Age Verification, VPNs and KYC: Why Digital Platforms Need Smarter Identity Checks

Age verification and online identity rules are being tightened by regulators and lawmakers worldwide right now. For digital platforms, online services and age-restricted businesses, the question is no longer whether they need to know more about their users. The question is how to verify users quickly, accurately and without creating unnecessary friction.

New rules and proposals are already reshaping the way platforms think about age gates, identity checks, onboarding and user safety. For online operators, this creates a clear challenge: simple tick boxes and self-declared ages are no longer enough. But heavy verification for every user can discourage sign-ups, frustrate legitimate users and make digital journeys slower than they need to be.

That is why smarter Know Your Customer (KYC) solutions are becoming more important.

What’s happening with age verification regulations?

In California, from early 2027, every digital service provider (likely with the exception of open source software) will be legally obliged to estimate the ages of every person using their systems.

Downloadable mobile apps of all kinds too will need to incorporate tech solutions that mean they have a sense of every user’s age bracket.

In practice, the incoming laws should help proactively prevent people from using online systems, apps, games, websites, even internet browsers, unless they can demonstrate they’re old enough to be doing so.

And this isn’t just happening in California or the US either, similar rules relating to age verification are being introduced around the world.

• In Europe – the Digital Services Act is swiftly evolving online protections for minors
• In the UK – plans are in place to ban children from using social media
• In Australia – under 16s are legally banned from accessing social media sites
• In Curacao – strict age verification rules created to prevent underage gambling are already on the books

Why is it happening?

Age verification law updates are designed generally to prevent minors from easily accessing online content that could be unsuitable for them.

Across the world, there is a growing appreciation of the potential harm that can arise if children have unfettered access to all parts of the digital world.

The new laws and tightened regulatory environments aim to ensure that children aren’t just banned from specific websites in theory but they’re actively barred from entering those spaces in practice too.

Why are VPNs also part of the debate?

VPNs are becoming part of the debate because they can be used to bypass restrictions. This does not mean every VPN provider should become a KYC platform. But it does mean that digital platforms need smarter risk-based identity checks instead of relying only on IP location, tick boxes or self-declared age.

Time to really know your customers?

Online operators have long allowed their systems to be used by people whose ages and identities they haven’t really known much about.

That now looks to be changing fast, however. Tighter rules will force companies across digital industries to make much greater efforts to know who their customers are.

In a sense, these new and incoming rules will establish a growing need for operators in digital spaces to accurately and consistently identify their users’ age ranges, whether they would like to or not. For digital operators and enterprises, in turn, the race is now very much on to combine that requisite level of regulatory compliance with advanced, potentially AI-enabled user experiences that continue to deliver interactions that are as frictionless as possible.

How serious could the consequences be?

The consequences of failing to live up to new rules around ID and age verification could be very serious for online service providers.

In California, for example, fines are set to be levied on a ‘per child’ basis:

- $2,500 per affected child (where the violation occurred unintentionally)
- $7,500 per affected child (where the violation occurred intentionally)

Given how many millions of people use popular digital service platforms on a routine basis, those fines could rack up very quickly.

Meanwhile, in Australia, social media platforms that fail to implement reasonable age-assurance measures can already face fines worth tens of millions of dollars.

Competitiveness considerations

For most online operators, while fines are never good news, the biggest risk might be to competitiveness.

Falling behind your rivals can always be costly but, when it comes to compliance issues, it can be closer to catastrophic.

If you’re not ready to deliver seamlessly integrated ID verification and KYC tools that work well and prove their worth - there’s every chance your competitors will be.

Why does verification need to be risk-based?

Modern KYC should not be a one-time gate at registration. It should work as a flexible decision layer across the user journey.

That means platforms need to ask several practical questions:

• Is this user old enough to access the service?
• Is the identity real?
• Is the person present during verification?
• Are there signs of account sharing, fraud or suspicious behaviour?
• Does this user need a stronger check, or can they move forward with minimal friction?

A risk-based approach allows platforms to treat different users differently. Low-risk users can move through the journey faster. Higher-risk cases can be routed to stronger checks, additional review or manual decision-making.

This is especially important in a world where users may access services from different devices, locations and networks. A single data point rarely tells the full story. Smarter verification comes from connecting signals and turning them into clear decisions.

Futureproofing and workable solutions

The good news is that the very latest KYC solutions – like X-faces – do an outstanding job of delivering on multiple fronts simultaneously, including…

• Biometric ID checks
• Age verification
• Fraud prevention
• Onboarding
• Compliance
• Continuous KYC

For digital businesses, this is not only about meeting the next regulatory deadline. It is about building a verification flow that can adapt as rules, risks and user behaviour continue to change.

Identifying who people are is increasingly essential for compliance reasons as we’ve seen - but good KYC tools today automate their functionality and embed practical, workable solutions as well.

They also keep the user data flowing and prepare businesses for whatever comes next.

With the right KYC tech, companies can glean a range of competitive benefits and offer better, more seamless services to their users – all while staying ahead of the curve from a compliance perspective.

What should platforms do next?

The regulatory direction is becoming clearer, but the practical question is still open: who should be responsible for age assurance – the device, the app store, the platform or the service provider itself?

As age gates become stricter, the real challenge is not only proving who a user is. It is doing so without losing them in the process.

Is your current verification flow ready for that? What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

X-faces — identity verification for a digital world.