NearScrub

2026-09-23

Age verification now means uploading a photo of your ID — what scrubbing its metadata adds, and what Discord's 70,000-photo breach shows it doesn't

Uploading a photo of your government ID to prove your age is turning into a routine online action in 2026, not an edge case. Three state "App Store Accountability Act" laws take effect this year alone — Texas on January 1, Utah on May 7, and Louisiana on July 1 — and the U.S. Supreme Court's June 27, 2025 ruling in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton upheld Texas's separate law (H.B. 1181) requiring adult-content sites to verify visitors' ages, which has driven a wave of similar state laws since. Some of those laws are satisfied by an app store passing along an age range through an API, with no photo involved at all. Others — and the "commercially reasonable method" language most of these laws use — are satisfied by a platform asking you to photograph your driver's license or passport and upload the file. What that file itself carries, separately from the ID information printed on it, is worth understanding before you send it.

What actually went wrong the one time this got tested at scale

Discord gave a concrete answer to "what could go wrong" in October 2025. Users who'd been banned for being under Discord's age minimum could appeal by sending a photo of a government ID to prove their real age — a manual verification flow handled by a third-party customer service vendor, 5CA. On October 3, 2025, Discord disclosed that attackers had compromised systems at that vendor. TechCrunch reported the breach exposed at least 70,000 government ID photos — passports and driver's licenses — along with names, usernames, email addresses, support conversation transcripts, and partial billing details. Discord itself wasn't hacked; the vendor it handed the ID photos to was. That's the exact shape of risk the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned about two months earlier, writing in its December 8, 2025 piece "10 (Not So) Hidden Dangers of Age Verification" that age checks mean users "submit their ID to third-party companies" rather than briefly showing it the way you would at a liquor store, and that "companies like AU10TIX and platforms like Discord have faced high-profile data breaches, exposing users' most sensitive information for months or even years."

What's in the ID photo file, versus what's printed on the ID

Everything the Discord breach exposed — the ID number, name, date of birth, photo of your face — is visible content sitting on the front of the document, and no metadata scrubber touches any of it. That's not what NearScrub is for, and it wouldn't have prevented that breach or any breach like it. What's separate is the file itself: if you take that ID photo the ordinary way, holding your license under your phone's camera, the resulting JPEG carries the same kind of EXIF block any phone photo does — capture date and time down to the second, the phone's make and model, and, if location services were on for the camera app, the GPS coordinates of wherever you happened to be standing when you took it. None of that is printed on your driver's license. None of it is information the verification vendor asked for or needs. It's just present in the file by default, the same way it's present in a photo you'd post to a marketplace listing or a resume — the cases this blog otherwise covers.

One JPEG, two different layers of information VISIBLE DOCUMENT — what the verifier asked for, what a breach like Discord's exposed ID number · name · date of birth · your photographed face A metadata scrubber does not touch this layer — it can't redact or blur the document itself. FILE METADATA — never requested, present by default GPS coordinates of capture · timestamp · phone make and model This is what NearScrub strips in the browser before the file ever uploads. Removing the bottom layer doesn't shrink or hide the top layer — the two are independent.
An ID photo carries two independent layers: the printed document a verifier actually asked for, and the camera's own metadata that nobody asked for. Scrubbing the second doesn't touch the first.

Where scrubbing the file doesn't help at all

Three limits worth being direct about. First, a growing share of age-verification flows capture the photo live inside a browser or app — you point your camera at your ID on screen rather than uploading an existing file from your camera roll. There's no file for you to run through a scrubber in that flow; whatever metadata handling happens is entirely on the vendor's side, invisible to you. Second, "liveness check" verification — a short selfie video to prove you're not holding up a photo of someone else's ID — is a video file, and NearScrub only handles JPEG, PNG, PDF, and Office documents; it has no video support to offer here. Third, and most important: nothing about metadata removal changes what the vendor stores, how long they keep it, or whether their systems get breached the way 5CA's did. The EFF's core complaint about age verification isn't that photos carry GPS tags — it's that "the more places personal data passes through, the higher the chances of it being misused or stolen," and that risk lives entirely on the receiving end, not in your file before you send it.

What it does add, and when

The one case where scrubbing an ID photo's metadata is worth the ten seconds it takes: you're photographing an existing physical document with your own phone and uploading that file, rather than using a live in-app capture. In that specific, common case, stripping the EXIF block removes one piece of information — where you were standing and which device you used — that has nothing to do with proving your age and that the verifier never asked for. It's a small addition on top of a much bigger problem, not a fix for that problem. If you're deciding whether to hand a platform a photo of your ID at all, the honest answer to weigh is Discord's 70,000 exposed photos and the EFF's warning about where that data ends up — not whether the file's metadata is clean.