The consensus is comfortable: stronger identity verification keeps us safer. Video selfies for account recovery. Two-factor authentication. Biometric locks. These tools proliferate across platforms, and parents nod along. Of course we want to know who's on the other end of the screen.
But here's the question nobody's asking loudly enough: as we perfect the technology of proving we are who we say we are, what happens to our ability to trust who we're actually talking to?
This matters for parents more than most because we're the ones teaching children to navigate digital spaces. We say: verify who you're talking to. Don't trust strangers. Check the source. But the infrastructure we've built doesn't quite support that wisdom anymore.
Consider what's happened. A teenager can now verify their identity to a platform with a video selfie. Impressive security. The platform knows, with reasonable certainty, that the account belongs to a real person. But it knows nothing about whether that person is trustworthy, whether their intentions are sound, or whether they're pretending to be someone they're not.
An adult can verify their identity and still catfish. They can prove they're a real human and still pose as a child. Identity verification solved one problem and obscured another: we conflated proving you exist with proving you're safe.
The platforms have optimized for the first. They've created beautiful, efficient systems for authentication. But authentication and trustworthiness are not the same thing. A verified account can belong to someone with harmful intent. A video selfie doesn't reveal character.
What breaks next is our intuition about digital risk. Parents grew up with a different framework: the internet was full of unknowns, so you approached it with caution. Now the framing has shifted. If someone is verified, if they've passed the identity check, they feel safe. The technology whispers: this person is real, therefore this person is trustworthy.
That's the dangerous leap.
The better question, then, isn't "how do we verify more identities?" It's "what information actually matters for safety, and how do we help people evaluate it?" These are different problems.
For children talking to verified accounts, what matters isn't whether the account owner passed a selfie test. It matters whether the person is asking for private information, attempting isolation from parents, offering things that seem too good to be true, or grooming patterns. These require different literacy entirely.
Food safety experts are cautious about which items they buy during outbreaks. They don't verify the farm's identity; they understand the epidemiology. They know the actual risk. Parents need something similar for digital spaces: not more verification tools, but better frameworks for assessing actual threat patterns.
The messaging from platforms is understandable. "We've verified this account" feels like a safety feature. It's tangible. It's measurable. But it's also incomplete in ways that matter.
I'm not arguing against identity verification. These tools serve genuine purposes. I'm arguing that we've allowed them to become a proxy for safety when they're something much narrower: proof of existence.
The real work is helping people, especially young people, understand the difference. That requires less faith in technological solutions and more willingness to discuss actual risk. It's messier. It's less quantifiable. It doesn't sell as well.
But it's what actually keeps people safe.