Resist ‘dangerous and socially unacceptable’ age checks for social media, scientists warn

BRUSSELS — Governments should halt plans to roll out age checks on online services until privacy and security concerns are addressed, hundreds of academics said Monday.

The warning comes as countries around the world move to bar children from social media, which requires some way of checking users’ ages to decide if they can access online services. In an open letter, 371 security and privacy academics across 29 countries said the technologies being rolled out are not effective and carry significant risks.

As companies including OpenAI, Roblox and Discord implement age checks in anticipation of being obliged to, the signatories said it is “dangerous and socially unacceptable to introduce a large-scale access control mechanism without a clear understanding of the implications” for security, privacy and people’s freedom and autonomy.

They are calling instead for a global pause “until the scientific consensus settles on the benefits and harms that age-assurance technologies can bring, and on the technical feasibility.” The signatories include Ronald Rivest, winner of the prestigious Turing Award in computing, and Bart Preneel, president of the International Association for Cryptologic Research.

France is planning to ban kids under 15 from social media as soon as September, while Germany, Denmark and Spain are also accelerating efforts. Australia became the first country in the world to introduce a ban in December 2025. Many leaders have expressed support on the basis it would protect children’s physical and mental health, but countries have yet to decide how bans would be implemented or enforced.

“We share the concerns about the negative effects that exposure to harmful content online has on children,” the academics write. But current plans “would require all users — minors and adults — to prove their age to converse with friends and family, read news, or search for information; well beyond what has ever happened in our offline lives.”

A robust age verification system would require checking “government-issued IDs with strong cryptographic protection for every single interaction with the service,” the academics write. Such infrastructure is not only hard to build and maintain on a global scale, but would add friction in services, meaning many providers would refuse to install age checks.

Using technologies like cryptography to solve the problem risks centralizing tools in the hands of the few companies that can deploy them at scale, the experts warn.

They also warn of the risks that governments would ban virtual private networks to stop people from getting around age bans. VPNs are frequently used by people looking to protect their identities from authoritarian regimes.