A German social platform needed to check that its users are over 18. It picked a provide …

A German social platform needed to check that its users are over 18. It picked a provider where you hold your identity document up to a camera and film yourself while a system checks your face against it.

Full name. Address. Date of birth. Document number. Photograph. A video of your face.

All of it, to answer one question: yes or no.

I'm not criticising the choice. It's the standard choice, and a defensible one — the tooling is mature and the compliance story writes itself.

I'm asking about the question underneath it: when a service needs one bit of information and collects a hundred, who are the other ninety-nine for?