Age verification brings the privacy debate to vaping

By Thomas Chen, Chief Technology Officer of IKE Tech

The most consequential age-verification deployment happening right now is not on a website. It is inside a vape. When the FDA authorized its first flavored e-cigarettes this year, it did so partly on the strength of device access restrictions, the technology that locks a nicotine device until the user’s age is confirmed. For the identity industry this is a notable moment, because it moves age assurance off the screen and into a physical object, verifies continuously rather than once, and does it under a federal regulator’s eye. It also drew the objection that trails age verification everywhere it goes, which is that it amounts to surveillance.

As someone who has spent more than two decades building identity systems, that objection deserves a serious answer rather than a defensive one. Privacy advocates are right that age-verification technology poses a privacy risk, and public health researchers are right to ask whether the technology actually works. Both critiques land against the way these systems are usually built, and neither is a law of nature. The vaping case is a useful place to show why, because the stakes are concrete and the design choices are unusually visible.

Start with the privacy concern, because it is the one the industry keeps getting wrong. The default way to verify identity is to collect a government ID and a live selfie, match them, and store the result. That stored repository is the problem. It sits there as a standing target, and anyone who has worked in security long enough has stopped asking whether such a store will be breached and started assuming when. The pattern plays out even inside government, where the IRS backed away from mandatory third-party facial recognition in 2022 after a bipartisan revolt, and where a 2026 proposal would now let that same vendor keep taxpayers’ biometric scans for years. A critic who worries that a company is building a database of faces and IDs is raising a reasonable concern.

The mistake is treating that storage as unavoidable. The durable answer to a privacy objection is not another layer of encryption around a retained honeypot, because walls eventually fall and the incentive to breach grows as the store fills. The answer is to design so the sensitive data is never retained at all. One architectural approach is to verify age once through a trusted provider, discard the identity documents, and retain only a cryptographic token representing eligibility. Every later interaction, unlocking the device, re-checking eligibility, generating a compliance record, runs against that token rather than against personal data. The token is anchored on a distributed ledger, which matters here only because it makes the record tamper-evident and interoperable without putting any personal information on-chain. Nothing in the store is worth stealing, because the identifying material was discarded the moment verification succeeded.

Identity professionals will recognize why that is a stronger position than promising to guard data well. A verifier that retains nothing is cheaper to secure, simpler to audit, and far less attractive to an attacker, and it answers the surveillance charge with architecture instead of assurances.

As it stands today, the only barrier to youth access to vapes is point-of-sale verification. Unfortunately, verifying a buyer at the register does nothing to stop that buyer from handing the product to a minor. A clerk who checks an ID at the register, or a website that verifies a purchaser once, has no oversight on who actually uses the product afterward, which is why retail-counter verification has never meaningfully controlled youth access to age-restricted goods, whether the product is a vape or a bottle of liquor bought by an of-age friend.

Point-of-use verification exists to close that gap, and its value depends on doing what point-of-sale cannot. A device that stays bound to a verified user, re-checks rather than trusting a single past approval, and deactivates when it leaves the verified context addresses the hand-off problem in a way a checkout screen structurally cannot. It does not make youth access impossible, and no honest engineer should claim it does. The FDA itself has said device restrictions are unlikely to be sufficient on their own for the most youth-appealing flavors. But the right comparison is not against perfection. It is against the retail check that the public health critique has already, correctly, dismissed as inadequate.

Both of these problems, privacy and real-world enforcement, come down to how the technology is built rather than whether age should be verified at all. Done the usual way, age verification is invasive and shallow, a data honeypot that still fails to govern real-world use. Done well, it can retain nothing personal while enforcing eligibility continuously at the point that actually matters. The vaping debate is simply where these choices are on display, under regulatory scrutiny, with real consequences for whether adults reach reduced-risk products and whether minors are kept from them. The identity industry should treat it as a proving ground, because the standard set here, verifying without remembering and enforcing without surveilling, is the one every age-restricted category needs.

The views expressed are the author’s own. To submit a guest column please contact our editorial team.

About the author

Thomas Chen, the co-founder of Berify, founder of nxtlinq and the chief technology officer of IKE Tech, has spent more than two decades building cybersecurity and identity systems. He holds seventeen patents spanning web security, blockchain, and artificial intelligence.

Article Topics

age verification  |  data privacy  |  IKE Tech  |  POS  |  regulation  |  retail biometrics