I believe there’s so much unnecessary confusion, frustration, and debate around age verification because we're treating two very different problems as one: 1/ Stopping kids from seeing inappropriate content 2/ Stopping adults from pretending to be kids I get why these are discussed together. Too much of (2) increases the risk of (1). But not all platforms face both challenges and certainly not at the same level, and treating them as the same problem leads to the wrong solutions and the wrong tradeoffs. I’m not a policy maker, but from our work at Persona, I’ve seen that the challenges, risks, and solutions for each of these problems are wildly different. Keeping kids from inappropriate content is a household-level problem. I don’t want to downplay the risks of social media or exposure to adult content. However, sacrificing broad privacy to solve what is fundamentally a parental controls problem doesn’t feel like a great bargain. Stopping adults from impersonating kids is a platform-level problem. It jeopardizes the safety and integrity of the community and at its core, it's fraud where adults have far more resources than kids. Unfortunately, the challenge is that more effective solutions tend to compromise more privacy. The best approaches evaluate how much of a tradeoff is worthwhile given the risks. When the risks of a technology don’t match the benefits of the problem it solves, public concern is justified. Applying fraud prevention techniques to what should be a parental controls problem is overreach. And a half-baked solution to adult impersonation is possibly worse. It’s security theatre where privacy is sacrificed but minimal assurance is gained. The more I work on this and the more I hear from all of you, the more I believe that if some privacy must be lost, some privacy should be gained elsewhere in return. The right framework is one that splits knowledge to prevent abuse. No single organization should know both: 1/ who you are 2/ what you are doing If Persona has to know who you are, we should make sure we don’t know what you’re doing or what app you’re using. And if a platform knows what you’re doing, they shouldn’t know who you are. This is not where the world is at today, and this framework is by no means perfect. But I think it’s better, and I’d love your feedback as we build it.