Stricter age verification checks for online content — especially social media — are becoming the norm across the world, and with iOS 26.4, Apple introduced OS-level age checks for some on its iPhones to prove to the Simpsons’ Helen Lovejoy (and other real-world governments) that someone is finally thinking of the children.
The rollout has been anything but smooth — mimicking overage verification check rollouts — especially for folks who lack Apple’s few approved forms of ID (which include credit cards, but not debit cards).
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Think of the children
I’ve grown up with the internet and seen it morph as platforms are tweaked and designed to be more addictive, running rampant with bot-fuelled misinformation that is destroying our real-world and digital lives. Cheerful.
While I love social media platforms like YouTube — I believe my favorite channels helped spark a genuine love of learning that helped me massively back at school, and to this day — the system we have is broken, and things need to change.
Blanket age checks and bans are an approach, but can be a blunt instrument where a precise scalpel is needed. They also raise major privacy concerns — as we’ve already seen, some sites mishandle ID document scans (to the benefit of hackers), and there are legitimate fears about governments knowing your online activity (especially for marginalized groups).
But this is where I’m hoping Apple could come in.
An ideal solution doesn’t require every company to know all of your ID’s info, or for a government to know precisely where you visit. The site just needs to know that you’re 1) a real person, and 2) over the age requirement. Ergo, a digital ID version of two-factor authentication that just sends over limited data in a privatised way could work wonders. However, it would also require trust that the system is as private as it promises.
Apple has strong privacy protections for user data on its devices, and it’s in a prime position to create my ideal ID system, having built so much trust in its platform privacy, and even pushing back against governments who have tried to reduce its protections.
Sure, its current efforts aren’t perfect, but Apple could work on something much better, and I hope it does. This way, we could maintain some level of online privacy while still helping to clamp down on bot farms ruining the internet and keep kids from accessing content they shouldn’t.
The reality is, governments are moving hard on age checks and online safety, so it’s a matter of when, not if, the status quo will change. Naturally, savvy netizens have found workarounds that work for now using VPNs and various other methods, but these bypasses may not exist forever.
The longer we wait to propose a good solution (even if it isn’t perfect), the more likely we are to be left with something terrible (including several of the methods on the table now). From a better starting position, we could continue to evolve — rather than flip-flopping from maximal to minimal approaches, which I fear is a cycle we may otherwise find ourselves trapped in.
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hamish.hector@futurenet.com (Hamish Hector)
