Show me your face, says the website

You open a forum you have used for years and it wants a selfie. A social app asks you to confirm your age with a bank or a photo of your driving licence. A music video pauses to ask whether you are over 18. If the internet has started asking how old you are more often, that is not your imagination. It is the Online Safety Act at work, and with the government now planning to restrict social media for under-16s, the questions are likely to get more frequent, not less.

This column has opinions about friction online. Age checks are an odd case, because the irritation is real and so is the reason for it.

Why the checks appeared

The Online Safety Act 2023 put legal duties on online services to protect children, and made Ofcom the regulator. The government’s explainer on the Act set 24 July 2025 as the deadline for services likely to be used by children to complete their children’s risk assessments, with the child safety regime in full effect from summer 2025. Companies that fail in their duties can be fined up to £18 million or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater. Numbers like that change behaviour quickly, which is why so many services added checks at once.

Has it worked?

Ofcom published its first report on the use of age assurance on 16 July 2026. A summary of the report by Lewis Silkin picks out the main figures:

• The share of children who encountered a highly effective age check when asked to verify their age rose from 25% to 43% between July 2025 and January 2026.
• Across a sample of 32 services, more than 69 million age checks were completed in the second half of 2025, around 23 times as many as in the previous six months.
• Ofcom had opened 23 investigations into providers of 88 adult services, and had imposed a series of fines.

So the checks are reaching more children than before. They are not reaching most of them yet, and Ofcom itself said there is more to do. It also expressed serious doubts about some “age inference” systems, which guess your age from behaviour rather than checking it, warning they may miss significant numbers of children.

The irritation is real, and so is the reason for it.

The under-16 plan

The government has said it intends to restrict social media use by under-16s. The Ofcom report addresses this directly: it says age inference is unlikely to support a meaningful ban at the point of signing up, and stronger age assurance will be needed. Ofcom was due to give Parliament a rapid assessment by October 2026 of what counts as highly effective age verification for over-16s, and it plans a report on protections at app store level by January 2027.

In plain terms: if a ban on under-16s goes ahead, many more adults will be asked to prove they are over 16, not just over 18. That may mean checks on apps that have never asked before.

The app store idea

One of the more sensible parts of the report is Ofcom’s call for what it calls a whole-of-system approach, sharing responsibility with app stores, operating systems and device makers. The appeal is obvious. If your phone already knows you are an adult, it could vouch for you once, rather than every app asking for your face separately. That would mean fewer selfies, fewer uploads of documents to companies you have never heard of, and less friction for adults, while children’s devices could be set up as children’s devices from the start.

What to do when a site asks your age

For adults, the practical question is how to get through checks without handing over more personal data than necessary.

• Prefer methods that keep less data. Where a service offers a choice, an age estimate from a photo that is deleted afterwards generally asks for less than uploading a passport. Read the short privacy note on the check screen; good providers say what they keep and for how long.
• Be wary of lookalike checks. A pop-up asking for card details “to confirm your age” on a site you reached from a strange link deserves suspicion. Close it.
• Ask whether you need the service. If a check wants more than you are comfortable giving for a site you barely use, walking away is a perfectly good answer.

For parents

Age checks on services are one layer. Device controls are another, and they are entirely in your hands. Setting up a child’s phone or tablet with its own account, its true date of birth and the built-in parental controls does more than any single website check. The age check is the bouncer at one door; the device settings decide which street the child is on.

A grumpy but fair verdict

There is plenty to dislike. Checks are inconsistent from site to site. Some are clumsy, some demand too much, and many adults are now proving their age for things that hardly seem to need it. Privacy campaigners have a point about the volume of sensitive data being collected by companies most of us had never heard of a year ago.

But the old system was a tick box that said “I am over 18”, and every child in the country knew how to tick it. Something had to change. The job now is to make the checks better: fewer, more private, more consistent, ideally done once at the device rather than fifty times on the web. That is what Ofcom says it wants too. Until then, the age check joins the cookie banner and the surprise app redesign on the list of small taxes on modern browsing, with the difference that this one has a defensible purpose.

If you are worried about how a company handled your data during an age check, you can complain to the company first and then to the Information Commissioner’s Office. Concerns about a service’s child safety can be raised with Ofcom.