If you want to scroll Reddit, play Roblox, or chat on Discord, a company backed by Peter Thiel may soon require you to hand over your face. That's not a dystopian hypothetical — it's happening right now, and the civil liberties implications are being largely ignored amid the broader age verification debate.
The company at the center of this is Persona, an identity verification provider that Thiel's Founders Fund backed through a $150 million Series C and a $200 million Series D. Persona has become one of the dominant age verification systems for major online platforms. Reddit uses it for age verification in the UK. Discord has initiated a global rollout. Roblox, a platform with an enormous population of young users, began using Persona to estimate player ages via facial scans globally in early 2026.
The Open Rights Group, which published a detailed press release on the issue, is raising concerns that users effectively have no choice: submit a facial scan to access mainstream social services, or be locked out. This isn't an opt-in privacy feature. It's a mandatory biometric gate on public digital infrastructure.
The connection to Thiel is what gives this story its sharp edge. His other major investment, Palantir, has worked with ICE on immigration enforcement and with the Israeli military. The surveillance and defense networks around his investment portfolio make the biometric data flow here particularly fraught. Where does the facial scan data go? Who can access it? How long is it retained? These are not paranoid questions.
To be fair, age verification laws — especially in the UK — are creating genuine regulatory pressure on platforms. The intent, protecting minors from harmful content, is legitimate. But there is a meaningful difference between age verification and biometric identity collection, and we should be honest that what's being built here is the latter.
The Open Rights Group is calling for users to have the right to choose between multiple accredited age verification providers, access to non-biometric alternatives, transparency about data processing, and clear limits on retention and onward sharing. These seem like minimum requirements, not radical demands.
What concerns me most, as someone who has thought about platform architecture for a long time, is the infrastructure being normalized here. Once biometric identity gates are standard on major platforms, the ability to participate in digital public life anonymously — or even pseudonymously — largely disappears. That changes the internet in ways that are very difficult to reverse.
