The privacy paradox of protecting kids online

OpinionThe privacy paradox of protecting kids onlineWe don’t need to imagine the privacy pitfalls of age verification. They’ve been happening for years, argues Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard. By Frederik Gregaard|Edited by Cheyenne Ligon Jul 15, 2026, 2:58 p.m. 3 min readMake preferred on ShareShare this articleCopy linkX iconX (Twitter)LinkedInFacebookEmailMake preferred on In 2024, identity verification provider AU10TIX, which provided services to companies like TikTok and Uber, was found to have exposed drivers' licenses to hackers for over a year. In 2025, the age-verification systems provider for the social media site Discord was breached, exposing potentially 70,000 users' government IDs. In 2026, the lesson should already be clear that once age verification depends on vendors and stored identity data, a safety system can become a breach vector.And the rise of AI is only accelerating these risks, making hacks faster and the resulting damage easier to inflict.This is the backdrop against which the U.S. House passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act on June 29th, a sprawling package built around the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), 267-117. The bill now sits in the Senate, where KOSA's own authors, Democrat Richard Blumenthal and Republican Marsha Blackburn, resoundingly rejected the House version and are pushing a tougher one, in part by tying it to federal preemption of state AI laws. A Senate Commerce Committee markup is expected this month. Whatever emerges from that process will shape how identity works online for years.The intent is to protect minors. The risk is that the mechanism protecting them requires building a much larger surveillance apparatus than anyone campaigning for it admits.Frederik Gregaard is the CEO of the Cardano Foundation, the Swiss-based non-profit organization that exists to ensure the advancement of the Cardano protocol.KIDS doesn't mandate age verification outright, because it doesn't have to. Making platfo…

The privacy paradox of protecting kids online

Coins in this story

Related stories

Ostium suffers $18 million exploit as oracle attack wave continues to hit DeFi

High-level White House meeting said to be planned to hash out Clarity Act ethics section

South Korea to modify 76-year-old law to classify cryptocurrencies as national assets