This is something I have been especially wary of for ages as the UK Digital Safety Act wants you to be age verified, yet by doing so your privacy and security is compromised far worse than it was before age verification. Persona, which is used by many platforms to process information for age verification, routinely send a lot of your data, most of it unnecessary as well, to at least 17 services, many of them AI. So if you use say, Discord, Reddit, Xbox services, LinkedIN and a whole host of others you are literally helping AI out. Just be aware that if the govt forces age verification on social media then they will probably use Persona so you will be way worse off than you are now and as per usual, AI gets more and more info – something it has to do to keep working and be useful. If you are in any way shape or form careful about security and your privacy then you will need to understand that having a raft of free accounts is really not a good idea nowadays, and moving forward you will need to understand that YOUR data is being used pretty much everywhere in 2026. We are beginning to see how people are withdrawing from a lot of platforms and internet use simply because it is a security nightmare. I personally have started to limit how much I use Google and I can tell you my security has improved with way less intrusion and spam as a result. Not using Facebook as much has also improved things drastically!
