Age verification is being built before it is solved

Every stronger check asks for more trust

Once governments or platforms want a firmer answer, personal data starts to pile up. A government ID can be accurate, but it also creates obvious breach risks. A face scan looks more modern, but the privacy problems do not disappear just because the process feels smoother. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has warned that facial age estimation can be discriminatory, with studies showing higher error rates for people of colour and women. The Verge also notes that face based estimation has been tricked and that even on device systems, often presented as a privacy win, are not yet easy to secure or deploy well across older hardware. This is where things change from a child safety discussion into a systems trust discussion. Who gets the data. How long is it kept. Can it be linked across services. What happens after a breach. Can a face scan be repurposed by another system later. Can a teenager or an adult challenge a wrong result. These are not side questions. They are the entire issue. A tool that blocks a child from a harmful service but quietly builds a new layer of biometric dependency is not a clean success story.

The device level fix is not really a fix

Because platform by platform checks are messy, some lawmakers have decided the app store or operating system should handle age verification once and then pass a signal on to everyone else. Supporters say that is more efficient and less repetitive. The California law is a strong example of this model. It requires an accessible interface at account setup for age information, then a real time signal that places users into age brackets for developers that request it. On the surface, that sounds cleaner than every app asking for an ID separately. But moving the checkpoint down into the device layer does not make the underlying problem disappear. It centralises it. Suddenly the operating system becomes part of the identity pipeline, and the age signal becomes a standard input for software access. That has huge consequences for open systems, small developers, and privacy focused alternatives that were never built to become age classification infrastructure. It also changes the relationship between the user and the device. A phone or computer stops being just a tool and starts acting more like a gatekeeper. Once that norm is established, it is hard to believe age will be the last attribute governments or platforms want signalled this way.

Open systems and smaller players get squeezed first

Big platforms can absorb compliance work more easily than the open web can. That is one of the quieter truths in this debate. The Verge notes that open source operating systems and Linux distributions are already grappling with how app store style age laws might apply to them. That matters because policy often gets written with Apple and Google in mind, then spills outward into a much wider technical ecosystem. Rules designed around a few giant companies can end up punishing smaller, decentralised, privacy oriented, or volunteer run projects that do not have the money or structure to implement age assurance pipelines the same way. The same pressure can fall on independent websites, forums, niche services, or new entrants who now face extra compliance and legal uncertainty just to let people read, talk, or download software. What this really means is that age verification can become a market filter as much as a safety measure. The companies with the biggest identity, moderation, and legal teams get stronger. The edges of the internet get weaker. That is a serious cost, even if it rarely appears in the public sales pitch.

Courts are warning that this is still about speech

Another reason this issue is not settled is that age verification is not just a technical compliance question. It is also a constitutional and civil liberties question. The Verge reports that laws aimed at both app stores and platforms have already run into federal court trouble. Reuters separately reported that a federal judge blocked enforcement of a Texas law requiring app stores and developers to verify users’ ages, and later reported that a federal judge blocked Virginia’s law restricting social media use for children, finding likely First Amendment problems. That matters because age gates do not just filter commerce. They can limit access to speech, communities, information, and lawful expression. When the government requires broad age checking before someone can access large parts of the internet, the legal system starts asking hard questions about overbreadth, burden, and whether the state has chosen a narrowly tailored path. The courts are not saying child safety is unimportant. They are saying the method still matters. That warning should be taken seriously, because badly designed online safety laws can easily create new rights problems while failing to solve the old safety ones.

Better privacy ideas exist but they are not yet the norm

There is a more hopeful part of the story, and it sits in the world of privacy preserving credentials. France’s CNIL demonstrated a privacy preserving age verification model that lets someone prove they are old enough without sharing other personally identifiable data. Google has also open sourced zero knowledge proof libraries for age assurance, arguing that this can help developers build privacy enhancing age checks. The Future of Privacy Forum says reusable credentials can store a single verification as a secure token so people do not have to keep re submitting sensitive personal data over and over. That is the direction the industry should want. A person should be able to prove a narrow fact, like being over 18, without exposing their full birth date, their full identity, or a reusable pile of biometric information. But the problem is that these systems are still not the universal standard in everyday use. They remain early, uneven, or limited by interoperability and implementation challenges. So while the better future is visible, most of the internet is still being pushed toward cruder methods in the meantime.

The deeper risk is that we normalise permanent ID checks

The child safety argument is powerful because it starts from a real concern. There is no point pretending otherwise. Harmful content exists. Predatory behaviour exists. Recommendation systems can amplify risk. Young users often do need stronger protection than the internet currently gives them. But the deeper risk is that societies get used to proving identity traits every time they want to access lawful digital spaces. Once that habit becomes normal, the infrastructure tends to expand. A rule built for pornography may later reach social media. A rule built for social media may later drift toward games, app downloads, forums, video sites, or general online services. A signal first framed as age only may become linked to parental status, jurisdiction, device ownership, or other categories. That is why privacy advocates worry even when the policy goal sounds reasonable. The danger is not only one bad system. It is the gradual building of a web where access always begins with a personal checkpoint. That changes the culture of the internet itself. It makes anonymity weaker, casual access harder, and participation more conditional. That may be a far larger transformation than many lawmakers currently admit.

What changes next

The next phase will be defined by whether policymakers accept that age assurance is not a simple box to tick. Better systems will need to minimise data collection, reduce repeated checks, avoid discrimination, work across devices, survive legal scrutiny, and still be understandable to ordinary users. That is a high bar, but it is the right one. The wrong path is to keep locking in rushed mandates and then hope the technology improves later. The better path is to treat privacy, security, usability, and speech as core design requirements from the start. In practical terms, that means more pressure for narrow proof systems, more legal fights over broad mandates, more tension between national rules and global platforms, and more debate over whether app stores, operating systems, or websites should bear the burden. Age verification is clearly not going away. The question now is whether it becomes a carefully limited safeguard or the foundation of a much more permission based internet. Right now, the answer is still unsettled, and that is exactly why this debate matters so much in 2026.