What Spotify’s Digital Age Verification Rules Really Mean for You
Spotify is rolling out a strict new policy in the United Kingdom: if you don’t pass an age verification check, your account could be deactivated and eventually deleted. The change is part of a growing trend toward platform compliance with government safety regulations and it’s sparking concerns about privacy, access, and digital identity. Earlier this week, Australia announced a ban of YouTube user accounts under 16 years of age.
Whether you’re a casual Spotify listener who just wants to stream music or someone who uses Spotify more actively for playlists, sharing, or social listening, this shift will affect how you access and maintain your account.
Why Spotify Is Asking for ID and Age Verification
Under the UK’s new Online Safety Act, digital platforms are now required to verify users’ ages before granting access to certain adult content, including explicit music videos and mature themes in podcasts.
In Spotify’s case, the company has partnered with Yoti, a third-party verification service that uses facial recognition or government-issued ID to confirm your age.
If Spotify determines you’re underage – or you simply fail to complete the verification process – your account may be restricted or permanently deleted. The policy currently applies only to UK-based users but could expand to other countries as similar laws emerge in the rest of the world.
What Could Go Wrong With Digital Age Verification?
The Tea app breach shows why handing over ID online comes with risk. Promoted as a safe space for women to share dating experiences, Tea leaked over 70,000 images including selfies and government IDs used for verification.
A second breach exposed more than a million private messages, many involving personal topics like relationships and health. Some of this content spread across public forums.
The recent news about Tea should be chilling in the wider context of powerful governments pushing for ID verification across the web.
Simply put, your ID is an incredibly valuable, sensitive piece of data – with it, someone can impersonate, defraud and steal from you with significantly more ease.
Leaving this data on the servers of private companies creates a vulnerability – one that bad actors will exploit, as the Tea app has shown us most recently. Once IDs (often including you name, address, data of birth, and sensitive ID numbers) are leaked, it’s almost impossible to secure them.
But hey – just move house, change your legal name, and get a new ID. Easy!
Internet ID verification should not involve storing IDs on a server – especially not a server managed by a private company.
What Information Is Being Collected for Online Age Verification?
When asked to verify, you might be prompted to:
- Scan your face using your phone’s camera
- Upload a photo of your passport or driver’s license
- Confirm your birthdate manually
That data is then assessed by Yoti’s system. If you decline or fail the process, your Spotify account may be deactivated for up to 90 days. After that window, deletion is possible.
This might sound like a fair step to protect minors, but it has broader implications – and ultimately, it’s more likely to cause more harm to minors and adults alike rather than effectively protect anyone.
What Age Verification Signals for the Future of Online Platforms
Spotify isn’t the first to adopt aggressive identity verification, and it won’t be the last. Platforms like Reddit, Discord, and even Bluesky have begun enforcing age checks for users. With growing global pressure on tech companies to comply with content moderation laws, the trend is clearly toward more oversight, less anonymity and more reliance on tech companies.
For users, that means your online behavior is increasingly tied to your real-world identity. Your browsing habits, playlists, posts, and likes could all be attached to your name, photo, and legal ID. If you ever thought of the internet as a place to explore freely, that reality is changing fast.
How Redact Helps You Stay in Control
Cybercrime and digital harm is often the result of bad actors leveraging multiple data points – people search sites, breached/leaked data, and critically – your public digital footprint.
Your social media probably contains information about your place of work, residence, friends, family, personality – potentially videos of your face and recordings of your voice.
Bad actors can leverage this information to create compelling deepfakes, spoof identity verification selfies (along with leaked IDs), defraud you, and scam your friends and family. Mitigating these risks is difficult – your digital footprint likely spans years of posts, messages and comments on multiple platforms.
Auditing your footprint and deleting old content is an essential part of securing your presence online and avoiding cybercrime – but this process can take days to do manually.
Redact offers an easy and powerful way to manage your digital history. It works across dozens of platforms to help you:
- Automatically delete old posts, comments, and messages
- Filter by keyword, platform, or time period
- Preview what you’re deleting before taking action
- Set up scheduled cleanups to stay protected over time
Whether you want to clean up Twitter threads from years ago, remove Reddit comments, or tidy up old Facebook likes, Redact gives you the tools to take charge of your data before companies, or even governments, do it for you.
Your digital identity is becoming more permanent. Use Redact to make sure it reflects who you are today, not who you were a decade ago.
