Fixing the Online Age Verification Privacy Problem

Finding Solutions is Better than Protesting Problems

July 31, 2025

Australia recently banned children under 16 from being able to use social media, or maybe they’ve banned social media from being able to access children under 16, I guess it depends on how you interpret it. The law passed a while ago and is back in the news because they’ve decided YouTube is to be included in this ban, and because this is back in the news people all over the internet are digging into the controversy of this ban.

You can call me a fascist, a commie, or whatever you want but I’m largely in favor of this ban. I’ve read Johnathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation and gave it an extremely positive review. No social media before 16 is one of the recommendations Haidt gives to parents and governments to protect kids from all sorts of mental problems. It isn’t hard to see why he makes this recommendation, data shows that giving young girls access to social media will always result in decreased mental health outcomes for them, it places young boys on a dangerous path towards pornography addiction, and of course things like TikTok will rot anyone’s brain. The intent behind this ban clearly comes from a good place.

The issue many online privacy advocates have with this ban is in its implementation. How do you verify if someone trying to make an Instagram account is above the age of 16? The current method most sites use is to ask users their birthday, but that isn’t reliable because we have no way to tell if the user is telling the truth. Back when I was in middle school all my friends who had YouTube accounts had told the site they were thirty in order to get past any age restrictions the site had implemented.

The solution that it seems sites has come up with to solve the honesty problem is to ask users to upload a picture of their ID in order to make an account. There are several reasons why this is a bad idea, the recent hack of the gossip app Tea is an example of one of those reasons but there are others. The biggest one people are afraid of is in the slippery slope that comes with your online activity being linked to your government ID, I don’t want to live in the world that lives at the bottom of that slope.

Because of that slippery slope activists want to get rid of Australia’s social media ban and they don’t want any similar laws to be implemented anywhere else, but I think they are trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I believe there is a way to handle online age verification without compromising privacy beyond what most people are comfortable with. Age verification can and should be handled at the operating system level.

How would this work? The operating system of whatever device a user is using would store their birthday somewhere where no other program could access it. If a program or website needed to verify if the user is over 16 the developer of that program or website would simply ask the operating system using a function (that could look like: isUserOver(16)) that would return a simple true or false. With this sort of system in place a user should never have to enter their birthday into any program or website and no program beyond the operating system could ever have access to the user’s birthday.

But how would the operating system reliably know it’s user’s birthday? Unfortunately I don’t think we can get around the requirement for needing an ID but I do believe the ID thing can be handled without having to send a picture of it to Microsoft or something. It is 2025 and good image processing software exists that can run on just about any computer, using that kind of software one should be able to give a computer a picture of their ID and have it identify what the birthday on the card is without the need to connect to the internet.

And for those of you who are still paranoid about giving their computer a picture of your ID another solution exists, you could go to a store and have some verified third party tell your operating system when your birthday is. An iPhone user could take their phone into the Apple store and show the employee their ID and the employee could enter in the birthday after scanning some sort of QR code that would tell the phone’s operating system that that employee is authorized to honestly enter the user’s birthday. A system like that would have the same privacy
risk associated with buying a case of beer.

I believe this sort of system would allow for age verification laws to be enforced in a way that satisfies most online privacy activists as long as these conditions are met:

Some more things may be necessary to further protect privacy and other things may be necessary to prevent the system from easily being bypassed, but I think we have a pretty solid core idea here. This article is not meant to explore every edge case of this problem, it is meant to suggest a solution for something I haven’t seen people want to find.

Age verification laws for social media are a good idea, if I had a thirteen year old daughter I’d rather her be secretly smoking cigarettes than be using Instagram with or without my knowledge, it is that dangerous. We should not be advocating against laws like this instead we should be asking companies and lawmakers to implement a privacy respecting age verification system like this so that we can have our children protected from the poison of the internet without having to give Google our government ID.

In a perfect world age verification laws wouldn’t be necessary because parents wouldn’t let their kids on the parts of the internet they shouldn’t go but we don’t live in a perfect world so age verification laws are necessary to protect future generations from the mental health crisis the current one is in. Protesting these laws based on privacy concerns won’t get anyone anywhere. More people should be talking about ways to fix the privacy problem with age verification rather than demanding that we just give up on it. My solution may not be the best way to go (it may not be entirely mine either, I don’t remember if I saw someone else suggest something similar months ago) but I believe it is one worth considering and I hope the rest of you will try to think up solutions to other problems as well.

The world is not made better by people who spend all day complaining its problems, it is made better by those who figure out how to fix them.