Your Data Is Already Breached: Why Age Verification Makes It Worse
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. Before we get started today, I want you to do a little experiment with me. Go to have ibeenpwned, that's pwned,.com, and check if your email address has been in a data breach. Ignore any ads or anything.
Leslie Poston:I'm not sending you there to buy anything. As of writing this episode, their site lists nine forty one PONED websites and over 17,400,000,000 PONED accounts. POWNED does internet speak for owned. If you showed up in the results, you've just learned the most important thing about today's episode: you're already in the blast radius for digital risk. Your data has been exposed by companies doing business online.
Leslie Poston:Sometimes it's just your email address, but just as often it's your social security number, your phone number, your address, or your passwords. Keep all of that in mind while we talk about the global push for age gates and digital ID verification. Because we're trying to solve complicated human development problems with a compliance shortcut. And the shortcut doesn't work it just creates new risk for everyone. Australia banned anyone 16 from social media, with fines up to 49,500,000.0 Australian dollars.
Leslie Poston:The United Kingdom enforces age checks for porn sites under the Online Safety Act. The EU just released a prototype age verification app. Here in The US, COSA is back in play in 2026 after we thought it was gone in 2025, and COSMA, which is the Kids Off Social Media Act, advanced to the senate calendar. The House pushed through a stack of kid safety online bills with serious implications for marginalized groups. In June 2025, the Supreme Court upheld a Texas age verification law, and several states have followed with their own versions of this constitutionally fuzzy law.
Leslie Poston:Watch how quickly scared adults embrace surveillance infrastructure when they're convinced it protects children. This is a textbook moral panic. A threat gets defined. Media presents it in stylized fashion. Moral entrepreneurs build consensus that, quote, something must be done, and the response becomes disproportionate to the actual risk.
Leslie Poston:The Surgeon General's 2023 advisory doesn't say social media is harmless or that it's the single cause of a youth mental health crisis. It says we can't conclude social media is sufficiently safe without parental guidance, and lays out research gaps. That's scientific humility, not a crisis declaration. But authority bias kicks in. When someone like the Surgeon General issues an advisory, people assume the threat must be real and serious.
Leslie Poston:The authority signal overwhelms the nuance of an issue. When researchers rigorously examine the evidence, the crisis narrative collapses. Orban and Przybylski analyzed three datasets with over 355,000 participants. Digital technology use explains at most 0.4% of the variation in adolescent well-being. Wearing glasses has a larger negative association with well-being than screen time.
Leslie Poston:Ojer's work is even more damning. Her reviews found that research generates a mix of conflicting small positive, negative, and null associations. Rigorous longitudinal studies that track the same kids over time show the strong linkages disappear. Adolescents already at higher risk for problems like depression use social media differently. Kids who are already struggling spend more time online.
Leslie Poston:Spending time online does not create the struggle. Audra's team found little evidence that adolescents experience higher emotional dysregulation or lower self esteem on high use days versus low use days. So when pundits say social media is destroying kids mental health, recognize the availability heuristic at work. We tend to judge likelihood based on how easily examples come to mind. Every tragic news story about a teen suicide mentioning social media makes the risk feel enormous, even though the statistical risk is tiny and heavily confounded.
Leslie Poston:Media amplifies these stories because they generate engagement. Parents see the stories, feel terrified, and demand action. Politicians respond to the availability cascade regardless of underlying statistical reality. Rogers has longitudinal data tracking actual kids over time. People like Jonathan Haight, whom you may have heard of, have a book to sell.
Leslie Poston:These aren't equivalent positions. The problem isn't access. Bullying, sleep disruption, body image pressure, loneliness none of these are solved by proving someone is 16. These harms often begin offline in social dynamics, school climates, and parenting capacity. Tech companies design products to exploit this.
Leslie Poston:Recommendation algorithms, notification patterns, engagement loops, all engineered to maximize time on a platform. But age gates and digital ID verification keep assuming the problem is access. Social comparison has always existed. What's different now is that kids experiencing it online don't have necessarily the critical thinking skills, parental support, or offline community resilience to contextualize it. That's a literacy and a capacity problem, not a platform problem.
Leslie Poston:If a kid is going down a pro anorexia rabbit hole, for example, the question isn't why did the algorithm show this? It's why doesn't this kid have an adult in their life who notices they're struggling and intervenes? A present attuned parent would see these warning signs before the algorithmic feed does any damage. And you can be 18 and still be vulnerable to all of this. Many adults are vulnerable to all of this.
Leslie Poston:Age gates and digital ID verifications solve for the wrong variable. So, what's actually broken? We have a society wide parenting capacity crisis. Not bad parents necessarily, just exhausted parents trying to survive in a system that has abandoned them. Secure attachments develop when caregivers are consistently available, responsive, and attuned.
Leslie Poston:But how does a parent provide that when they're working multiple jobs, drowning in logistics, stressed about money or their health with no support network. Attachment security predicts emotional regulation, social competence, and resilience. Insecure attachment predicts vulnerability to anxiety and depression. When humans can't provide responsive attention because they're overworked and burnt out, kids will attach to whatever is available. That's why AI companions are becoming a problem.
Leslie Poston:Kids forming primary relationships with bots that are always there and always responsive is also not a technology problem. That's what happens when children are starved of human connection. We should be talking about whether parents have the capacity to provide responsive attuned caregiving, but that conversation implicates economic structures, work culture, social policy. It's just easier to blame the phones. We also have a literacy crisis.
Leslie Poston:Reading scores tanked after 2020, and it didn't have anything to do with lockdown. Prior to that, we abandoned phonics, spent decades teaching kids to fill in bubbles on tests instead of thinking. Kids can use phones, but they struggle to evaluate what they're reading. When a kid goes down a misinformation rabbit hole, that's an education system problem. We didn't teach them to think critically, evaluate sources, recognize manipulation, so then we act shocked when they can't do it.
Leslie Poston:Underneath all of this, capitalism gutted support structures that families used to have. Childcare is unaffordable, health care bankrupts people, parents work multiple jobs and can't make rent. There's just no time or energy left to parent, so they try to solve it with laws. When kids struggle, we're told it's a personal failure. That's victim blaming, telling someone they don't have enough grit.
Leslie Poston:It lets us avoid admitting that we build a system that's making parenting nearly impossible and then point at screens when the inevitable happens. So why do we keep choosing the wrong solution? Age gates and digital ID verifications let adults feel like they did something without requiring structural change. Symbolic action beats policy transformation that would redistribute resources. This is the illusion of control.
Leslie Poston:Age gates feel more concrete and measurable. It's psychologically more satisfying than confronting complex systemic problems. People prefer simple, certain interventions over complex ones, even when the complex intervention would be more effective. An age gate or digital ID verification feels certain. Fixed capitalism so parents have time to parent feels overwhelming.
Leslie Poston:Protect the kids unites people across the political spectrum. It lets them avoid admitting that we build a society where parents can't afford to parent, and schools can't afford to teach. Once you activate protective instincts around children, rational evaluation of the evidence becomes harder. Anyone questioning the narrative gets cast as not caring about kids or as making excuses for big tech. Many adults that are pushing for age gates and digital ID verifications benefit from the economic system that's crushing families.
Leslie Poston:It's psychologically uncomfortable to acknowledge their policy preferences are making kids miserable. When behavior and beliefs conflict, we adjust our beliefs to justify our behavior. We find an external villain, social media, phones, or tech companies, and now the story is coherent. They care about kids, they're protecting kids from big tech, and they don't have to examine their role. This is scapegoating.
Leslie Poston:It redirects blame onto a safe target, reducing cognitive load. It's easier to hate TikTok, for example, than to confront capitalism. The just world hypothesis creates pressure to find a reason when kids struggle. If the reason is structural, economic inequality and policy failure, that threatens belief in a just world. If the reason is a discreet bad actor like social media, the just world belief can be preserved.
Leslie Poston:Ban the bad thing, restore order, justice prevails. What does age verification actually create? Australia's enforcement, age estimation from selfies, behavioral analysis, government ID checks, and bank linked verification, is not just affecting teenagers. Once platforms face massive fines for failing to exclude minors, they just verify everyone. So youth policy becomes universal infrastructure more places where sensitive data is collected, processed, stored, and transmitted.
Leslie Poston:Even when the laws say don't retain this data, the ecosystem expands. Vendors exist and logs exist, and systems get hacked. Remember that breach check we did in the beginning? We're creating more opportunities for exactly those problems every time we try and deploy this solution. This is function creep, when a system built for one purpose gets used for others.
Leslie Poston:The Social Security number was never supposed to be a national ID. Biometric data for border security ends up used for domestic surveillance. We're living through that in The United States right now. Age verification infrastructure will creep into content moderation, law enforcement, marketing, and political control. If you verify your identity to access online spaces, you know your identity is linked to your activity.
Leslie Poston:That changes what you're willing to say, read, and explore. Chilling effects on free speech, political dissent, exploration of stigmatized topics, marginalized communities are especially affected. LGBTQIA plus youth, undocumented immigrants, abuse survivors needing anonymity are all impacted. Verification systems produce errors. People get locked out.
Leslie Poston:People without stable government IDs get excluded. This is digital redlining. Identity requirements exclude people based on documentation status, housing stability, and institutional trust. Age verification mandates and digital ID verification are panopticle level surveillance affecting everyone, not just the young. So what would actually work?
Leslie Poston:Well, if the problem is capacity, literacy, community, and economic structure, fixing those would work. Universal childcare, publicly funded. Parental leave for bonding time health care, including mental health services schools with counselors, social workers, enrichment programs living wages, housing policy that keeps families stable labor protections for predictable schedules and time off. Many countries do this and they have measurably better outcomes for their youth, not because they have different phones but because they support families structurally. For platforms, focus on actual harm mechanisms, transparency about recommendation algorithms, and friction around features designed to maximize engagement at the expense of well-being.
Leslie Poston:Have real accountability when AI products generate dangerous content. For educators, bring back phonics, teach critical thinking, fund schools properly, and stop teaching to the test. All of this requires political will and resource redistribution. That's harder than surveillance, and that's why we're not doing it. So why did I start with a breach check?
Leslie Poston:Age gates sold as child safety are mass identity infrastructure creating new risk for everyone. Once we normalize prove yourself to participate online, we're changing internet access fundamentally for everyone, while avoiding confronting what's actually broken. When you hear the next proposal to ban teens or install age gates or have digital IDs or digital ID verification, ask yourself, will this reduce the specific harms we care about, and what new harms are we creating to avoid structural change? Age gates are a mirage. They look like protection, but they're distraction.
Leslie Poston:Real protection requires confronting why adults don't have capacity to parent, why schools can't teach literacy, why communities are fragmented, and why families have been economically abandoned. The psychological mechanisms being exploited target real fears. Parents really are scared and kids really are struggling, but fear doesn't make us clear headed. It makes us vulnerable to manipulation. Simple solutions that won't work, that feel like action.
Leslie Poston:Our brains pay more attention to threats than positive information. That's evolutionary. The ancestor who noticed the rustle in the bushes survived. But in modern information environments, this gets weaponized. You remember the scary story about the teen who developed an eating disorder after Instagram more vividly than studies showing small effect sizes.
Leslie Poston:Loss aversion compounds this. The prospect of losing something feels psychologically more powerful than gaining something. Parents are being sold a story about losing their children's mental health, innocence, and childhood, and that activates stronger emotional response than stories about the benefits of online connection or the free speech implications of surveillance. Understanding how your mind is being manipulated is the first step to resisting it. When you feel anxiety about your kid's phone use, pause.
Leslie Poston:What evidence are you responding to? Who profits from your fear, and what does the proposed solution actually do versus what it claims? What structural factors are being ignored? That's a lot harder than surveillance, but it's the only thing that will actually work. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace.
Leslie Poston:I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off and reminding you to stay curious.
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