The government is consulting on children’s use of social media and how age verification and age assurance technologies could help implement a potential age restriction on some platforms. We call on the Government not to require age assurance technologies on all user-user services.

Age assurance technology involves the verification of users' identity. We think this poses a severe risk to privacy and free speech as we believe it prevents communication that is safe from potential surveillance. We are concerned that it could put more users at risk from cybercrime, as safe user-user platforms could be harder to access and so dangerous platforms may be used instead. It increases the risk to users of breaches such as the Discord breach of age verification software.