Free Markets

U.K. 'Looking Seriously' at Including Online Marketplaces Like eBay and Depop in Teen Social Media Ban

Carded before shopping on eBay? That could be a reality in the U.K.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 11.9.2026 12:00 PM

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(Mikhail Primakov/Dreamstime.)

Online age verification champions are a bit like horror movie villains. Once Michael Myers gets inside a house, he's not going to stop with just one or seven kills. He's going to keep killing until you push him out a window, run him over with a car, and throw his body in a lake (and even then, he'll be back again someday). Likewise, once authorities learn that the public and the courts will stand for one form of age verification—say, asking porn platforms to verify user identities—they're suddenly off on a surveillance spree that won't stop until the whole internet is covered. Age verification for app stores! Age verification for social media! Age verification for… eBay?

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Yes, eBay. Where your shut-in uncle buys old beanie babies and you occasionally turn for used books. Where enterprising teens might make a little cash selling their parents' old jeans.

British regulators apparently want us to believe that eBay is a hotbed of "grooming" by child predators.

Eroding Online Privacy

Online clothes marketplaces like those on eBay, Depop, Facebook Marketplace, and Vinted are in the crosshairs of age-verification-obsessed U.K. regulators, who say—sans any serious evidence—that predators are using them to message minors, The Times reports. U.K. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy is now "looking seriously" at including these marketplaces in the list of platforms that must ban people under age 16 from using them.

As with plans to ban minors from social media, this is disturbing on multiple levels.

First, it's unfair to teenagers. Fourteen or 15 hardly seems too young to search for vintage fashion or used books with a parent's blessing. And trying to ban 14-year-olds from visiting a physical store just because they could potentially encounter an adult with ill intentions there would never fly; why would it be OK online?

It's also unfair to adults, who would have to prove they're adults in order to use any online marketplaces. Perhaps that doesn't seem like a huge deal in itself. But it's one more way that authorities are chipping away at anonymity online. It's one more way they're setting out to erect an internet-wide surveillance system.

It's one more way they're saying you have no right to online privacy.

It's also one more way that authorities are putting people at risk of having their information and identities compromised. Each new platform that has to collect data........

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