When my daughter asked for help in creating digital assets on Roblox, I was excited to support her growing creativity. Part of this process required her to verify her age with a government issued identification (ID). However, as an IT professional and a cautious parent, I was immediately concerned with providing an online platform with a copy of this ID. How is this data processed? Who has access to it? What happens to it afterward? These questions raised significant concerns around digital trust.
The Roblox FAQs provided little reassurance beyond a generic “we don’t store your personal information.” While I don’t doubt that companies like Roblox and their third party vendors implement robust security measures, the process still felt risky from a security and data privacy standpoint. It left me wondering if there was a better way to achieve age verification while protecting sensitive data.
Age verification is becoming more common across industries such as gaming, social media, and e-commerce. Yet traditional methods pose several challenges. Many minors lack government-issued IDs, making verification difficult. Uploading sensitive documents to third-party systems increases the risk of data breaches or unauthorized access. Even with these measures, traditional systems can still be prone to falsification, leaving platforms vulnerable to misuse.
For parents, these issues create a difficult balance between enabling their child’s online freedom and ensuring their privacy.
For businesses, improper verification can lead to regulatory penalties or loss of user trust.
This personal experience as a parent intersected with my professional expertise in digital security. It highlights a fundamental challenge in digital trust—the confidence users and organizations have in digital interactions. While traditional verification methods compromise privacy and security, digital trust solutions offer a secure and privacy-preserving alternative for individuals and organizations to share only necessary information.
Balancing personal and professional perspectives
At OXD, I regularly perform security audits on third-party software and services. Drawing on that experience for a personal project, I discovered that Roblox relies on Persona for age verification. This means my daughter's ID scan and headshot would be routed to a third party, where the data could be stored temporarily or processed further.
While Persona has its own security policies and certifications, the process revealed a larger issue: the burden on individuals to evaluate each third party handling their data. Most users do not have the time or expertise to scrutinize privacy policies or request detailed security documentation.
After carefully reviewing the security and privacy practices of both Roblox and Persona, I ultimately decided to proceed with the verification, recognizing that this was the only available option for my daughter to access the platform’s digital asset creation tools. However, this process reinforced a fundamental concern. Centralized verification services require users to trust multiple parties with their sensitive information, placing the responsibility on individuals to assess security risks while creating unnecessary friction in the user experience.
This led me to ask a critical question: What if there were a simpler, safer way to verify age without relying on third party systems to handle such sensitive information?
The promise of verifiable credentials
There are better solutions available that minimize data exposure and put users in control of their information. Verifiable credentials (VCs) provide a privacy-first alternative, allowing individuals to provide attributes like age without sharing unnecessary personal details. If you are unfamiliar with how VCs work, our previous article provides a detailed overview of their components and structure.
The potential of VCs lies in their ability to shift control back to users. Instead of requiring companies to store and process sensitive information, VCs allow individuals to store verified credentials in secure digital wallets and share only the data needed for verification. Age verification, for example, could be reduced to a simple “yes” or “no” confirmation rather than requiring a full ID scan.
The case for implementing VCs
For digital platforms, age verification is both a security requirement and a user experience challenge. Traditional identity verification methods introduce friction, increase operational costs, and require companies to manage sensitive data which exposes them to regulatory risk. Verifiable credentials provide a scalable, privacy-first alternative that benefits businesses in multiple ways.
1. Reducing compliance risks
With increasing regulations like COPPA in the US and GDPR in Europe, platforms must ensure that they handle user data securely. VCs reduce regulatory risk by allowing platforms to verify attributes like age without collecting or storing personally identifiable information (PII). For government agencies managing citizen services, VCs can streamline processes like benefits applications, licensing, and permit renewals, while maintaining strict privacy standards and reducing the administrative burden of handling sensitive personal information.
2. Lowering operational costs
Traditional age verification processes rely on document scans, manual reviews, or third party identity verification services. These methods require ongoing human review, customer support, and fraud detection which can become costly at scale. By integrating automated, cryptographically verified credentials, platforms can streamline verification and reduce dependency on human intervention.
3. Improve user experience
Requiring users to upload government-issued IDs creates friction and drop-off points, particularly for younger audiences who may not have an official ID readily available. VCs simplify the process by allowing users to share a verified proof of age without needing to repeatedly upload sensitive documents.
4. Building competitive advantage
As users become more privacy-conscious, companies that prioritize privacy-first authentication solutions will have a trust advantage over competitors. Offering decentralized, user-controlled identity verification demonstrates a commitment to digital trust and can differentiate a platform from others in the industry.
Challenges and opportunities of adopting VCs
For organizations considering the adoption of Verifiable credentials, several key factors must be addressed to ensure successful implementation.
1. Establishing a network of reliable credential issuers
For a VC ecosystem to function effectively, organizations must rely on trusted issuers who verify and issue credentials. Governments, educational institutions, and certified private entities are potential issuers but challenges arise in ensuring interoperability across different providers. Organizations must evaluate issuer credibility and define clear guidelines for credential issuance.
2. Choosing the right digital wallet strategy
Users need secure wallets to store and share their credentials. Organizations must decide whether to integrate with existing wallet providers like Microsoft Entra or Trinsic, or develop proprietary wallets tailored to their platform. Regardless of the approach, wallets must support selective disclosure, allowing users to share only the necessary data while keeping other details private.
3. Integrating verification with existing systems
To make VCs solutions viable for businesses, verification systems must integrate seamlessly with existing authentication and access control mechanisms. Secure APIs must facilitate real-time verification while ensuring cryptographic proofs remain valid. Privacy-preserving technologies such as Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) allow organizations to confirm age eligibility without exposing unnecessary information.
4. Managing trust in a decentralized system
Organizations adopting VCs must determine how to manage trust in a decentralized environment. Blockchain technology provides a tamper-proof solution for storing issuer public keys, ensuring verifiers can authenticate credentials without reliance on centralized databases. Platforms like Hyperledger Indy or Ethereum offer scalable infrastructure for managing public keys and credential registries.
5. Designing for adoption and accessibility
The success of any VC-based system depends on user adoption. Verification processes should be intuitive and easy to understand. Features like QR code scanning, one-click verification and guided onboarding improve usability. Providing clear documentation and fallback support reduces friction for users unfamiliar with digital credentials.
6. Ensuring adoption across platforms
Interoperability is key to large-scale adoption. Organizations should follow open standards like W3C Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identifiers to ensure that credentials issued by one entity can be accepted by multiple platforms and verifiers.
From theory to practice
Verifiable credentials offer a more secure and privacy-preserving alternative to traditional identity verification. While creating a full VC ecosystem requires coordination among issuers, verifiers, and technology providers, the benefits can outweigh the challenges. VCs reduce compliance risks, eliminate unnecessary data storage, and give users more control over their digital identities.
This shift in managing digital identity was anticipated over a decade ago. Eric Schmidt reflected on its significance in The New Digital Age:
“The shift from having one’s identity shaped off-line and projected online to an identity that is fashioned online and experienced off-line will have implications for citizens, states and companies as they navigate the new digital world. And how people and institutions handle privacy and security concerns in this formative period will determine the new boundaries for citizens everywhere.”
Eric Schmidt, The New Digital Age (2013)
His observation is even more relevant today. Organizations that embrace privacy-enhancing technologies like Verifiable credentials will be better positioned to build trustworthy, user-centric digital ecosystems.
As both a parent and an IT professional, I believe that verifiable credentials are a positive step toward a future where verification is both effective and respectful of our digital identities.
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