Age Verification Is Identity Surveillance in Disguise — Refuse the Face Scan

A wave of “age assurance” laws now advancing across three continents is, in practice, a mandate for universal identity verification. The argument is straightforward: to prove a child isn’t present, a platform must check everyone, so a rule nominally aimed at minors becomes an ID checkpoint at the entrance to ordinary online activity. The author notes that almost none of these systems are designed to answer the simple yes/no question of whether a user is over eighteen — they instead capture names, birth dates, document numbers, and facial biometrics, and frequently route that data through unaccountable third-party vendors.

The core objection is permanence and risk concentration. A leaked password can be reset; a face scan — a 3D biometric template that can later be matched against street surveillance — cannot. Every verification database becomes a honeypot, and “we delete it immediately” promises evaporate the day a breach happens, except this time the stolen records are passports and faces rather than hashed credentials. The author also argues the scheme fails on its own terms: teens trivially bypass age gates with VPNs, borrowed logins, and pre-verified accounts sold online, while being pushed toward smaller, unmoderated platforms — and age-labeled user pools effectively create a searchable index of children.

Beyond the technical critique, the piece frames this as a civil-liberties problem: registries built under a trusted government persist into the hands of future, possibly hostile ones, and a real-name internet chills speech the way a workplace does. The author dismisses “nothing to hide” reasoning and argues the system’s dependence on near-universal compliance is also its weakness — it only works if almost everyone participates. The proposed response is mass non-compliance: refuse the scan, close accounts that demand it, and state in writing why. The closing line: never give them your face.