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For: Maddie Wong, 17, German Swiss International School
Sites with age restrictions tend to have them for good reason.
Children are increasingly exposed to the internet from a very young age. In 2021, around 70 per cent of 10-year-olds in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries already owned a smartphone, and 93 per cent of the same cohort had access to the internet, according to the OECD.
Exposure to mature and inappropriate content could have various negative effects, including emotional or psychological distress and behavioural issues. It is also common for such content to be accompanied by dangerous interactions, such as grooming or exploitation, putting children in further danger.
Enforcing laws that safeguard underage users is therefore more critical than ever.
It may be argued that there are many ways to bypass identity verification, with VPNs being one of them. Despite this, I argue that laws requiring identity verification for the purpose of age checks would not be entirely useless.
Although it may not deter all underage users from accessing certain sites illegally, it would at the very least make it harder for children to unintentionally come across inappropriate sites.
By mandating ID verification, users of all ages would also be held more accountable for their digital footprint, since their identity would be attached to it. This measure would remove a layer of anonymity that many users exploit for dubious online behaviour.
I believe it is the legislative council’s responsibility to protect its citizens and fight for what is right, even if not consistently successful. Policymakers should not shy away from taking action simply because the desired effect may not happen; such reasoning is cowardly.
Requiring people to show their identity cards to access sites with age restrictions would be a meaningful and necessary first step towards longer-term change.
Against: Nicholas Gao, 17, Chinese International School
Age verification is nothing new; such processes have been in place for decades. From ticking a box to confirm you are over 18 to sharing your birth date, companies have largely relied on an honesty policy up until recently.
Popular social platforms Instagram, Facebook and Discord all technically require users to be at least 13, while most adult content pages clearly label their content as unsuitable for minors.
In July, the United Kingdom introduced the Online Safety Act, which requires all websites displaying pornographic content to implement a robust age verification process. The intentions behind this are noble – preventing underage users from consuming unsuitable media – but the new rules jeopardise a basic right to privacy.
It is not just the UK. Global companies are now implementing identification requirements for access to age-restricted content. The United States, Germany, Australia, Canada and China all enforce “age gates” in some way, shape or form to protect underage internet users.
But are those over 18 being put at risk of becoming innocent casualties?
By introducing age verification for a multitude of websites, adults across the world are being forced to hand over personal information, including email addresses, photographs, credit card information and copies of identification documents.
This sparks a number of privacy concerns over what companies do with that sensitive information once the verification process is complete, and whether the data is at risk of potential future breaches.
According to Statista, there were 3,158 publicly reported data breaches in the United States in 2024 alone, affecting around 1.35 billion people.
Last year, cybercriminals tried to sell the personal data of 560 million Ticketmaster customers following a hack, while patient medical data was stolen from the UK’s National Health Service pathology provider, Synnovis.
In short, your data is only as secure as the companies that hold it.
Such extensive verification is needless when you consider that technology, which solves the problem of under-18 internet access, already exists. For example, adults can set parental blocks on their children’s devices, and schools can block mature websites. This protects a child from unsuitable content without putting personal data at risk.
When it comes to social media, companies like X, formerly Twitter, and Meta have a responsibility to ensure their content is suitable for all users. Why should under-13s be denied access to information and be restricted from building a community? And why should adults be forced to shoulder the burden of data breach risks just to access their desired websites?
While identity verification for age-restricted content was introduced for all the right reasons, it unfortunately creates far greater risks than it solves.
