A new advocacy website is urging internet users to refuse facial scans and identity-document uploads demanded for online age verification. The campaign, titled “Never Give Them Your Face,” argues that measures presented as child-safety controls can create an identity checkpoint for adults and minors alike.
Its core reasoning is that a service cannot reliably exclude people below an age threshold without assessing everyone who seeks access. In practice, that may involve government identification, a camera-based age estimate or analysis of account data. The site contends that collecting names, birth dates, document numbers and biometric templates goes beyond answering the limited question of whether a person is over 18.
The campaign emphasizes that biometric credentials differ from passwords. A compromised password can be replaced, while a face and the geometry derived from it are persistent. It warns that outside verification vendors create additional stores of sensitive data and that deletion promises may fail through retention, breach or a later change in ownership or government access. The supplied source does not document specific vendors’ architectures or prove that every facial age-estimation service retains reusable templates, so those risks should be assessed system by system.
The site also challenges effectiveness. It says determined teenagers can bypass checks using borrowed logins, virtual private networks, checked boxes or pre-verified accounts. It further argues that labeling accounts by age could help bad actors identify children, while pushing teenagers away from mainstream platforms might lead them toward smaller services with less moderation. These are plausible scenarios presented by the campaign, not measured outcomes in the evidence packet.
A wider concern is attribution of speech. If a person’s verified identity becomes a condition of reading or posting, anonymous participation in political, health and personal discussions may shrink. The campaign predicts that users will self-censor when an opinion can be reliably tied to an employer-facing or government-facing identity record. It also warns that databases created under one administration could later serve more intrusive purposes.
The proposed response is collective refusal. The site imagines users boycotting platforms that demand facial verification, depriving them of activity and advertising revenue and creating pressure to change the underlying rules. That is a political tactic, not a technical substitute for child-safety policy.
The campaign makes sweeping statements and does not supply a balanced survey of privacy-preserving age-assurance methods. Its strongest contribution is a set of concrete questions: whether verification can produce only an age assertion, whether identity data is retained, who can access it, how errors are corrected and what happens after a breach. Those details determine whether an age gate is a narrow control or an enduring identity system.
