In his newest article Jaap-Henk Hoepman discusses the major problems caused by age verification:

Roughly speaking there are four problems. First of all, bad approaches to age verification or age estimation, that heavily intrude in our private lives, are already in use today. These are putting age assurance in a bad light. Truly privacy friendly forms of age verification do exist though, and are in fact used in practice as well.

Second, even for privacy friendly technologies for age verification there are restrictions that limit their usefulness in practice. I’ll explain those in some detail below.

Third, current proposals for using age verification are overly broad, aiming to place age restrictions on social media in general, and on ‘controversial’ content. In fact, all technologies for age assurance, including even the most privacy friendly ones, carry the risk of function creep: once the infrastructure to reliably enforce age restrictions is in force, it can be imposed on increasingly larger sets of websites and services.

Finally, age assurance raises important questions about control and digital autonomy, as the global infrastructural needed to implement it is already dominated by large platforms.