This post was co-authored by
Sheila B. Lalwani
, a doctorate student and recent
COMPASS Fellow
hosted by EFF.
Age verification proposals are
often presented
as a simple tradeoff: sacrifice a little privacy to better safeguard children online. But that framing overlooks a more fundamental question. What happens to people who cannot verify their age at all? This is particularly a problem when users are required to prove their age with identity documents.
Age-related restrictions are developing quickly around the world. While they differ radically across jurisdictions, in the past year, we’ve witnessed a sharp uptick toward mandatory age assurance for social media access but also for other high-risk digital services.
For example:
In late 2025,
Australia
became the first country
to implement a minimum age requirement for prohibiting children under age 16 from creating or holding social media accounts.
India
passed the
Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act
that includes mandatory verifiable parental consent and has undertaken ongoing discussions for social media restriction.
The United Kingdom
passed the
Online Safety Act
requiring age verification
across a swath of services hosting content considered harmful to users under 18. More than half the states across the
U.S.
have enacted age verification laws
.
An
EU Commission
’s expert
report
recommends a ban on social media access for users under 13. It also recommends mandatory age verification for platforms to ensure that users are ‘age appropriate.’
The Access Problem
Age verification laws that
are predicated on the necessity of
users possessing a current passport, driver’s license, credit card, or similar documents proving their identity exclude critical sections of populations. And this problem is global in nature:
Millions of people lack government-issued identification
or encounter regular challenges to obtaining or updating it.
Roughly 15 million adult U
… [more]
