It’s a scene that is beginning to play out weekly for Americans: you go to a website that’s part of your regular routine and suddenly, you’re staring at a prompt asking you to upload your driver’s license and take a selfie. Age verification, they say.
You hesitate for exactly three seconds before clicking “upload” because, well, you want what you want.
Congratulations. Your sensitive identity documents just joined the databases of yet another company you’ve never heard of, with security practices you can’t verify, storing your data for who knows how long.
We’re living through the world’s most chaotic identity verification experiment, and nobody’s talking about the elephant in the room: who is handling this data?
The State-by-State Free-for-All
In 2024 alone, 19 states passed laws requiring age verification for online pornography. Altogether, 18 states now have some form of age verification requirements, each with their own interpretation of what “adequate verification” means. Louisiana started this mess in 2022. Texas doubled down. Nebraska’s recent law requiring ID uploads caused Pornhub to simply block the entire state.
The result is a compliance nightmare where businesses operating nationwide face a patchwork quilt of conflicting requirements.
Some states demand ID uploads.
Others prohibit them.
Some allow facial recognition.
Others ban it outright.
It’s regulatory chaos masquerading as child protection.
Meanwhile, the federal Improving Digital Identity Act has been gathering dust in Congress since 2020 despite bipartisan support. So instead, states are flying blind, making it up as they go along, creating fifty different standards for the same fundamental problem.
The Security Nightmare We’re Creating
Here’s what happens every time you “verify your age” online:
- You upload a photo of your driver’s license to some random company’s servers
- You take a selfie for “liveness detection”
- There’s a check if they match performed by an algorithm, or human, third-party, or that company – it could be anything
- Your data sits in their database forever
- You have zero control over what happens next
The age verification industry is dominated by a long list of companies which have each built their own data fortresses. The problem is, every time you verify with a new service, you’re creating another potential breach point. Another database storing your most sensitive documents. Another company you have to trust with information that could destroy your life if misused.
These companies profit from collecting and hoarding your data. They have zero incentive to give you control or minimize data collection. Their business objective is to lock you into their ecosystem, force you to verify repeatedly, and sell additional services on top of your trapped information.
The Question Nobody’s Asking
Amid all the noise about protecting children online, there’s a critical question being ignored: Who is actually qualified to handle the most sensitive identity verification at scale?
The current answer is: whoever can afford to build a verification service and convince websites to use it. There’s no standardized vetting of these companies. No requirements for specific security practices. No oversight of how they store or use your data.
We’re essentially outsourcing national identity infrastructure to whoever shows up with an API and a sales deck.
The problem is getting worse. Zyphe’s 2025 trends report highlights how AI-generated attacks have reached an inflection point, with generative AI now producing fake IDs, faces, and voices sophisticated enough to fool traditional verification systems. The current approach of uploading documents to random databases isn’t just a privacy nightmare—it’s increasingly ineffective against modern fraud.
This isn’t sustainable. We can’t have a system where your identity documents are scattered across dozens of random databases, with varying security standards, no interoperability, and zero user control.
The Decentralized Identity Alternative
There’s a better way, and it’s not theoretical. According to Zyphe’s 2025 Digital ID Verification Trends report, decentralized identity is one of the most significant innovations reshaping the verification landscape.
The real innovation is giving users control over their identity through more direct management of their own personal data.
Here’s how true decentralized identity works:
- Verify once: Complete identity verification with a trusted, regulated issuer
- Retain Self-Sovereign Identity: Your complete identity data is issued back to your own decentralized vault—not in some company’s database
- Control everything: You decide what information to share, when to share it, and with whom
- Share selectively: Prove you’re over 21 without revealing your exact age, address, or full identity
- Remove middlemen: No centralized databases accessing your sensitive documents
Unlike systems that keep central control over your data and have significant vulnerabilities to bad actors, decentralized identity means your driver’s license photo, personal details, and biometric data are under your own control. Companies can see and verify what they need without ever storing your actual documents, and needless middlemen never get access to your most sensitive data.
Why This Matters Now
The current trajectory is unsustainable. Every new state law creates more compliance chaos. Every new verification requirement means more companies collecting your data. Every new database becomes a target for hackers.
The EU gets it. They’re developing a “mini-ID wallet” for age verification by Q2 2025, ahead of EU Digital Identity Wallets rolling out by 2026. They’re building user-controlled, privacy-preserving systems as the default.
Meanwhile, we’re stuck with a system where teenagers upload their IDs to sketchy age verification startups just to access social media.
The Path Forward
What we need is coordination. Instead of fifty states creating fifty different verification requirements, we need unified standards that put users in control, and that standard needs to be better than “upload your ID to whoever asks for it.”
Instead of trusting random startups with our identity documents, we need regulated, auditable systems designed for privacy.
We can do better.
We have the technology to do better.
***The only question is: Will we adopt it before the current system implodes?
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