Why this is suddenly everywhere
Over the last couple of years, new laws have pushed a lot of ordinary websites to check that their users are adults. The UK’s Online Safety Act now requires age checks on many sites, and more than twenty US states have passed their own rules. Similar laws are appearing in other countries too.
The most common way to do this check is to ask for a government ID or a face scan. So a step that used to be rare is now something you can meet on social media, adult sites, some games, and even a few everyday apps.
Where your ID actually goes
Here is the part most people miss: the website usually does not do the check itself. It hands the job to a separate age-verification company you have probably never heard of. Your ID is sent there, checked, and — depending on the company — may be stored for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.
That means a photo of your passport or licence can end up on another company’s servers, sometimes in another country, under rules you never see. There is no single standard for how long they keep it or who they can share it with.
Why that is a risk worth knowing
A photo of your ID is a jackpot for an identity thief. In one image it usually shows your full name, date of birth, ID number and photo — most of what someone needs to pretend to be you. And you cannot change your face or your date of birth the way you can change a leaked password.
Every company that stores IDs also becomes a target. In one recent case, attackers reached a support company used by the chat app Discord and walked away with around 70,000 users’ government-ID photos. The attackers claimed a far bigger haul; the company disputed that number — but even the confirmed figure is a lot of very personal documents.
What you can actually do
Stay calm and share less. When a site offers both a full ID upload and a face age-estimate, the face estimate usually reveals less about you. Before you upload anything, look for who is doing the check and whether they say they delete your image straight after.
Where you can, take the photo inside the app or website at that moment rather than uploading a saved copy — that way a picture of your ID is not also left sitting in your camera roll or cloud backup. And keep the master copies of your own documents in one place you control, such as an encrypted vault on your phone, instead of scattered across chats, emails and downloads.
Where Sealby fits in
Sealby does not run age checks and cannot stop a site from asking for your ID. That part is out of its hands, and it does not claim otherwise.
What Sealby can do is keep your own copies of sensitive documents — ID, passport, insurance papers — encrypted on your device with a key only you hold, so they are not sitting in a photos app or an email thread waiting to leak. The web keeps asking for more proof of who you are; the copies you keep deserve a proper lock.
This is general education, not legal advice. Age-verification rules differ between countries and change over time, and each site handles your ID differently — check the current rules and the site’s own policy for your situation.