The Costs of Age Verification
The desire to realize many seemingly promising possibilities does not last beyond the point of realization. After some anticipated advantage or other is obtained, it is often quickly learned that having what was wanted is an experience quite different from what was expected—and far less pleasant or useful, too. June polling released by All About Cookies, an outfit that covers issues of online privacy, found that 72 percent of respondents favor imposing age verification mandates on social media platforms. These opinions are founded, presumably, on a well-meaning concern for the safety of children. Their enthusiasm is, however, alloyed with nervousness about data privacy: four fifths of respondents fear such laws would compromise privacy and data security, with roughly half reporting having attempted to circumvent age verification processes.
Six months later (in mid-October), another poll from All About Cookies arrived, discovering that “72% of Americans express low levels of trust in the companies and services handling age verification data, including 40% who do not trust them at all.” Only 15 percent expressed comfort at the prospect of providing government-issued identification for the purposes of age verification, and 18 percent did so with respect to submitting to facial scans. Alas, these are, given the state of the technology and the industry, the dominant modes of age verification.
At this date, “safe and secure age verification” approaches the contradiction of “family-friendly pornography.” Third-party age and identity verification providers, with which platforms contract to accomplish the nitty-gritty of the process, routinely maintain data securely about as well as handcuffs restrained Harry Houdini. Hacks, data breaches, and other incidents ending in the exposure of government documents and other information sensitive and personal to users abound. Just in September, as the Taxpayers Protection Alliance Foundation’s App Security Project (ASP) noted, “[i]t was reported…that the identification documents of 170 million North Americans—the vast majority of them from people in the U.S.—were made available on a dark-web service called Nexus.” Among the victims, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and a menagerie of other federal officials. ASP continues: “Brian Krebs, a long-time reporter who writes on the blog Krebs on Security, broke the story and trace the breach back to the identification service called IDScan, which partners with such companies as Hertz, Fedex, and Target.” This latest, being just one of a long train of such failures, evidences the simple fact that personal information and documentation, once collected, will almost invariably be made public. To crib from Shakespeare, the data will out.
In the United Kingdom, whose regulation of technology amounts to an unbroken chain of errors and tyrannies, the age verification regime commenced under the Online Safety Act (OSA) so distressed residents that, in the first year of statute’s enforcement, VPN usage doubled. Interest in VPNs and criticism of the OSA likewise proliferated, according to a review conducted by British academics. A 2025 Ipsos poll indicated that nearly 70 percent of Britons support age verification, but nearly half say they are unlikely, personally, “to submit proof of age to access a website.” Poor Richard’s Almanac cautioned: “Wise Men learn by other’s harms; Fools by their own.” Americans ought to wise up.
And for what benefit is enforced age verification, a digital show-your-papers apparatus and a grave danger to privacy and free speech, to be codified? Ofcom, the United Kingdom’s digital regulator, last month reported that, since OSA’s imposition, children are no less likely to access categories content they shouldn’t. In fact, as Matthew Lesh notes: “Exposure to porn went from 11.0% to 12.9% among 11–17s, suicide or self-harm from 12.5% to 13.7%, and any “primary priority” content from 29.6% to 32.2%.” (Ofcom, ever consistent, hopes to remedy these deficiencies by redoubling its censorial efforts.)
Such delinquency is transnational. Australia, having attempted to remove children from designated social media platforms, has struggled to enforce the ban and accompanying age verification scheme. And according to All About Cookies’ October report, “[a]ge verification laws don’t get more people to verify: 31% complete verification in states with and without laws. Instead, people in law states are 7x more likely to give up entirely and 4x more likely to use a VPN.” If enacting good policy were so simple as harboring good intentions and writing them into statute, governance would be a much simpler activity. But theories, even good ones, do not pass easily and undamaged along the road to implementation, and lawmakers must account for it.
Children ought to be safe online; they ought to be safe everywhere, in fact. The famous phrase has it that the ends do not justify the means, but more pertinently, the ends do not rationalize the means. That is, the pursuit even of the highest ends cannot render ill-considered means effective. Americans, because they are, in the main, a generous, compassionate people, experience an instinctual affinity for proposals that promise to make children safe. But they must, as they strive to get hold of this desideratum, remember that the promises of glittery, simple public-policy schemes very often do not resemble their results. Enforced age verification is dangerous, and very often ineffectual. Better to learn as much today, for bad laws are easier prevented than repealed.
Published on November 2, 2026