The internet is a vast and confusing place no matter your age. Trying to help youth engage with it safely and privately is a complicated topic that touches on many different skillsets and ideas. But just because it’s complicated doesn’t mean it’s impossible. We’ve launched our Online Privacy for Parents and Youth Surveillance Self-Defense guide in hopes to provide a framework for finding solutions that work for you. 

EFF rolls out this crucial resource as state and local governments consider ill-advised laws that cut young people off from essential information and experiences. This particularly harms vulnerable youth and marginalized groups who often find safety in supportive online communities they can't access offline. Such laws also entail age gating, which compromises the privacy of all internet users and stifles young users’ ability to learn, grow, and express themselves.

Young people have unique needs and those needs change over time. Trying to protect from everything all the time is an exhausting process, but the security community has long had a solution for this: security planning (also called threat modeling). The idea is to provide a series of questions designed to help you focus on what’s truly important. When it comes to online privacy, this is as applicable for youth and parents as it is for anyone else. 

We used a security plan as our foundation for this guide because deciding what is and isn’t important is the first step we should all take when assessing our privacy risks. But this isn’t a place for quick fixes, and every young person has their unique needs and considerations. There is no single tool or technology fix that can substitute for spending time learning, and then teaching a young person, how the internet works, how to use it, what sorts of harms exist, and how to navigate those harms.

Solutions are rarely about the tools or software you use. It’s about understanding the threats and concerns you have, and then determining what steps you can take to mitigate those risks. We hope our Online Privacy for Parents and Youth guide can help provide the outline to get the conversation started.

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Doxxing, also known as the deliberate sharing of personal information to harass or endanger someone, is a tricky thing to protect against. It often happens by some ill-intentioned person accessing publicly available information, then sharing that information more widely in the hopes it will intimidate their target or worse. 

This guide is a followup from a previous post that describes a methodology for you to clean up your digital footprint and get a firm entry into the art of open source intelligence. There's a slight bit of repetition here, but with a slant towards using those now-familiar tools and methods toward what to do in the context of incident response. The best thing you can do is familiarize yourself with this post and its tactics before something happens, then return back to it for reference when needed.

Incident Log

An incident log is a way to keep track of suspicious or harmful activity online. It doesn't need to be beautiful or complex, just a place where you can quickly note details around the different things you're seeing online. Noting times, places, people, and the general nature of what you see ought to be enough. In the event that law enforcement gets involved, this sort of record will be helpful. 

The process of finding and noting hateful incidents online can be incredibly stressful, so now is a good time to revisit the team roles you might have already thought of in the previous blog post. If you haven't yet done that, here's a brief refresher:

Assign Team Roles

Remember, privacy–and responding to doxxing–is a team sport. Knowing who you trust is as important as identifying threat actors. Having trusted people ready to assist is invaluable in this type of situation. Refer them to this blog post or specific recommendations in it. If you've already plotted out a list of designated team roles, now is the time to remind everyone of their responsibilities. That might look like monitoring the hate forums where activity happens, keeping track of events in the incident log, setting up web alerts, locking down your social media accounts, or contacting law enforcement to reduce the likelihood of SWATing (a type of attack where bad actors call the police on their target, hoping to incite violence or disruption of peace by bringing law enforcement to their door).

Monitoring Hate Forums

So often the victims of doxxing and harassment campaigns are positioned that way because of bias or bigotry. If you're a part of a community who is the target of such abuse, you are likely already aware of the places where such bigots gather and the language they use. Safely and privately accessing those sites to check for organizing against you or those in your community is a crucial step to take. Take great care to do so privately. We recommend you use the Tor browser for such information-gathering missions. It’s also advisable that you don’t engage with anyone in those places.

Again, this step can be particularly stressful; asking a friend for help is a good idea, or you can thoughtfully apply some of the advice from the next section to automate the process.

Set Up Search Alerts

Google alerts is a free service that Google offers to alert you when a particular keyword—like your name—is freshly indexed by their search engine. Doxxing efforts done by anonymous trolls may not trigger an alert, but if you're the target of smear campaigns in the media, or the victim of abuse by very prominent media figures, those things are more likely to appear. Updates can come pretty frequently, so we advise leaving the monitoring of these alerts to a person that you trust.

For a more sophisticated approach, you could use a tool like Open Measures to automate the task of tracking coordinated campaigns. It's important to note that this type of tool is more likely to miss nuanced language or oblique references to you and your community.

Hardening Your Public Facing Accounts

For accounts that you can't or don't want to shut down, at the very least you must review the privacy and security settings on them and consider raising that bar. If two-factor authentication isn't already on, now is the time to do so. For social media accounts, consider switching the account to "private," where users have to request to have access to your page. For peace of mind, especially on accounts that you have to keep using, consider muting certain terms and blocking accounts so that you're less likely to encounter stressful content when on the app. Every app's options are different for this sort of thing, so be prepared to spend a few minutes figuring out what the menu is like and where the options are.

Shut Down Affected Accounts

If a particular account is being targeted with hate, or signs are pointing to an account of yours being the source of information people are using against you, shutting down that account may be the best decision for now. Depending on the app, account deletion may be temporary and you may be able to recover the account after you've done so and things have cooled off.

Revisit Your Data Broker Removal Strategies

Although this is more of a doxxing preventative measure, it's a good idea to get on top of removing the information that's available about you via data brokers. In case you're unaware, the data broker industry is an unregulated viper’s nest of privacy threats, often contributing to or directly supplying the sources of information that are used in doxxing campaigns. Although there are plenty of services that offer to file data broker opt-out requests on your behalf, a recent study revealed that doing it DIY is still more effective than relying on these paid services. That said, a paid service may still be worth its money if you'd rather have someone else take care of it.

Revisit Public Records

As covered in the previous blog post, your information may be made available through public records that you have little to no control over. You may be able to limit the convenience of that information being available by requesting to have it taken down from sites that republish it. Check through voter records, business registration records, court and property records, and the like. If you aren't able to limit that information from appearing on such mirroring sites, at least gaining awareness of where they are and the specific contours of what they contain will help you strategize against the harms they may cause.

Consider Contacting Law Enforcement

For many, talking to law enforcement will only make things worse. On the other hand, SWATing is a tactic often used in these types of coordinated attacks. If you think that's a possible outcome in your situation, it could be a good idea to get ahead of it and contact law enforcement to let them know what you're dealing with. It's in their best interest to be aware of fraudulent calls, and will make them less likely to show up at your door with guns drawn.

Revisit PACE Documents, Enact Those Steps

If you're involved in any kind of activism or community organizing you may be familiar with PACE documentation. It’s an acronym for coming up with contingency plan reactions if unwanted things come up: Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Escape/Emergency. Think of it like a panic button, a routine checklist of things to do if shit hits the fan. Maybe it involves some of the recommendations from this blog post. The point is to have something readymade, and some thoughts and strategies prepared, if the doxxing escalates to increased levels of harm and danger.

This is another step that's best done in a community with trusted people. The point is to keep your community organizing or community work moving, but with special contingency measures enacted to keep you and everyone else safe while remaining aware of this incident. This step is highly personalized and relies on a bit of prep work having already been done.

Put A Lock on Your Bank Accounts and Cell Subscriptions

One of the tactics those who are doxxing you might use is trying to get into your social media or other accounts through “SIM swapping,” an attack where they contact your cellular provider pretending to be you in order to hijack your phone number. They can then use that number and pivot to stealing other accounts you authenticate yourself to with your phone. Likewise, those targeting you might try to steal access to or disrupt your bank accounts through similar techniques. 

Get ahead of them by placing security passwords or pin codes on these highly sensitive accounts, if your bank or cellular provider provides this extra security measure. Most cell providers offer some sort of SIM swapping prevention method, but they all use different names for this feature, so be sure to look up the process in your provider’s documentation (here are guides for the major U.S. providers: Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile).

Regulate Your Nervous System

It’s an understatement to say that being doxxed is scary and potentially very dysregulating. You're much more likely to make safe, smart decisions if you are able to maintain a sense of control around your mental state. Recognizing that capability, as well as having a strategy to keep calm in the face of a crisis is just as important as having good digital security hygiene. Do what you need to do, be it involving the help of friends, taking a break, or whatever else, to stay afloat during this process. 

Flexibility and Resiliency

The reality is that the more you experience cultural marginalization, the higher the chances are that adversarial actors will resort to such tactics as doxxing and coordinated harassment campaigns. The fervor of those adversaries is often stoked by hateful public figures and politicians. And the plausible deniability of public records can limit the recourse you have to stop them. We hope that after reading this and the previous post, we’ve also brought to surface the idea that you can have great control over your digital footprint. Even more, that you can continue to share information online without unnecessarily compromising your safety and security. 

Until we have digital privacy protections for everyone, it’s up to us to take matters into our own hands. Privacy, security, and dignity online are achievable. If you follow this guide, the previous one, and stay clued into the strategies laid out on Surveillance Self-Defense, you're well on your way.

Doxxing is the deliberate disclosure of personal information in order to bully, harass, intimidate, or instigate a chain of harms against someone. It's a tricky thing to protect against when the jerk doing it is often able to use legal and accessible means to do so. The odds are stacked against everyday internet folk when there's little to no comprehensive data privacy legislation keeping us safe. The responsibility is on each of us to protect ourselves, but the good news is that there's a lot you can do to reduce your digital footprint and take control of your data.

This post is part one of a two-part series discussing safety and response to doxxing. This first part focuses on prevention and ways to reduce your overall footprint. The second focuses on incident response, as in, steps to take if you're in the midst of being doxxed. There will be some crossover and redundancy between these two posts, so it's worth reading each and gaining familiarity with the steps well ahead of time.

OSINT

Open source intelligence (OSINT) is a broad term within information security. It focuses on the tools and means available to us for investigation and information retrieval. OSINT sits at the heart of doxxing campaigns but is also an important part of the process of preventing them. Typically it is a way of describing a methodology of piecing together scraps of information to form a dossier on a subject.

There are fancy multipurpose tools (like Maltego or Lampyre) that combine many datapoints into accessible graphs and datasets. As helpful as they can be for traditional penetration tests or corporate OSINT campaigns, they’re best used for investigations focused on organizations, mapping together details like employee email charts, LinkedIn profiles, and company network maps. They may not fit the needs of everyday people or liberation movement workers. Instead, we recommend referring to different OSINT resource lists that index together a bunch of different tools, then using those resources to create a list for yourself of which tools may be most helpful. 

Many, if not all, of the resources we cover below will be referenced in those guides, and themselves fall under the OSINT category. It’s important to note that the tools we reference in this particular blog post are only relevant at the time of publishing. The bigger ideas have a much longer shelf life than various tech tools. That said, in no particular order:

Breach Databases

When a company gets hacked and their customer data is leaked, that information often ends up in “breach databases,” that is, troves of peoples' data available for sale and reuse in illegal trades online. Because of the sensitivity of that type of information, it can potentially be used in doxxing campaigns. Some resources, like haveibeenpwned, note pieces of vulnerable identifying information in those databases and make it easy for people to see if their information is included. Others, like DeHashed, offer a similar sort of tracking, but for a fee. 

You may not have control over a company's digital security that could put your own data at risk, but you can gain insight into whether your information is already out there. This gives you the opportunity to control the accuracy of that data (such as changing your email address or phone number). Doing so is extremely inconvenient, but unfortunately, it may be the only agency you have when another’s company’s digital insecurity puts your own safety at risk.

Open Records

Public records (such as voter records, property records, business registration, medical licensing information, and more) present a dilemma. It is in the public interest for there to be levels of transparency on such information. On the other hand, making such personally-identifiable information accessible to those with ill-intent can lead to serious consequences. 

Instead of requiring a formal request through the courts, mirroring sites make this information easy to find online. Such sites often have forms where you can request your information be taken down. This doesn’t necessarily remove the records from existing, but it does remove a layer of convenience in accessing them.

Some states have programs called “Address Confidentiality Programs” that offer people the right to supplant address information with proxy addresses, keeping public records open but that specific piece of information potentially hidden.

Social Media

Going through and tightening the security and privacy settings of your various social media accounts is always a good idea, but it’s especially important if you are in the process of minimizing your digital footprint. Consider turning your discoverability to “private” or “hidden” (verbiage and details depend on the app) so that only users vetted by you are able to see your account.

To get a quick overview of the various accounts you have registered online, especially if you've been online for a long time, use a username search engine like What's My Name or Namechk to see where your usernames have been registered. They may not be entirely accurate, but they are effective and quick. These tools are also helpful if you are at risk of being impersonated online and want to get an overview of where that may be taking place.

Data Brokers and Removals

Data brokers are craven, pernicious companies that present an existential risk to everyone in the digital age. Until that industry is no more, it's up to us to protect ourselves and the ways that it endangers us by selling personal, sensitive information. The most effective way to get your information removed from their stores is to file requests manually. Yael Grauer's BADBOOL project compiles and prioritizes the worst offenders in this industry and the means you can use to request data removals from them. This process can be grueling and time-consuming, so it may be worth investing in a service that automates the process. Though they've been found to be less effective than the DIY approach, there are some services that have stood out amongst the others in terms of efficacy when tested by third-party reviewers. If you’re a resident of California, you can more easily opt out through the new and exciting DROP tool.

Reverse Image Searching and FR Services

Services like PimEyes and Lenso have jumped on the profit-driven opportunity to create facial recognition as a service. They contribute to law enforcement investigations and predictive policing systems, as well as providing commercial services to abusers and stalkers. The gist of their service: upload a picture of someone (in this case, yourself) and it will use facial recognition technology to determine where else online that person has appeared. If your image is being shared online without your consent, this service will find out. 

Willfully participating in these services does mean having your image mapped, scanned, and stored by their systems. But if you believe you're under the type of targeted harassment that includes your image being shared online against your will, it may be worth that tradeoff.

Extra Monitoring, Automated

This section is less about data minimization, and more about laying extra protections down in the event that doxxing or other coordinated harassment seems imminent. If you're in the Google ecosystem of products, consider enrolling in their Advanced Protection Program, which offers a number of different features to keep you and your account safe. 

If you're the focus of coordinated attacks that span from online communities to media outlets participating in the harassment, a service like Open Measures is worth looking into. It tracks, maps, and analyzes the spread of hateful information online. They provide free access to their open-source API, so with some technical fancy-footwork, you can automate this process.

Get Others Involved

Coordinated harassment is often a process of daisy-chaining targets and tactics together until there’s a meaningful process of harm being inflicted. This means that people in your community are also at risk. As we always say, privacy is a team sport. Get others involved in the process; there’s strength in numbers. 

A great way to do this is think of the activities you and your group are up to. What roles do individual members take on? Figure out a way to tack on some of the responsibilities you’re coming up with here onto those team members. Find ways to talk about it and share strategies, preferably using secure technology like Signal. You can coordinate together which tasks each person could take on, perhaps pulled from this blog post.

It's a Process; Keep Yourself Apace for the Marathon, Not the Race

The process of data minimization and reclaiming agency over your digital footprint can be grueling and stressful. Don't underestimate the toll it can take on your mental health. Take breaks, employ the help of friends, and take the time to make sure you're first addressing the parts that are most relevant to your threat model. It may feel like there’s nothing to be done about protecting your digital privacy, but that’s just a symptom of surveillance capitalism’s psychological effect on its victims. There’s much you can do to stay safe, to protect yourself and others. Refer to this post and to the Surveillance Self-Defense project. 

Time and time again, researchers have found numerous compromised Android devices for sale at large online retailers like Amazon. When these devices get individually reported, we have seen some noted efforts to take them down. But this is a systemic problem and Amazon and other major online retailers must make a corresponding systemic and intentional effort to stop these devices from entering people’s homes and ultimately their networks.

As a refresher: Last year, Google wrote that one major campaign, deemed BADBOX, affected 10 million uncertified devices that were running Android’s open-source software (Android Open Source Project or AOSP). These devices span from TVs and streaming devices to digital picture frames. Even now, someone can go on Amazon and Walmart and buy one of these devices. Not all of them come from Amazon and Walmart, but it’s fair to assume since they have the lion’s share of the market.

Most well-known Android-based devices don’t come with just “stock Android.” The operating system is usually Android plus additional features that the manufacturer wanted. These custom versions of Android often come with pre-installed applications that range from useful to innocuous bloatware to actual malware. Many Android OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) pre-install apps that may not be visibly represented by an icon in your list of installed apps. This obscurity makes the issue particularly hard for users to identify any potential threats.

Since the initial BADBOX analysis, there have been more reports of large campaigns and clusters of different devices participating in malicious activities that utilize people’s home networks to engage in illegal activity. Task forces in the private sector have made an effort to take down these existing Command and Control structures, but these actors may pivot and evolve to flood the market with more devices. 

Online retailers can stop this cycle. A multi-billion dollar company like Amazon should offer more resources, like their anti-fraud efforts, given that these products may have facilitated conditions for large scale attacks and illegal activity. It would also be helpful if they communicated malware-related take downs in a more visible way to consumers who are seeking very similar devices with shared characteristics.

Identifying these devices can be tricky, but it’s not impossible because they tend to follow a pattern. For example, the FBI warned consumers this year to avoid TV streaming devices that claim to provide free sports, tv shows, and movies, a common tactic used by the makers of these malware-filled Android devices that leverages people’s exhaustion from spending money on countless streaming services. We detailed what sorts of indicators to look for on a device you’ve purchased.

But it’s not just the storefronts. There are other parts of this ecosystem that need to improve too, like increased engagement in firmware transparency and the actual manufacturers of the devices themselves being held accountable for these malware laced products.

On Prime Day, we urge retailers like Amazon to better empower users with information they need to make safe and smart decisions.

Update April 22, 2026. Apple has reportedly addressed part of the issue with the notification database in iOS 26.4.2 and 18.7.8, released today. With this update, notifications marked for deletion should no longer be stored in the notification database.

A phone’s push notifications can contain a significant amount of information about you, your communications, and what you do throughout the day. They’re important enough to government investigations that Apple and Google now both require a judge’s order to hand details about push notifications over to law enforcement, and even with that requirement Apple shares data on hundreds of users. More recently, we also learned from a 404 Media report that law enforcement forensic extraction tools can unearth the text from deleted notifications, including those from secure messaging tools, like Signal. The good news is that you can mitigate some of this risk. 

There are two points where notifications may betray your privacy: when they’re transmitted over cloud servers and once they land on the device. Let’s start with the cloud. It might seem like push notifications come directly from an app, but they are typically routed through either Apple or Google’s servers first (depending on if you use iOS or Android). According to a letter sent to the Department of Justice by Senator Wyden, the content of those notifications may be visible to Apple and Google, and at the very least the companies collect some metadata about what apps send a notification and when. App providers have to make the decision to hide the content from Apple and Google and implement that functionality; Signal is one app that does this. 

Then, once the notifications land on your phone, depending on your settings, the notification content may be visible on your lock screen without needing to unlock the device. This can be dangerous if you lose your device, someone steals it, or it’s confiscated by law enforcement. 

You may clear notifications after looking at them. But it turns out the content notifications get recorded in your device’s internal storage, which then makes them susceptible to recovery with certain types of forensic tools. Notification content may even persist after the app is deleted, if the OS doesn’t fully purge the app’s notification data. 

We still have a lot of unanswered questions about how the notification databases work on devices. We do not know how long notifications are stored, or whether they’re backed up to the cloud, in which case the cloud provider could get backdoor access to the content of messages if the backups are enabled and not end-to-end encrypted. This may also make backups vulnerable to law enforcement demands for data. 

Which is all to say that there are myriad ways that law enforcement can access the content or metadata of push notifications. Let’s fix that.

Consider the Strongest Notification Protections for Your Secure Messaging Apps

Secure chat tools are designed to keep the content of the messages safe inside the app. So, for secure chat apps like WhatsApp and Signal, that means the company that makes those apps cannot see the content of your messages, and they’re only accessible on your and your recipients’ devices. Once messages land on a device, it’s still important to consider some privacy precautions, particularly with notifications. 

Signal
Signal offers three levels of information to include in notifications, all which are pretty self explanatory:

• Name, Content, and Actions (Name and message on Android) shows the entirety of a message as well as who sent it (on iPhone you can also slide to reply, mark as read, or call back). 
• Name only only shows the name of the sender. 
• No Name or Content (No name or message on Android) will only show that you have a message from Signal, not who sent it or what it’s about. 

To change your settings:

• On iPhone: Tap your profile picture, then Settings > Notifications > Show.
• On Android: Tap your profile picture, then Notifications > Show. 

WhatsApp
WhatsApp only has one option for this, and it’s currently limited to iPhone, but you can at least tell the app not to include the content of a message in the notification:

• Open WhatsApp for iPhone, tap the “You” bar, then Notifications, and disable the Show preview option.

Check your other apps to see if they offer similar settings.

Limit Your Notifications Device-Wide

Since Apple and Google manage push notifications for their respective devices, they also have some visibility into certain data. Push notification data can include certain types of metadata, like which app sent a notification and when, as well as the account ID associated with the phone. In some cases, Apple and Google may have access to unencrypted content, including the content of the text in a notification or other information from the app itself. 

For most app notifications, there’s no simple way to easily figure out what metadata might be gleaned from a notification, or if the notification is unencrypted or not. But some app developers have described details along these lines. For example, Signal president Meredith Whittaker explained on social media how the Signal app handles notifications entirely on-device. Searching online for an app name along with “notification privacy,” “notification encryption” or “notification metadata” may help answer your questions, or you may need to dig around in support forums for the app.

It’s also good to reconsider whether any app should be sending you notifications to begin with. Aside from a potential decrease in the number of distractions you endure throughout the day, or the level of chaos on display on your lockscreen, limiting the apps that can send notifications and what content is visible in them can improve your privacy with respect to the sorts of metadata that may be gathered by the companies, as well as any content that may be viewable if someone has physically accessed your device.

To check and change your settings on iPhone

• Open Settings > Notifications.
• On the Show Previews option, you can choose whether to show the content of notifications on the lock screen, “Always,” which doesn’t require unlocking the device, “When Unlocked,” which does, and “Never,” which means notifications won’t have any details, just that you have a notification in an app. 
• Alternatively, you can scroll down and change these settings per app. Just tap the app name, then the Show Previews menu, and choose how you’d like them to appear. Or, if you’ve decided you don’t want notifications from that app at all, uncheck the Allow Notifications option.

To check and change your settings on Android
The core version of Android relies on app developers to develop specific settings more than controlling them on a platform-wide level.

• Open Settings > Notifications > App notifications to disable notifications from any app completely. Some apps may also offer internal notification options for specific types of notices, like new messages, that you can control in the app itself. Tap an app name, then tap the Addition settings in the app option to potentially customize it more.
• You can also experiment with the sensitive content setting. This is up to the developer to set properly, but when done so, most notifications will require at least unlocking the device to see them. Open Settings > Notifications > Notifications on lock screen and disable “Show sensitive content.”

Control What Notifications AI Tools Can Access

In an attempt to make notifications easier to skim, both Android and iOS offer optional ways to get notification summaries using their AI tools that summarize the content of notifications. On an individual app level, WhatsApp offers this as well. Some of these summarization tools, like Apple’s, run on the device, while others, like WhatsApp’s, do not. This can all be a lot to keep track of, and sending data off device may create some level of risk for some messages.

Since this is a bit more complicated, we have another blog post that walks through the steps to take to protect messaging from accidentally ending up in AI tools built into Apple and Google's devices. For WhatsApp specifically, we have a blog detailing when you might want to turn on the app’s “Advanced Chat Privacy” feature, which can disable summaries for both yourself and others in the chat.

Balancing security, privacy, and usability with something like push notifications is a complicated task. At the very least, Apple and Google should better ensure that the content of these notifications isn’t transmitted over their servers in plain text. The companies need to also make sure that device operating systems don’t back up the notification database to the cloud, and when an app is deleted, that all notification data is purged.

We appreciate that apps like Signal allow you to control what’s visible with notifications on a per-app basis, and we’d like to see this level of granularity of choices in other secure messaging tools, like WhatsApp. Likewise, more apps should handle push notifications similarly to the way Signal does, where a ping is sent to wake up the app to check for messages, and the content of that message is never sent across servers.

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 age gating and age verification mandates, and we hope we’ll win in getting existing ones overturned and new ones prevented. But mandates are already in effect, and every day many people are asked to verify their age across the web, despite prominent cases of sensitive data getting leaked in the process.

At some point, you may have been faced with the decision yourself: should I continue to use this service if I have to verify my age? And if so, how can I do that with the least risk to my personal information? This is our guide to navigating those decisions, with information on what questions to ask about the age verification options you’re presented with, and answers to those questions for some of the top most popular social media sites. Even though there’s no way to implement mandated age gates in a way that fully protects speech and privacy rights, our goal here is to help you minimize the infringement of your rights as you manage this awful situation.

Follow the Data

Since we know that leaks happen despite the best efforts of software engineers, we generally recommend submitting the absolute least amount of data possible. Unfortunately, that’s not going to be possible for everyone. Even facial age estimation solutions where pictures of your face never leave your device, offering some protection against data leakage, are not a good option for all users: facial age estimation works less well for people of color, trans and nonbinary people, and people with disabilities. There are some systems that use fancy cryptography so that a digital ID saved to your device won’t tell the website anything more than if you meet the age requirement, but access to that digital ID isn’t available to everyone or for all platforms. You may also not want to register for a digital ID and save it to your phone, if you don’t want to take the chance of all the information on it being exposed upon request of an over-zealous verifier, or you simply don’t want to be a part of a digital ID system

If you’re given the option of selecting a verification method and are deciding which to use, we recommend considering the following questions for each process allowed by each vendor:

• Data: What info does each method require?
• Access: Who can see the data during the course of the verification process?
• Retention: Who will hold onto that data after the verification process, and for how long?
• Audits: How sure are we that the stated claims will happen in practice? For example, are there external audits confirming that data is not accidentally leaked to another site along the way? Ideally these will be in-depth, security-focused audits by specialized auditors like NCC Group or Trail of Bits, instead of audits that merely certify adherence to standards. 
• Visibility: Who will be aware that you’re attempting to verify your age, and will they know which platform you’re trying to verify for?

We attempt to provide answers to these questions below. To begin, there are two major factors to consider when answering these questions: the tools each platform uses, and the overall system those tools are part of.

In general, most platforms offer age estimation options like face scans as a first line of age assurance. These vary in intrusiveness, but their main problem is inaccuracy, particularly for marginalized users. Third-party age verification vendors Private ID and k-ID offer on-device facial age estimation, but another common vendor, Yoti, sends the image to their servers during age checks by some of the biggest platforms. This risks leaking the images themselves, and also the fact that you’re using that particular website, to the third party. 

Then, there’s the document-based verification services, which require you to submit a hard identifier like a government-issued ID. This method thus requires you to prove both your age and your identity. A platform can do this in-house through a designated dataflow, or by sending that data to a third party. We’ve already seen examples of how this can fail. For example, Discord routed users' ID data through its general customer service workflow so that a third-party vendor could perform manual review of verification appeals. No one involved ever deleted users' data, so when the system was breached, Discord had to apologize for the catastrophic disclosure of nearly 70,000 photos of users' ID documents. Overly long retention periods expose documents to risk of breaches and historical data requests. Some document verifiers have retention periods that are needlessly long. This is the case with Incode, which provides ID verification for Tiktok. Incode holds onto images forever by default, though TikTok should automatically start the deletion process on your behalf.

Some platforms offer alternatives, like proving that you own a credit card, or asking for your email to check if it appears in databases associated with adulthood (like home mortgage databases). These tend to involve less risk when it comes to the sensitivity of the data itself, especially since credit cards can be replaced, but in general still undermine anonymity and pseudonymity and pose a risk of tracking your online activity. We’d prefer to see more assurances across the board about how information is handled.

Each site offers users a menu of age assurance options to choose from. We’ve chosen to present these options in the rough order that we expect most people to prefer. Jump directly to a platform to learn more about its age checks:

• Meta – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads
• Google – Gmail, YouTube
• TikTok
• Everywhere Else

Meta – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads

Inferred Age

If Meta can guess your age, you may never even see an age verification screen. Meta, which runs Facebook, Threads, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, first tries to use information you’ve posted to guess your age, like looking at “Happy birthday!” messages. It’s a creepy reminder that they already have quite a lot of information about you.

If Meta cannot guess your age, or if Meta infers you're too young, it will next ask you to verify your age using either facial age estimation, or by uploading your photo ID. 

Face Scan

If you choose to use facial age estimation, you’ll be sent to Yoti, a third-party verification service. Your photo will be uploaded to their servers during this process. Yoti claims that “as soon as an age has been estimated, the facial image is immediately and permanently deleted.” Though it’s not as good as not having that data in the first place, Yoti’s security measures include a bug bounty program and annual penetration testing. Researchers from Mint Secure found that Yoti’s app and website are filled with trackers, so the fact that you’re verifying your age could be not only shared to Yoti, but leaked to third-party data brokers as well. 

You may not want to use this option if you’re worried about third parties potentially being able to know you’re trying to verify your age with Meta. You also might not want to use this if you’re worried about a current picture of your face accidentally leaking—for example, if elements in the background of your selfie might reveal your current location. On the other hand, if you consider a selfie to be less sensitive than a photograph of your ID, this option might be better. If you do choose (or are forced to) use the face check system, be sure to snap your selfie without anything you'd be concerned with identifying your location or embarrassing you in the background in case the image leaks.

Upload ID

If Yoti’s age estimation decides your face looks too young, or if you opt out of facial age estimation, your next recourse is to send Meta a photo of your ID. Meta sends that photo to Yoti to verify the ID. Meta says it will hold onto that ID image for 30 days, then delete it. Meanwhile, Yoti claims it will delete the image immediately after verification. Of course, bugs and process oversights exist, such as accidentally replicating information in logs or support queues, but at least they have stated processes. Your ID contains sensitive information such as your full legal name and home address. Using this option not only runs the (hopefully small, but never nonexistent) risk of that data getting leaked through errors or hacking, but it also lets Meta see the information needed to tie your profile to your identity—which you may not want. If you don’t want Meta to know your name and where you live, or rely on both Meta and Yoti to keep to their deletion promises, this option may not be right for you.

Google – Gmail, YouTube 

Inferred Age

If Google can guess your age, you may never even see an age verification screen. Your Google account is typically connected to your YouTube account, so if (like mine) your YouTube account is old enough to vote, you may not need to verify your Google account at all. Google first uses information it already knows to try to guess your age, like how long you’ve had the account and your YouTube viewing habits. It’s yet another creepy reminder of how much information these corporations have on you, but at least in this case they aren’t likely to ask for even more identifying data.

If Google cannot guess your age, or decides you're too young, Google will next ask you to verify your age. You’ll be given a variety of options for how to do so, with availability that will depend on your location and your age.

Google’s methods to assure your age include ID verification, facial age estimation, verification by proxy, and digital ID. To prove you’re over 18, you may be able to use facial age estimation, give Google your credit card information, or tell a third-party provider your email address.

Face Scan

If you choose to use facial age estimation, you’ll be sent to a website run by Private ID, a third-party verification service. The website will load Private ID’s verifier within the page—this means that your selfie will be checked without any images leaving your device. If the system decides you’re over 18, it will let Google know that, and only that. Of course, no technology is perfect—should Private ID be mandated to target you specifically, there’s nothing to stop it from sending down code that does in fact upload your image, and you probably won’t notice. But unless your threat model includes being specifically targeted by a state actor or Private ID, that’s unlikely to be something you need to worry about. For most people, no one else will see your image during this process. Private ID will, however, be told that your device is trying to verify your age with Google and Google will still find out if Private ID thinks that you’re under 18.

If Private ID’s age estimation decides your face looks too young, you may next be able to decide if you’d rather let Google verify your age by giving it your credit card information, photo ID, or digital ID, or by letting Google send your email address to a third-party verifier.

Email Usage

If you choose to provide your email address, Google sends it on to a company called VerifyMy. VerifyMy will use your email address to see if you’ve done things like get a mortgage or paid for utilities using that email address. If you use Gmail as your email provider, this may be a privacy-protective option with respect to Google, as Google will then already know the email address associated with the account. But it does tell VerifyMy and its third-party partners that the person behind this email address is looking to verify their age, which you may not want them to know. VerifyMy uses “proprietary algorithms and external data sources” that involve sending your email address to “trusted third parties, such as data aggregators.” It claims to “ensure that such third parties are contractually bound to meet these requirements,” but you’ll have to trust it on that one—we haven’t seen any mention of who those parties are, so you’ll have no way to check up on their practices and security. On the bright side, VerifyMy and its partners do claim to delete your information as soon as the check is completed.

Credit Card Verification

If you choose to let Google use your credit card information, you’ll be asked to set up a Google Payments account. Note that debit cards won’t be accepted, since it’s much easier for many debit cards to be issued to people under 18. Google will then charge a small amount to the card, and refund it once it goes through. If you choose this method, you’ll have to tell Google your credit card info, but the fact that it’s done through Google Payments (their regular card-processing system) means that at least your credit card information won’t be sitting around in some unsecured system. Even if your credit card information happens to accidentally be leaked, this is a relatively low-risk option, since credit cards come with solid fraud protection. If your credit card info gets leaked, you should easily be able to dispute fraudulent charges and replace the card.

Digital ID

If the option is available to you, you may be able to use your digital ID to verify your age with Google. In some regions, you’ll be given the option to use your digital ID. In some cases, it’s possible to only reveal your age information when you use a digital ID. If you’re given that choice, it can be a good privacy-preserving option. Depending on the implementation, there’s a chance that the verification step will “phone home” to the ID provider (usually a government) to let them know the service asked for your age. It’s a complicated and varied topic that you can learn more about by visiting EFF’s page on digital identity.

Upload ID

Should none of these options work for you, your final recourse is to send Google a photo of your ID. Here, you’ll be asked to take a photo of an acceptable ID and send it to Google. Though the help page only states that your ID “will be stored securely,” the verification process page says ID “will be deleted after your date of birth is successfully verified.” Acceptable IDs vary by country, but are generally government-issued photo IDs. We like that it’s deleted immediately, though we have questions about what Google means when it says your ID will be used to “improve [its] verification services for Google products and protect against fraud and abuse.” No system is perfect, and we can only hope that Google schedules outside audits regularly.

TikTok

Inferred Age

If TikTok can guess your age, you may never even see an age verification notification. TikTok first tries to use information you’ve posted to estimate your age, looking through your videos and photos to analyze your face and listen to your voice. By uploading any videos, TikTok believes you’ve given it consent to try to guess how old you look and sound.

If TikTok decides you’re too young, appeal to revoke their age decision before the deadline passes. If TikTok cannot guess your age, or decides you're too young, it will automatically revoke your access based on age—including either restricting features or deleting your account. To get your access and account back, you’ll have a limited amount of time to verify your age. As soon as you see the notification that your account is restricted, you’ll want to act fast because in some places you’ll have as little as 23 days before the deadline passes.

When you get that notification, you’re given various options to verify your age based on your location.

Face Scan

If you’re given the option to use facial age estimation, you’ll be sent to Yoti, a third-party verification service. Your photo will be uploaded to their servers during this process. Yoti claims that “as soon as an age has been estimated, the facial image is immediately and permanently deleted.” Though it’s not as good as not having that data in the first place, Yoti’s security measures include a bug bounty program and annual penetration testing. However, researchers from Mint Secure found that Yoti’s app and website are filled with trackers, so the fact that you’re verifying your age could be leaked not only to Yoti, but to third-party data brokers as well.

You may not want to use this option if you’re worried about third parties potentially being able to know you’re trying to verify your age with TikTok. You also might not want to use this if you’re worried about a current picture of your face accidentally leaking—for example, if elements in the background of your selfie might reveal your current location. On the other hand, if you consider a selfie to be less sensitive than a photograph of your ID or your credit card information, this option might be better. If you do choose (or are forced to) use the face check system, be sure to snap your selfie without anything you'd be concerned with identifying your location or embarrassing you in the background in case the image leaks.

Credit Card Verification

If you have a credit card in your name, TikTok will accept that as proof that you’re over 18. Note that debit cards won’t be accepted, since it’s much easier for many debit cards to be issued to people under 18. TikTok will charge a small amount to the credit card, and refund it once it goes through. It’s unclear if this goes through their regular payment process, or if your credit card information will be sent through and stored in a separate, less secure system. Luckily, these days credit cards come with solid fraud protection, so if your credit card gets leaked, you should easily be able to dispute fraudulent charges and replace the card. That said, we’d rather TikTok provide assurances that the information will be processed securely.

Credit Card Verification of a Parent or Guardian

Sometimes, if you’re between 13 and 17, you’ll be given the option to let your parent or guardian confirm your age. You’ll tell TikTok their email address, and TikTok will send your parent or guardian an email asking them (a) to confirm your date of birth, and (b) to verify their own age by proving that they own a valid credit card. This option doesn’t always seem to be offered, and in the one case we could find, it’s possible that TikTok never followed up with the parent. So it’s unclear how or if TikTok verifies that the adult whose email you provide is your parent or guardian. If you want to use credit card verification but you’re not old enough to have a credit card, and you’re ok with letting an adult know you use TikTok, this option may be reasonable to try.

Photo with a Random Adult?

Bizarrely, if you’re between 13 and 17, TikTok claims to offer the option to take a photo with literally any random adult to confirm your age. Its help page says that any trusted adult over 25 can be chosen, as long as they’re holding a piece of paper with the code on it that TikTok provides. It also mentions that a third-party provider is used here, but doesn’t say which one. We haven’t found any evidence of this verification method being offered. Please do let us know if you’ve used this method to verify your age on TikTok!

Photo ID and Face Comparison

If you aren’t offered or have failed the other options, you’ll have to verify your age by submitting a copy of your ID and matching photo of your face. You’ll be sent to Incode, a third-party verification service. In a disappointing failure to meet the industry standard, Incode itself doesn’t automatically delete the data you give it once the process is complete, but TikTok does claim to “start the process to delete the information you submitted,” which should include telling Incode to delete your data once the process is done. If you want to be sure, you can ask Incode to delete that data yourself. Incode tells TikTok that you met the age threshold without providing your exact date of birth, but then TikTok wants to know the exact date anyway, so it’ll ask for your date of birth even after your age has been verified.

TikTok itself might not see your actual ID depending on its implementation choices, but Incode will. Your ID contains sensitive information such as your full legal name and home address. Using this option not only runs the (hopefully small, but never nonexistent) risk of that data getting accidentally leaked through errors or hacking. If you don’t want TikTok or Incode to know your name, what you look like, and where you live—or if you don't want to rely on both TikTok and Incode to keep to their deletion promises—then this option may not be right for you.

Everywhere Else

We’ve covered the major providers here, but age verification is unfortunately being required of many other services that you might use as well. While the providers and processes may vary, the same general principles will apply. If you’re trying to choose what information to provide to continue to use a service, consider the “follow the data” questions mentioned above, and try to find out how the company will store and process the data you give it. The less sensitive information, the fewer people have access to it, and the more quickly it will be deleted, the better. You may even come to recognize popular names in the age verification industry: Spotify and OnlyFans use Yoti (just like Meta and Tiktok), Quora and Discord use k-ID, and so on. 

Unfortunately, it should be clear by now that none of the age verification options are perfect in terms of protecting information, providing access to everyone, and safely handling sensitive data. That’s just one of the reasons that EFF is against age-gating mandates, and is working to stop and overturn them across the United States and around the world.

Join EFF

Help protect digital privacy & free speech for everyone

Our Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) guides, which provide practical advice and explainers for how to deal with government and corporate surveillance, had a big year. We published several large updates to existing guides and released three all new guides. And with frequent massive protests across the U.S., our guide to attending a protest remained one of the most popular guides of the year, so we made sure our translations were up to date.

(Re)learn All You Need to Know About Encryption

We started this year by taking a deep look at our various encryption guides, which start with the basics before moving up to deeper concepts. We slimmed each guide down and tried to focus on making them as clear and concise as deep explainers on complicated topics can be. We reviewed and edited four guides in total:

• What Should I Know About Encryption? 
• Key Concepts in Encryption
• Key Verification
• A Deep Dive on End-to-End Encryption: How Do Public Key Encryption Systems Work?

And if you’re not sure where to start, we got you covered with the new Interested in Encryption? playlist.

New Guides

We launched three new guides this year, including iPhone and Android privacy guides, which walk you through all the various privacy options of your phone. Both of these guides received a handful of updates throughout their first year as new features were released or, in the case of the iPhone, a new design language was introduced. These also got a fun little boost from a segment on "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" telling people how to disable their phone’s advertising identifier.

We also launched our How to: Manage Your Digital Footprint guide. This guide is designed to help you claw back some of the data you may find about yourself online, walking through different privacy options across different platforms, digging up old accounts, removing yourself from people search sites, and much more.

Always Be Updating

As is the case with most software, there is always incremental work to do. This year, that meant small updates to our WhatsApp and Signal guides to acknowledge new features (both are already on deck for similar updates early next year as well). 

We overhauled our device encryption guides for Windows, Mac, and Linux, rolling what was once three guides into one, and including more detailed guidance on how to handle recovery keys. Some slight changes to how this works on both Windows and Mac means this one will get another look early next year as well.

Speaking of rolling multiple guides into one, we did the same with our guidance for the Tor browser, where it once lived across three guides, it now lives as one that covers all the major desktop platforms (the mobile guide remains separate).

The password manager guide saw some small changes to note some new features with Apple and Chrome’s managers, as well as some new independent security audits. Likewise, the VPN guide got a light touch to address the TunnelVision security issue.

Finally, the secure deletion guide got a much needed update after years of dormancy. With the proliferation of solid state drives (SSDs, not to be confused with SSD), not much has changed in the secure deletion space, but we did move our guidance for those SSDs to the top of the guide to make it easier to find, while still acknowledging many people around the world still only have access to a computer with spinning disk drives. 

Translations

As always, we worked on translations for these updates. We’re very close to a point where every current SSD guide is updated and translated into Arabic, French, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.

And with the help of Localization Lab, we also now have translations for a handful of the most important guides in Changana, Mozambican Portuguese, Ndau, Luganda, and Bengali.

Blogs Blogs Blogs

Sometimes we take our SSD-like advice and blog it so we can respond to news events or talk about more niche topics. This year, we blogged about new features, like WhatsApp’s “Advanced Chat Privacy” and Google’s "Advanced Protection.” We also broke down the differences between how different secure chat clients handle backups and pushed for expanding encryption on Android and iPhone.

We fight for more privacy and security every day of every year, but until we get that, stronger controls of our data and a better understanding of how technology works is our best defense.

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2025.