Online child safety is a complex issue. Many recent legislative proposals look to require platforms to verify users' ages to see various types of content or access critical services. But without fail, these "age assurance," "age verification," or "age estimation" systems hurt user privacy and increase the risks of identity theft.

There are a variety of age determination options, but all have serious privacy, accuracy, or security problems.

No method of age verification is both privacy-protective and entirely accurate. These methods don’t each fit somewhere on a spectrum of “more safe” and “less safe,” or “more accurate” and “less accurate.” Rather, they each fall on a spectrum of “dangerous in one way” to “dangerous in a different way.”