Proton’s boss has waded into the age verification fight with a warning that sounds less like child safety and more like an identity checkpoint for the entire internet.
In a blog post on Thursday, Andy Yen, CEO of Proton, argues that the current push for age checks risks flipping the web from anonymous by default to something closer to “show your papers” before you click.
The problem, he says, is that you can’t reliably identify minors without identifying everyone else first, meaning systems built to protect kids inevitably sweep up adults too. “We cannot accept a world where every adult is expected to hand over ID as the price of going online.”
That argument is landing as age checks move from policy debate to product reality. Anthropic has already rolled out ID verification tied to certain personas in its Claude chatbot, while Microsoft has warned UK Xbox users they’ll need to verify their age to keep using core social features. Sony has also begun introducing age checks for PlayStation users this week, and Discord, after flirting with the idea, notably hit the brakes after admitting hackers accessed records, including government ID photos, tied to more than 70,000 users via a third-party age verification vendor.
For Yen, that’s exactly the issue. Start with a few “high-risk” services, and it doesn’t stop there. “With age verification, we’re on the cusp of, once and for all, requiring ID for every single person going online, for any reason, legal or not, adult or not,” he said.
Age checks also mean handing over sensitive data, and as Discord already found out, that doesn’t always end well. “The more sensitive data you stockpile in privately held databases, the bigger a target it becomes for criminals,” Yen said, adding that leaks are more or less inevitable once that data is collected.
His bigger gripe, however, is what this does to basic access. “Age verification as is currently being proposed in country after country would mean the death of anonymity online,” he added.
Privacy groups have been making similar noises, with the Open Rights Group warning that mandatory age checks pose serious risks to privacy, data protection, and freedom of expression, particularly if verification systems become centralized or linked across services.
If age checks are unavoidable, Yen argues they need to be built very differently from what’s currently rolling out. That means keeping the whole process on the user’s device, using facial scans instead of uploaded IDs, and discarding the data immediately after a simple yes-or-no answer on whether someone is old enough. That answer should be anonymized, sent with end-to-end encryption, and backed by open source code, he says, so people can verify that it does what it claims.
None of this is coming from a disinterested party. Proton’s entire pitch is privacy-first services, so a world of mandatory ID checks is hardly good for business. Still, it’s clear that age verification is no longer theoretical, and the list of services experimenting with it is growing – along with the size of the target they’re painting on their own backs. ®
