Part 3/15:
As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other digital rights organizations point out, age verification systems often serve as backdoors to mass surveillance. To verify age, users are typically required to submit personal identification—such as government-issued IDs—which are then stored securely or, as many incidents have shown, not securely at all. For example, recent breaches involving Discord's age verification process resulted in the leak of minors' personal data, including IDs, addresses, and other sensitive information. Similar issues have occurred with other platforms, exposing children's private data to malicious actors.