There is a vital global conversation underway about how to best protect young people online. Governments worldwide are introducing a range of proposals, from restrictions on personalized feeds and screen time to outright social media bans. While these proposals share a crucial goal that we support, they often overlook a major practical hurdle: how platforms can safely and accurately verify a teen’s age.
For any of these proposals to succeed, apps must know the age of their users. But proving age on the internet remains a complex, industrywide challenge. Many teens don’t have traditional government IDs, and requiring people to upload sensitive personal documents to every individual app they download creates significant privacy risks. Furthermore, smaller or emerging platforms often lack the robust security infrastructure required to safeguard this data, which can inadvertently expose millions of people to security breaches.
Protecting young people online should not come at the expense of privacy. That’s why parents and safety advocates overwhelmingly support a simpler, more secure approach: centralizing age verification and parental consent in the app store. By handling age verification once at the device level, we can provide young people with consistent, age-appropriate experiences across the many apps they use while keeping their personal data safe.
