decisions.

Another important aspect of the current movie ratings system is that it replaced the restrictive Hays Code, which had a long list of banned topics. The ratings system allowed filmmakers to create movies that wouldn’t have complied with the code’s censorship rules (such as Oppenheimer and Deadpool). Good digital solutions should also prioritize freedom of expression and respect internet users’ First Amendment rights.

An ineffective approach

While age restrictions can be a useful tool in some situations, they often fail to achieve their stated goals. For one thing, it’s impossible to break down content into age brackets that everyone agrees with. Even with broadly accepted systems like movie ratings, you can probably think of some decisions you disagree with. Did you remember that Frozen didn’t qualify for a G rating for some reason?

Age appropriateness is a very subjective measure, and trying to quantify it typically yields appropriately silly results. In 2006, for example, researchers tried to quantify the amount of violence in popular video games and concluded that the most violent games ever made included the likes of Pac-Man, Dig Dug, and Galaga. This dubious research was even presented as evidence in congressional hearings.

These are just some of the issues that come up even when you assume that all parties involved are acting in good faith. Things get a lot more complicated when people try to exploit these systems for personal gain. In the 2010s, people realized that one of the best ways to make money on YouTube was to manipulate the site’s algorithm with low-quality, and often disturbing, content directed at children. The problem was so severe that YouTube had to completely overhaul its policies toward kids’ content.

Legal issues with age verification

Age verification is a rather ineffective framework for developing online tools, but it’s a terrible idea as a legal framework. Unfortunately, there has been a recent surge of governments trying to write online age restrictions into law. Besides just not working very well, such laws in the U.S. usually come into conflict with the First Amendment.

In 2025, both Arkansas and Louisiana passed laws requiring social media companies to verify users’ ages using official documents. In both cases (Arkansas and Louisiana), the laws were found to be unconstitutional, noting that the First Amendment does not give the government the ability to choose what kinds of speech children can and cannot access.

When age verification doesn’t work

Despite these laws being struck down, political discussions about online safety often don’t get beyond blanket age restrictions. But if we want to know how such laws would work, we only have to look to Australia, which actually implemented age restrictions on social media.

Although Australian politicians touted the law as a landmark piece of legislation, it took kids less than five minutes to bypass the ban. In contrast to systems like the MPAA ratings, the Australian law does not give parents the ability to make choices about their children’s social media use. Unsurprisingly, a poll found that despite its apparent popularity, only 29 percent of parents planned to enforce the ban on their own children. Another poll found that a third of parents intended to help their children bypass the restrictions.

Creating effective age verification software has always been an elusive goal, and it’s only going to get less attainable in the future. After the messaging app Discord started using face-scanning software to enforce age restrictions, frustrated users created a free tool to bypass the system using a 3D model.

When age verification makes things worse

While age verification systems often fail to bring the benefits they promise, they can also do real harm. They are a privacy nightmare, not just to children, but to all users who give their personal data to these systems, whether willingly or not. Major data breaches are increasingly common among platforms like Discord that are collecting age verification data and third-party companies that specialize in identity verification. Requiring users to surrender personal data, especially government documents, puts them at a massive risk of identity theft. To quote Jason Kelley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “online age verification is incompatible with privacy.”

Even if these deeply flawed systems could be made to work as intended, the results are often still bad. The Australian social media ban, for instance, kicked millions of kids and teenagers out of their YouTube accounts, forcing them to use the site while logged out. If you’ve ever tried to use YouTube when logged out, then you probably know that the default algorithm is a cesspool of ragebait, AI slop, and misinformation. Instead of recommendations based on their interests, Australian kids had to wade through the worst of YouTube until they or their parents figured out a way to circumvent the new law.

Furthermore, many of the biggest online threats to children are in the spaces ostensibly created for children. Online predators don’t hang out on adult sites waiting for kids to come to them; they go where children already are. Spaces like Roblox, an online game platform geared toward a younger audience, have had massive issues with child abuse and exploitation.

Better ways to improve online safety

Age verification software is a clumsy, invasive, and lazy solution to online safety that infringes on constitutional rights, takes power away from parents, and distracts from more effective approaches. So what are some better ways to protect your kids online? The best tool is always to be involved with your kids, communicate with them about their online activity, and teach them digital literacy skills.

It’s also important to understand how parental controls and other content settings work on your kids’ apps and devices. There are also lots of parental control tools you can use, though many of these also rely on simple age gating by default. When looking for good parental control tools, look for those that give parents a high degree of customization and those that are applicable to the kinds of online activity your kids engage in.

On a broader, societal level, we don’t need a scan of our face and a copy of our social security card sitting on the servers of every tech company we interact with. What we do need is better content moderation and more responsive customer service so that unwanted behaviors can be blocked or prevented. We need laws that give parents more control over deciding what’s appropriate for their children and that give us more recourse against tech companies that act recklessly with our kids’ safety and privacy.