Lawmakers around the world, including in the U.S., are racing to ban minors from social media, which effectively mandates digital services check I.D.’s before any person can use their service. While the use of this blunt instrument is usually well intentioned, it will make the internet more dangerous, especially for teens.
In an open letter sent yesterday, 405 cybersecurity and privacy experts from 30 countries worldwide warned that mandating age verification “breaks the internet’s security model” by creating centralized databases of sensitive identity information. These databases will become prime targets for hackers.
The problem is not hypothetical.
A hack of a major third-party age verification firm used for compliance with the U.K. and Australia’s laws in 2025 exposed the government I.D.s of around 70,000 users. Similarly, the Tea app faced a large breach of their identity verification system, including “72,000 images (13,000 selfies and photo IDs, and 59,000 images from app posts and direct messages).” In 2025, the Identity Theft Resource Center found that the number of data compromises has jumped 79% over the last five years. According to research from Javelin Strategy, 1 in every 8 children has their identities stolen before turning 18. Requiring users to hand over sensitive I.D. information essentially creates a honeypot of data for hackers and predators to exploit, which will magnify these numbers.
Indeed, Catherina Gionio at Fortune sums it up well:
At the heart of the issue is there is fundamentally no tool that can verify a user’s age without inherently violating a user’s privacy. Any accurate models require extremely invasive measures like biometrics or government IDs—and the IDs are something that even social media companies are hesitant to request because of the ID gap in which 15 million Americans lack any identification.
To provide lawmakers with good solutions, NetChoice created our Digital Safety Shield for America: a constitutional policy framework that focuses on empowering families. Instead of effectively mandating services collect massive datasets of sensitive information, NetChoice’s Digital Safety Shield prioritizes funding for and coordination of law enforcement to catch predators and investing in digital education so young Americans can navigate the web safely. It also encourages education on existing, robust parental control tools already built into devices, ISPs, games and apps that allow parents to manage screen time and content without handing their teen’s private data over to every website they visit.
By shifting the focus from blanket bans to targeted enforcement and parent-led education, we can create a safer internet that preserves online privacy and respects the fundamental rights of all Americans. Education and empowerment, not bans and state-mandated surveillance, are the keys to a healthier digital environment.
Social media bans are not the catch-all solution their proponents claim them to be; they are a privacy nightmare. Essentially requiring users to prove their identities creates a digital roadmap for predators and identity thieves to steal this sensitive information. We must stop treating children as subjects in a massive, uncontrolled experiment in government overreach.