Hundreds of Scientists Just Pleaded Governments to Pump the Brakes on Age Verification

Protecting children online is a genuinely noble goal that nobody argues with. But while the idea itself is truly worth pursuing, rolling out this technology at internet scale, before its harms are understood, is reckless and will likely cost every single one of us a lot more than the good it will achieve.

Since the governments remain blinded by their daydreams and ignorant of the reality, the rest of us are doing everything in our power to get this message across in hopes of finally getting their attention. And now, we just got some much-needed reinforcements.

On March 2, 2026, a joint open letter signed by 419 security and privacy researchers from 30 countries went public, calling for a moratorium on age verification deployment worldwide. The signatories include professors from MIT, Cambridge, Oxford, ETH Zurich, and dozens of other institutions.

The Fix That Could Break the Internet

The scientists lay out the core problem clearly: age verification does not actually work the way regulators believe it does. Checks are trivially easy to bypass, and a borrowed account from an older sibling, a bought credential, a VPN pointed at a jurisdiction with no age rules, or a simple prop in front of a camera for biometric estimation is more than enough to do it.

All of these are already in use, and all of them will scale up the moment verification becomes more widespread. The letter notes that fake age credentials spread quickly after any new deployment, just as fake vaccination certificates did during the COVID pandemic.

Beyond the circumvention problem, building a system that actually works would require a global trust infrastructure for identity verification, something that took decades to build even for basic web security and still does not exist for this purpose.

The EU's digital identity wallet is still unfinished. Revocation mechanisms remain unsolved. Cross-border interoperability is nowhere near ready. And for the people who do not have government-issued digital IDs, the elderly, undocumented immigrants, tourists, and people without smartphones, verified access to the internet simply disappears.

When Child Safety Becomes the Perfect Excuse

This is where the letter gets genuinely alarming. Age verification is not just a single check. It is the foundation of a much larger access control infrastructure, one that could be adapted to enforce any attribute-based policy once it exists. The scientists flag this painfully clearly: in the wrong hands, the same system used to verify age can be used to block LGBTQ+ content, restrict political speech, or facilitate the kind of internet shutdowns seen recently in Iran.

There is also a VPN dimension that hits close to home. Because VPNs are one of the most obvious circumvention tools, some policymakers are already discussing regulating or restricting VPN access as a response. The letter calls this out as a serious risk, noting that VPNs are essential security tools for journalists, activists, domestic abuse victims, and businesses.

And then there is the privacy harm from the verification process itself. Age estimation and age inference technologies rely on biometric data and behavioral profiling. They are AI-based, which means they carry known error rates and documented bias against certain minorities.

The Discord case the letter references is instructive: 70,000 users had their government ID photos leaked after appealing incorrect age assessments. Stuff like this keeps happening over and over again, yet the governments keep dismissing it, believing it won’t happen to them despite not doing anything differently. Talk about being naive…

The Science Isn't Done, So the Regulation Shouldn't Be Either

The scientists are not saying age verification should never happen. They are asking for a moratorium until two fundamental questions get answered: does it actually work, and what damage does it cause? Right now, neither question has a scientific answer.

Their proposed alternatives are worth taking seriously: regulate the algorithmic recommendation systems that push harmful content toward minors in the first place, and support parents with local content tools. That would address the actual problem without laying surveillance infrastructure into the internet's core.

But, you know, there is this globally known quote by an unnamed Alcoholics Anonymous attendee, said some 45 years ago, which goes, “Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.” Today, it might just be more applicable than ever.

Australia tested age verification in 2024, found no reliable solution, and implemented it anyway. Most of the world already followed without a second thought, too. Honestly, in my eyes, this leaves us with two alternatives: either this really is insanity that we can hopefully still snap out of, or neither the children’s nor the rest of our safety was ever really the point.