This topic is a spicy one, and one I’ve attempted to avoid. I don’t want to pretend I understand what it’s like to raise children online while living in a childless household.

The UK will ban under-16s from certain social media platforms from spring 2027, which raises a question that affects everybody:

How will the rest of us prove that we’re old enough to use them?

Since July 2025, there has already been an effort to keep under-18s away from harmful and adult content, and long before that, many services and websites had their own age checks. The idea of age-gating things has been around for as long as I’ve been alive, especially when it comes to movies and games.

My concern, shared by plenty of others as I understand it, is that uploading ID to various “checking services” carries risks of its own. My behaviour has already changed in an unexpected way. For example, I recently stopped partway through an age check on Xbox because I wasn’t comfortable with the process required to prove I was over 18, even though I was sending emails from the account in 2012, so I must have been a very internet-savvy four-year-old.

On the flipside, I also understand the need to protect children. Back in my day, there were very few guardrails on the internet, but over time I learned which websites to avoid, and scepticism became the default.

Granted, those days were simpler in some ways. Technology has advanced to the point where, in some cases, there is now a very fine line between what is fake and what is real.

There is an irony in websites asking us to prove we are real while offering little more than a promise that our ID will not be used for anything else. Where is the proof of that?

With spoofing becoming more sophisticated, websites arguably need to prove they are real more than ever too.

So… I don’t have a perfect answer here. Obviously, protecting children online matters, but so does avoiding a system where every adult has to repeatedly hand over sensitive information just to prove they are allowed through the door.

The real debate lies with how age checks can be enforced without turning ordinary internet use into a constant identity check.

By spring 2027, that question is going to matter to far more than just parents, and may shape how all of us access the internet in future.