Proton CEO Andy Yen warns that mandatory age verification laws risk turning the internet into an identity checkpoint for all users, not just minors. He argues that verifying minors' ages inevitably requires identifying everyone, threatening online anonymity. Pointing to the Discord breach — where hackers accessed government ID photos of 70,000+ users via a third-party vendor — he highlights the data security risks of stockpiling sensitive identity data. Yen proposes a privacy-preserving alternative: on-device verification using facial scans, immediate data deletion, anonymized yes/no responses with end-to-end encryption, and open source code. The debate is no longer theoretical, with Anthropic, Microsoft, and Sony already rolling out age checks.
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