EFF Also Will Host a Reddit AMA and a Livestreamed Panel Discussion

SAN FRANCISCO—With ill-advised and dangerous age verification laws proliferating across the United States and around the world, creating surveillance and censorship regimes that will be used to harm both youth and adults, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a new resource hub that will sort through the mess and help people fight back. 

To mark the hub's launch, EFF will host a Reddit AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) next week and a free livestreamed panel discussion on January 15 highlighting the dangers of these misguided laws. 

“These restrictive mandates strike at the foundation of the free and open internet,” said EFF Activist Molly Buckley. “While they are wrapped in the legitimate concern about children's safety, they operate as tools of censorship, used to block people young and old from viewing or sharing information that the government deems ‘harmful’ or ‘offensive.’ They also create surveillance systems that critically undermine online privacy, and chill access to vital online communities and resources. Our new resource hub is a one-stop shop for information that people can use to fight back and redirect lawmakers to things that will actually help young people, like a comprehensive privacy law.” 

Half of U.S. states have enacted some sort of online age verification law. At the federal level, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee last week held a hearing on “Legislative Solutions to Protect Children and Teens Online.” While many of the 19 bills on that hearing’s agenda involve age verification, none would truly protect children and teens. Instead, they threaten to make it harder to access content that can be crucial, even lifesaving, for some kids. 

It’s not just in the U.S.  Effective this week, a new Australian law requires social media platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under the age of 16 from creating or keeping an account. 

We all want young people to be safe online. However, age verification is not the panacea that regulators and corporations claim it to be; in fact, it could undermine the safety of many. 

Age verification laws generally require online services to check, estimate, or verify all users’ ages—often through invasive tools like government ID checks, biometric scans, or other dubious “age estimation” methods—before granting them access to certain online content or services. These methods are often inaccurate and always privacy-invasive, demanding that users hand over sensitive and immutable personal information that links their offline identity to their online activity. Once that valuable data is collected, it can easily be leaked, hacked, or misused.  

To truly protect everyone online, including children, EFF advocates for a comprehensive data privacy law. 

EFF will host a Reddit AMA on r/privacy from Monday, Dec. 15 at 12 p.m. PT through Wednesday, Dec. 17 at 5 p.m. PT, with EFF attorneys, technologists, and activists answering questions about age verification on all three days. 

EFF will host a free livestream panel discussion about age verification at 12 p.m. PDT on Thursday, Jan. 15. Panelists will include Cynthia Conti-Cook, Director of Research and Policy at the Collaborative Research Center for Resilience; a representative of Gen Z for Change; EFF Director of Engineering Alexis Hancock; and EFF Associate Director of State Affairs Rindala Alajaji. RSVP at https://www.eff.org/livestream-age. 

For the age verification resource hub: https://www.eff.org/age 

For the Reddit AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/  

For the Jan. 15 livestream: https://www.eff.org/livestream-age  

 

Tags: age verificationage estimationage gatingContact:  MollyBuckleyActivistmollybuckley@eff.org

This blog also appears in our Age Verification Resource Hub: our one-stop shop for users seeking to understand what age-gating laws actually do, what’s at stake, how to protect yourself, and why EFF opposes all forms of age verification mandates. Head to EFF.org/Age to explore our resources and join us in the fight for a free, open, private, and yes—safe—internet.

EFF is against all mandatory age verification. Not only does it turn the internet into an age-gated cul-de-sac, but it also leaves behind many people who can’t get or don’t have proper and up-to-date documentation. While populations like undocumented immigrants and people experiencing homelessness are more obviously vulnerable groups, these restrictions also impact people with more mundane reasons for not having valid documentation on hand. Perhaps they’ve undergone life changes that impact their status or other information—such as a move, name change, or gender marker change—or perhaps they simply haven’t gotten around to updating their documents. Inconvenient events like these should not be a barrier to going online. People should also reserve the right to opt-out of unreliable technology and shady practices that could endanger their personal information.

But age restriction mandates threaten all of that. Not only do age-gating laws block adults and youth alike from freely accessing services on the web, they also force users to trade their anonymity—a pillar of online expression—for a system in which they are bound to their real-life identities. And this surveillance regime stretches beyond just age restrictions on certain content; much of this infrastructure is also connected to government plans for creating a digital system of proof of identity.

So how does age gating actually work? The age and identity verification industry has devised countless different methods platforms can purchase to—in theory—figure out the ages and/or identities of their users.  But in practice, there is no technology available that is entirely privacy-protective, fully accurate, and that guarantees complete coverage of the population. Full stop.

Every system of age verification or age estimation demands that users hand over sensitive and oftentimes immutable personal information that links their offline identity to their online activity, risking their safety and security in the process.

But in practice, there is no technology available that is entirely privacy-protective, fully accurate, and that guarantees complete coverage of the population. Full stop.

With that said, as we see more of these laws roll out across the U.S. and the rest of the world, it’s important to understand the differences between these technologies so you can better identify the specific risks of each method, and make smart decisions about how you share your own data.

Age Assurance Methods

There are many different technologies that are being developed, attempted, and deployed to establish user age. In many cases, a single platform will have implemented a mixture of methods. For example, a user may need to submit both a physical government ID and a face scan as part of a liveliness check to establish that they are the person pictured on the physical ID. 

Age assurance methods generally fall into three categories:

1. Age Attestation
2. Age Estimation
3. ID-bound Proof

Age Attestation Self-attestation 

Sometimes, you’ll be asked to declare your age, without requiring any form of verification. One way this might happen is through one-off self-attestation. This type of age attestation has been around for a while; you may have seen it when an alcohol website asks if you’re over 21, or when Steam asks you to input your age to view game content that may not be appropriate for all ages. It’s usually implemented as a pop-up on a website, and they might ask you for your age every time you enter, or remember it between site accesses. This sort of attestation provides an indication that the site may not be appropriate for all viewers, but gives users the autonomy and respect to make that decision for themselves.

An alternative proposed approach to declaring your own age, called device-bound age attestation, is to have you set your age on your operating system or on App Stores before you can make purchases or browse the web. This age or age range might then be shared with websites or apps. On an Apple device, that age can be modified after creation, as long as an adult age is chosen. It’s important to separate device-bound age attestation from methods that require age verification or estimation at the device or app store level (common to digital ID solutions and some proposed laws). It’s only attestation if you’re permitted to set your age to whatever you choose without needing to prove anything to your provider or another party—providing flexibility for age declaration outside of mandatory age verification.

Attestation through parental controls

The sort of parental controls found on Apple and Android devices, Windows computers, and video game consoles provide the most flexible way for parents to manage what content their minor children can access. These settings can be applied through the device operating system, third-party applications, or by establishing a child account. Decisions about what content a young person can access are made via consent-driven mechanisms. As the manager, the parent or guardian will see requests and activity from their child depending on how strict or lax the settings are set. This could include requests to install an app, make a purchase on an app store, communicate with a new contact, or browse a particular website. The parent or guardian can then choose whether or not to accept the request and allow the activity. 

One survey that collected answers from 1,000 parents found that parental controls are underutilized. Adoption of parental controls varied widely, from 51% on tablets to 35% on video game consoles. To help encourage more parents to make use of these settings, companies should continue to make them clearer and easier to use and manage. Parental controls are better suited to accommodating diverse cultural contexts and individual family concerns than a one-size-fits-all government mandate. It’s also safer to use native settings–or settings provided by the operating system itself–than it is to rely on third-party parental control applications. These applications have experienced data breaches and often effectively function as spyware.

Age Estimation

Instead of asking you directly, the system guesses your age based on data it collects about you.

Age estimation through photo and facial estimation

Age estimation by photo or live facial age analysis is when a system uses an image of a face to guess a person’s age.

A poorly designed system might improperly store these facial images or retain them for significant periods, creating a risk of data leakage. Our faces are unique, immutable, and constantly on display. In the hands of an adversary, and cross-referenced to other readily available information about us, this information can expose intimate details about us or lead to biometric tracking.

This technology has also proven fickle and often inaccurate, causing false negatives and positives, exacerbation of racial biases, and unprotected usage of biometric data to complete the analysis. And because it’s usually conducted with AI models, there often isn’t a way for a user to challenge a decision directly without falling back on more intrusive methods like submitting a government ID. 

Age inference based on user data and third party services

Age inference systems are normally conducted through estimating how old someone is based on their account information or querying other databases, where the account may have done age verification already, to cross reference with the existing information they have on that account.

Age inference includes but not limited to:

• Partnering with data brokers to gather data associated with an email, like utility use or mortgage purchases, or associated with a name, such as transaction history from a credit bureau;
• Other AI model-assisted deployments that infer age based on existing account or web activity, such as account age or “happy birthday” messages;
• Credit card ownership checks.

In order to view how old someone is via account information associated with their email, services often use data brokers to provide this information. This incentivizes even more collection of our data for the sake of age estimation and rewards data brokers for collecting a mass of data on people. Also, regulation of these age inference services varies based on a country’s privacy laws.

ID-bound Proof

ID-bound proofs, methods that use your government issued ID, are often used as a fallback for failed age estimation. Consequently, any government-issued ID backed verification disproportionately excludes certain demographics from accessing online services. A significant portion of the U.S. population does not have access to government-issued IDs, with millions of adults lacking a valid driver’s license or state-issued ID. This disproportionately affects Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, immigrants, and individuals with disabilities, who are less likely to possess the necessary identification. In addition, non-U.S. citizens, including undocumented immigrants, face barriers to acquiring government-issued IDs. The exclusionary nature of document-based verification systems is a major concern, as it could prevent entire communities from accessing essential services or engaging in online spaces.

Physical ID uploaded and stored as an image 

When an image of a physical ID is required, users are forced to upload—not just momentarily display—sensitive personal information, such as government-issued ID or biometric identifiers, to third-party services in order to gain access to age-restricted content. This creates significant privacy and security concerns, as users have no direct control over who receives and stores their personal data, where it is sent, and how it may be accessed, used, or leaked outside the immediate verification process.

Requiring users to digitally hand over government-issued identification to verify their age introduces substantial privacy risks. Once sensitive information like a government-issued ID is uploaded to a website or third-party service, there is no guarantee that it will be handled securely. The verification process typically involves transmitting this data across multiple intermediaries, which means the risk of a data breach is heightened. The misuse of sensitive personal data, such as government IDs, has been demonstrated in numerous high-profile cases, including the breach of the age verification company AU10TIX, which exposed login credentials for over a year, and the hack of the messaging application Discord. Justifiable privacy and security concerns may chill users from accessing platforms they are lawfully entitled to access.

Device-bound digital ID

Device-bound digital ID is a credential that is locally stored on your device. This comes in the form of government or privately-run wallet applications, like those offered by Apple and Google. Digital IDs are subject to a higher level of security within the Google and Apple wallets (as they should be). This means they are not synced to your account or across services. If you lose the device, you will need to reissue a new credential to the new one. Websites and services can directly query your digital ID to reveal only certain information from your ID, like age range, instead of sharing all of your information. This is called “selective disclosure."

There are many reasons someone may not be able to acquire a digital ID, preventing them from relying on this option. This includes lack of access to a smartphone, sharing devices with another person, or inability to get a physical ID. No universal standards exist governing how ID expiration, name changes, or address updates affect the validity of digital identity credentials. How to handle status changes is left up to the credential issuer.

Asynchronous and Offline Tokens

This is an issued token of some kind that doesn’t necessarily need network access to an external party or service every time you use it to establish your age with a verifier when they ask. A common danger in age verification services is the proliferation of multiple third-parties and custom solutions, which vary widely in their implementation and security. One proposal to avoid this is to centralize age checks with a trusted service that provides tokens that can be used to pass age checks in other places. Although this method requires a user to still submit to age verification or estimation once, after passing the initial facial age estimation or ID check, a user is issued a digital token they can present later to to show that they've previously passed an age check. The most popular proposal, AgeKeys, is similar to passkeys in that the tokens will be saved to a device or third-party password store, and can then be easily accessed after unlocking with your preferred on-device biometric verification or pin code.

Lessons Learned

With lessons pulled from the problems with the age verification rollout in the UK and various U.S. states, age verification widens risk for everyone by presenting scope creep and blocking web information access. Privacy-preserving methods to determine age exist such as presenting an age threshold instead of your exact birth date, but have not been mass deployed or stress tested yet. Which is why policy safeguards around the deployed technology matter just as much, if not more. 

Much of the infrastructure around age verification is entangled with other mandates, like deployment of digital ID. Which is why so many digital offerings get coupled with age verification as a “benefit” to the holder. In reality it’s more of a plus for the governments that want to deploy mandatory age verification and the vendors that present their implementation that often contains multiple methods. Instead of working on a singular path to age-gate the entire web, there should be a diversity of privacy-preserving ways to attest age without locking everyone into a singular platform or method. Ultimately, offering multiple options rather than focusing on a single method that would further restrict those who can’t use that particular path.

In the brand new Planet Hollywood Poker Room, 48 digital rights supporters played No-Limit Texas Hold’Em in the 4th Annual EFF Benefit Poker Tournament at DEF CON, raising $18,395 for EFF.

img_5930.jpg

The tournament was hosted by EFF board member Tarah Wheeler and emceed by lintile, lending his Hacker Jeopardy hosting skills to help EFF for the day.

img_5980_copy.jpg

Every table had two celebrity players with special bounties for the player that knocked them out of the tournament. This year featured Wendy Nather, Chris “WeldPond” Wysopal, Jake “MalwareJake” Williams, Bryson Bort, Kym “KymPossible” Price, Adam Shostack, and Dr. Allan Friedman.

img_1962.jpg

img131959.jpeg

Excellent poker player and teacher Jason Healey, Professor of International Affairs at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs noted that “the EFF poker tournament is where you find all the hacker royalty in one room."

img_5955-fs8-web.jpg

The day started with a poker clinic run by Tarah’s father, professional poker player Mike Wheeler. The hour-long clinic helped folks get brushed up on their casino literacy before playing the big game.

Mike told the story of first teaching Tarah to play poker with jellybeans when she was only four. He then taught poker noobs how to play and when to check, when to fold, and when to go all-in.

img_5978.jpg

After the clinic, lintile roused the crowd to play for real, starting the tournament off by announcing “Shuffle up and deal!”

The first hour saw few players get knocked out, but after the blinds began to rise, the field began to thin, with a number of celebrity knock outs.
At every knockout, lintile took to the mic to encourage the player to donate to EFF, which allowed them to buy back into the tournament and try their luck another round.

kym.jpg

Jay Salzberg knocked out Kym Price to win a l33t crate.

img_6019.jpg
img_5923.jpg

Kim Holt knocked out Mike Wheeler, collecting the bounty on his head posted by Tarah, and winning a $250 donation to EFF in his name. This is the second time Holt has sent Mike home.

mike_knock_out.jpg

Tarah knocked out Adam Shostack, winning a number of fun prizes, including a signed copy of his latest book, Threats: What Every Engineer Should Learn From Star Wars.

adam.jpg

Bryson Bort was knocked out by privacy attorney Marcia Hofmann.

img_6082-web.jpg

Play continued for three hours until only the final table of players remained: Allan Friedman, Luke Hanley, Jason Healey, Kim Holt, Igor Ignatov, Sid, Puneet Thapliyal, Charles Thomas and Tarah Wheeler herself.

As blinds continues to rise, players went all-in more and more. The most exciting moment was won by Sid, tripling up with TT over QT and A8s, and then only a few hands later knocking out Tarah, who finished 8th.

For the first time, the Jellybean Trophy sat on the final table awaiting the winner. This year, it was a Seattle Space Needle filled with green and blue jellybeans celebrating the lovely Pacific Northwest where Tarah and Mike are from.

The final three players were Allen Friedman, Kim Holt and Sid. Sid doubled up with KJ over Holt’s A6, and then knocked Holt out with his Q4 beating Holt’s 22.

Friedman and Sid traded blinds until Allan went all in with A6 and Sid called with JT. A jack landed on the flop and Sid won the day!

img_5987.jpg

img_6115.jpg

img_6126.jpg

Sid becomes the first player to win the tournament more than once, taking home the jellybean trophy two years in a row.

img_6139.jpg

It was an exciting afternoon of competition raising over $18,000 to support civil liberties and human rights online. We hope you join us next year as we continue to grow the tournament. Follow Tarah and EFF to make sure we have chips and a chair for you at DEF CON 34.

Be ready for this next year’s special benefit poker event: The Digital Rights Attack Lawyers Edition! Our special celebrity guests will all be our favorite digital rights attorneys including Cindy Cohn, Marcia Hofmann, Kurt Opsahl, and more!

Photo Gallery

It’s nearly the end of 2025, and half of the US and the UK now require you to upload your ID or scan your face to watch “sexual content.” A handful of states and Australia now have various requirements to verify your age before you can create a social media account.

Age-verification laws may sound straightforward to some: protect young people online by making everyone prove their age. But in reality, these mandates force users into one of two flawed systems—mandatory ID checks or biometric scans—and both are deeply discriminatory. These proposals burden everyone’s right to speak and access information online, and structurally excludes the very people who rely on the internet most. In short, although these laws are often passed with the intention to protect children from harm, the reality is that these laws harm both adults and children. 

Here’s who gets hurt, and how: 

   1.  Adults Without IDs Get Locked Out

Document-based verification assumes everyone has the right ID, in the right name, at the right address. About 15 million adult U.S. citizens don’t have a driver’s license, and 2.6 million lack any government-issued photo ID at all. Another 34.5 million adults don't have a driver's license or state ID with their current name and address.

Specifically:

• 18% of Black adults don't have a driver's license at all.
• Black and Hispanic Americans are disproportionately less likely to have current licenses.
• Undocumented immigrants often cannot obtain state IDs or driver's licenses.
• People with disabilities are less likely to have current identification.
• Lower-income Americans face greater barriers to maintaining valid IDs.

Some laws allow platforms to ask for financial documents like credit cards or mortgage records instead. But they still overlook the fact that nearly 35% of U.S. adults also don't own homes, and close to 20% of households don't have credit cards. Immigrants, regardless of legal status, may also be unable to obtain credit cards or other financial documentation.

   2.  Communities of Color Face Higher Error Rates

Platforms that rely on AI-based age-estimation systems often use a webcam selfie to guess users’ ages. But these algorithms don’t work equally well for everyone. Research has consistently shown that they are less accurate for people with Black, Asian, Indigenous, and Southeast Asian backgrounds; that they often misclassify those adults as being under 18; and sometimes take longer to process, creating unequal access to online spaces. This mirrors the well-documented racial bias in facial recognition technologies. The result is that technology’s inherent biases can block people from speaking online or accessing others’ speech.

   3.  People with Disabilities Face More Barriers

Age-verification mandates most harshly affect people with disabilities. Facial recognition systems routinely fail to recognize faces with physical differences, affecting an estimated 100 million people worldwide who live with facial differences, and “liveness detection” can exclude folks with limited mobility. As these technologies become gatekeepers to online spaces, people with disabilities find themselves increasingly blocked from essential services and platforms with no specified appeals processes that account for disability.

Document-based systems also don't solve this problem—as mentioned earlier, people with disabilities are also less likely to possess current driver's licenses, so document-based age-gating technologies are equally exclusionary.

   4.  Transgender and Non-Binary People Are Put At Risk

Age-estimation technologies perform worse on transgender individuals and cannot classify non-binary genders at all. For the 43% of transgender Americans who lack identity documents that correctly reflect their name or gender, age verification creates an impossible choice: provide documents with dead names and incorrect gender markers, potentially outing themselves in the process, or lose access to online platforms entirely—a risk that no one should be forced to take just to use social media or access legal content.

   5.  Anonymity Becomes a Casualty

Age-verification systems are, at their core, surveillance systems. By requiring identity verification to access basic online services, we risk creating an internet where anonymity is a thing of the past. For people who rely on anonymity for safety, this is a serious issue. Domestic abuse survivors need to stay anonymous to hide from abusers who could track them through their online activities. Journalists, activists, and whistleblowers regularly use anonymity to protect sources and organize without facing retaliation or government surveillance. And in countries under authoritarian rule, anonymity is often the only way to access banned resources or share information without being silenced. Age-verification systems that demand government IDs or biometric data would strip away these protections, leaving the most vulnerable exposed.

   6.  Young People Lose Access to Essential Information 

Because state-imposed age-verification rules either block young people from social media or require them to get parental permission before logging on, they can deprive minors of access to important information about their health, sexuality, and gender. Many U.S. states mandate “abstinence only” sexual health education, making the internet a key resource for education and self-discovery. But age-verification laws can end up blocking young people from accessing that critical information. And this isn't just about porn, it’s about sex education, mental health resources, and even important literature. Some states and countries may start going after content they deem “harmful to minors,” which could include anything from books on sexual health to art, history, and even award-winning novels. And let’s be clear: these laws often get used to target anything that challenges certain political or cultural narratives, from diverse educational materials to media that simply includes themes of sexuality or gender diversity. What begins as a “protection” for kids could easily turn into a full-on censorship movement, blocking content that’s actually vital for minors’ development, education, and well-being. 

This is also especially harmful to homeschoolers, who rely on the internet for research, online courses, and exams. For many, the internet is central to their education and social lives. The internet is also crucial for homeschoolers' mental health, as many already struggle with isolation. Age-verification laws would restrict access to resources that are essential for their education and well-being.

   7.  LGBTQ+ Youth Are Denied Vital Lifelines

For many LGBTQ+ young people, especially those with unsupportive or abusive families, the internet can be a lifeline. For young people facing family rejection or violence due to their sexuality or gender identity, social media platforms often provide crucial access to support networks, mental health resources, and communities that affirm their identities. Age verification systems that require parental consent threaten to cut them from these crucial supports. 

When parents must consent to or monitor their children's social media accounts, LGBTQ+ youth who lack family support lose these vital connections. LGBTQ+ youth are also disproportionately likely to be unhoused and lack access to identification or parental consent, further marginalizing them. 

   8.  Youth in Foster Care Systems Are Completely Left Out

Age verification bills that require parental consent fail to account for young people in foster care, particularly those in group homes without legal guardians who can provide consent, or with temporary foster parents who cannot prove guardianship. These systems effectively exclude some of the most vulnerable young people from accessing online platforms and resources they may desperately need.

   9.  All of Our Personal Data is Put at Risk

An age-verification system also creates acute privacy risks for adults and young people. Requiring users to upload sensitive personal information (like government-issued IDs or biometric data) to verify their age creates serious privacy and security risks. Under these laws, users would not just momentarily display their ID like one does when accessing a liquor store, for example. Instead, they’d submit their ID to third-party companies, raising major concerns over who receives, stores, and controls that data. Once uploaded, this personal information could be exposed, mishandled, or even breached, as we've seen with past data hacks. Age-verification systems are no strangers to being compromised—companies like AU10TIX and platforms like Discord have faced high-profile data breaches, exposing users’ most sensitive information for months or even years. 

The more places personal data passes through, the higher the chances of it being misused or stolen. Users are left with little control over their own privacy once they hand over these immutable details, making this approach to age verification a serious risk for identity theft, blackmail, and other privacy violations. Children are already a major target for identity theft, and these mandates perversely increase the risk that they will be harmed.

   10.  All of Our Free Speech Rights Are Trampled

The internet is today’s public square—the main place where people come together to share ideas, organize, learn, and build community. Even the Supreme Court has recognized that social media platforms are among the most powerful tools ordinary people have to be heard.

Age-verification systems inevitably block some adults from accessing lawful speech and allow some young people under 18 users to slip through anyway. Because the systems are both over-inclusive (blocking adults) and under-inclusive (failing to block people under 18), they restrict lawful speech in ways that violate the First Amendment. 

The Bottom Line

Age-verification mandates create barriers along lines of race, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, immigration status, and socioeconomic class. While these requirements threaten everyone’s privacy and free-speech rights, they fall heaviest on communities already facing systemic obstacles.

The internet is essential to how people speak, learn, and participate in public life. When access depends on flawed technology or hard-to-obtain documents, we don’t just inconvenience users, we deepen existing inequalities and silence the people who most need these platforms. As outlined, every available method—facial age estimation, document checks, financial records, or parental consent—systematically excludes or harms marginalized people. The real question isn’t whether these systems discriminate, but how extensively.

The European Commission (EC) is considering a “Digital Omnibus” package that would substantially rewrite EU privacy law, particularly the landmark General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It’s not a done deal, and it shouldn’t be.

The GDPR is the most comprehensive model for privacy legislation around the world. While it is far from perfect and suffers from uneven enforcement, complexities and certain administrative burdens, the omnibus package is full of bad and confusing ideas that, on balance, will significantly weaken privacy protections for users in the name of cutting red tape.

It contains at least one good idea: improving consent rules so users can automatically set consent preferences that will apply across all sites. But much as we love limiting cookie fatigue, it’s not worth the price users will pay if the rest of the proposal is adopted. The EC needs to go back to the drawing board if it wants to achieve the goal of simplifying EU regulations without gutting user privacy.

Let’s break it down. 

 Changing What Constitutes Personal Data 

 The digital package is part of a larger Simplification Agenda to reduce compliance costs and administrative burdens for businesses, echoing the Draghi Report’s call to boost productivity and support innovation. Businesses have been complaining about GDPR red tape since its inception, and new rules are supposed to make compliance easier and turbocharge the development of AI in the EU. Simplification is framed as a precondition for firms to scale up in the EU, ironically targeting laws that were also argued to promote innovation in Europe. It might also stave off tariffs the U.S. has threatened to levy, thanks in part to heavy lobbying from Meta and tech lobbying groups.  

 The most striking proposal seeks to narrow the definition of personal data, the very basis of the GDPR. Today, information counts as personal data if someone can reasonably identify a person from it, whether directly or by combining it with other information.  

 The proposal jettisons this relatively simple test in favor of a variable one: whether data is “personal” depends on what a specific entity says it can reasonably do or is likely to do with it. This selectively restates part of a recent ruling by the EU Court of Justice but ignores the multiple other cases that have considered the issue. 

 This structural move toward entity specific standards will create massive legal and practical confusion, as the same data could be treated as personal for some actors but not for others. It also creates a path for companies to avoid established GDPR obligations via operational restructuring to separate identifiers from other information—a change in paperwork rather than in actual identifiability. What’s more, it will be up to the Commission, a political executive body, to define what counts as unidentifiable pseudonymized data for certain entities.

Privileging AI 

In the name of facilitating AI innovation, which often relies on large datasets in which sensitive data may residually appear, the digital package treats AI development as a “legitimate interest,” which gives AI companies a broad legal basis to process personal data, unless individuals actively object. The proposals gesture towards organisational and technical safeguards but leave companies broad discretion.  

 Another amendment would create a new exemption that allows even sensitive personal data to be used for AI systems under some circumstances. This is not a blanket permission:  “organisational and technical measures” must be taken to avoid collecting or processing such data, and proportionate efforts must be taken to remove them from AI models or training sets where they appear. However, it is unclear what will count as an appropriate or proportionate measures.

Taken together with the new personal data test, these AI privileges mean that core data protection rights, which are meant to apply uniformly, are likely to vary in practice depending on a company’s technological and commercial goals.  

And it means that AI systems may be allowed to process sensitive data even though non-AI systems that could pose equal or lower risks are not allowed to handle it. 

A Broad Reform Beyond the GDPR

There are additional adjustments, many of them troubling, such as changes to rules on automated-decision making (making it easier for companies to claim it’s needed for a service or contract), reduced transparency requirements (less explanation about how users’ data are used), and revised data access rights (supposed to tackle abusive requests). An extensive analysis by NGO noyb can be found here.  

Moreover, the digital package reaches well beyond the GDPR, aiming to streamline Europe’s digital regulatory rulebook, including the e-Privacy Directive, cybersecurity rules, the AI Act and the Data Act. The Commission also launched “reality checks” of other core legislation, which suggests it is eyeing other mandates.

Browser Signals and Cookie Fatigue

There is one proposal in the Digital Omnibus that actually could simplify something important to users: requiring online interfaces to respect automated consent signals, allowing users to automatically reject consent across all websites instead of clicking through cookie popups on each. Cookie popups are often designed with “dark patterns” that make rejecting data sharing harder than accepting it. Automated signals can address cookie banner fatigue and make it easier for people to exercise their privacy rights. 

While this proposal is a step forward, the devil is in the details: First, the exact format of the automated consent signal will be determined by technical standards organizations where Big Tech companies have historically lobbied for standards that work in their favor. The amendments should therefore define minimum protections that cannot be weakened later. 

Second, the provision takes the important step of requiring web browsers to make it easy for users sending this automated consent signal, so they can opt-out without installing a browser add-on. 

However, mobile operating systems are excluded from this latter requirement, which is a significant oversight. People deserve the same privacy rights on websites and mobile apps. 

Finally, exempting media service providers altogether creates a loophole that lets them keep using tedious or deceptive banners to get consent for data sharing. A media service’s harvesting of user information on its website to track its customers is distinct from news gathering, which should be protected. 

A Muddled Legal Landscape

The Commission’s use of the "Omnibus" process is meant to streamline lawmaking by bundling multiple changes. An earlier proposal kept the GDPR intact, focusing on easing the record-keeping obligation for smaller businesses—a far less contentious measure. The new digital package instead moves forward with thinner evidence than a substantive structural reform would require, violating basic Better Regulation principles, such as coherence and proportionality.

The result is the opposite of  “simple.” The proposed delay of the high-risk requirements under the AI Act to late 2027—part of the omnibus package—illustrates this: Businesses will face a muddled legal landscape as they must comply with rules that may soon be paused and later revived again. This sounds like "complification” rather than simplification.

The Digital Package Is Not a Done Deal

Evaluating existing legislation is part of a sensible legislative cycle and clarifying and simplifying complex process and practices is not a bad idea. Unfortunately, the digital package misses the mark by making processes even more complex, at the expense of personal data protection. 

Simplification doesn't require tossing out digital rights. The EC should keep that in mind as it launches its reality check of core legislation such as the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, where tidying up can too easily drift into a verschlimmbessern, the kind of well-meant fix that ends up resembling the infamous ecce homo restoration.