From porn sites to social media, age verification requirements are spreading fast. But the technology doesn't work as advertised, the privacy implications are nightmarish, and the laws creating these mandates are often written by people who don't understand the internet.
Let me explain what age verification actually looks like in practice. Hint: it's not good.
Multiple states have passed laws requiring websites to verify that users are over 18 before allowing access to adult content. Some states are expanding this to social media platforms for users under 13 or 16. The stated goal is protecting children, which is a goal everyone can agree on in principle.
The problem is the implementation.
There are basically three approaches to age verification: uploading ID documents, facial age estimation, and third-party verification services. None of them work well.
ID document uploads require users to submit driver's licenses or passports to websites. This creates an obvious privacy problem: you're handing sensitive identity documents to websites that may or may not have robust security. When one of these sites inevitably gets breached, you're talking about massive identity theft exposure.
Facial age estimation uses AI to guess age based on photos. It's notoriously inaccurate, especially across different ethnicities and age groups. It also requires users to submit biometric data—another privacy nightmare—and it still fails at the margins. Can the system tell the difference between a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old? Not reliably.
Third-party verification services act as intermediaries, supposedly anonymizing the verification process. But someone still has your identity information. And now you're trusting not just the website you want to access, but also the verification service and however many partners they work with. Each additional party in the chain is another potential breach point.
And here's the thing that lawmakers often miss: the internet doesn't have borders. State-level age verification laws create a patchwork of compliance requirements. A website has to implement different verification systems for Texas, Utah, , and wherever else has passed these laws. The complexity is enormous, and the result is that many sites just block access from entire states rather than deal with compliance.
