The group surveyed over 1,000 UK children and their parents, and while it did report some positive effects from changes made under the OSA, many children saw age verification as an easy-to-bypass hurdle rather than something that kept them genuinely safe.
A full 46 percent of children even said that age checks were easy to bypass, while just 17 percent said that they were difficult to fool. The methods kids use to fool age gates vary, but most are pretty simple: There’s the classic use of a video game character to fool video selfie systems, while in other instances, children reported just entering a fake birthday or using someone else’s ID card when that was required.
Does anyone find this surprising ?Ask anyone who know how the internet works and most will say this won’t work
Age verification through facial recognition should be banned. Not only does it not work, it invaded privacy. Businesses have no business knowing what kids look like and shouldn’t be collecting this kind of personal information.
Exactly. It’s not age verification, it’s 1984-esque mass surveillance.
We need to blanket ban online age verification.
The thing is that the politicians pushing for it genuinely want the 1984-esque mass surveillance. And it’s not even some sort of mustache twiddling cartoonish evil, these are the sorts of people that genuinely believe if you’re doing nothing wrong you have nothing to hide. That police should be able to get into any lock and read any message. That police are inherently good and won’t ever misuse those powers once they have them. They’re really just that naive.
The frustrating thing is that many of these people’s voters, at least in the US, have always believed the Democrats are tracking them and just generally being evil while in power, and totally oblivious to the amount of control they offer up the government willingly. The idea that their beliefs might be persecuted is lost on them, despite not even that long ago saying they were.
It’s a really weird law because all it’s really doing is collecting data on the most stupid part of society, the ones that actually submit their real details. They are by definition those that are least worth surveilling.
As adult I would be beaten by age checks by shaving my face.
Hello fellow adults.
Its never been able age verification, its been about identity verification.
All this data collection is to build a verified user profile on you for tracking purposes, it’s not about protecting the kids. It’s about tracking everyone everywhere online.
They want to make it absolutely impossible to opt out of surveillance capitalism. You exist to work, eat, sleep, train AI without consent and generate ad analytics data, then give it away for free while you own nothing.
THX 1138 wasn’t that far off the mark.
Fuck, I am old enough to not need to fool the age checks, I just don’t want to participate in them, and I don’t think anyone should have too. So strange to go from, “don’t tell anyone who you are” to upload all your real details and verify them with a government id.
I will just stop using any service that has this. I dont need to use them.
I know a minor that just scrunched her face to beat the Youtube age limit thing. It’s not rocket science, and I think these companies know that.
The goal isn’t preventing kids from seeing anything, it’s about getting them used to websites/apps asking for facial ID.
It only needs to happen a couple times to tie your browsing history across the whole Internet to you.
The AI can’t guess ages, it can’t tie a minor to a driver’s licenses…
But when those kids turn 16 and get their pictures uploaded with name, DLN, and likely SSN it can all be backfilled and that prior browsing history tied to the identity.
Tldr:
Everyone know it won’t do what they say, that’s fine with the people doing it because they’re not doing it for the reason they say they are.
I remember an article going by several years ago on Reddit that was talking about how lunch lines at schools had started using fingerprint IDs for the kids. And this was basically the same general consensus in the comments, that the whole idea was just getting kids used to biometric security. That the cost of the security system itself could’ve just paid for a bunch of kids lunches if that was the actual problem.
Part of me wonders if the point of the age checks is to stop this whole “to catch a predator” shit. That’s gotta be bad for business, right?
If everyone in a chatroom or forum is verified “over 18”, does that mean the pedos have plausible deniability?
I mean to an extent, yeah, but most companies implementing this stuff are doing so because of laws in various jurisdictions, not because they’re worried about their image. But of course it’s all connected, if your image gets bad enough then law makers force your hand.
God forbid they actually try to moderate things properly, why make them do that when we can get all this facial data??
IMO the purpose of age verification is to legalise social media companies data collection before they get in hot water over it.
That’s why Meta has been spending millions on lobbying for age verification.
Also, adding age verification is a costly burden that makes it more difficult for competitors to enter the market.
Yep, absolutely!
This, and it also gives them the ability to tell who’s a bot and who isn’t. For somebody who’s entire income is based on advertising, being able to guarantee advertisers actual human eyes on is worth a lot of money.
Correction: to make sure the only bots/manipulation of views etc are the bots they control.
Not if the predators themselves get to regulate stuff.
Except the way it’s done means everyone on the internet is by default a child, including the pedophiles. There isn’t a single purpose for the age checks, it’s useful for (wannabe) authoritarians, its profitable for the companies, it’s convenient for child abusers, it’s data galore for 3 letter agencies etc. The current big wave of it is known to be sponsored by the american megacorpos, so pretty much all the reasons apply.
In my opinion, it’s not even meant to stop kids from using the internet. I believe it’s to collect data on people that don’t know any better or don’t care about uploading their ID or face to some mysterious server. The type of people that click “accept all” for cookies when they go to a website and those that live in the “if you don’t have anything to hide than it shouldn’t be a problem” camp. I have a friend like this that whenever I bring it up he simply does not give a single shit about his own privacy on the internet and just calls the whole thing, in his own words, a “nothingburger.”
Explaining this to the layman is honestly infuriating. They just tell you that you are overreacting and that it’s not a big deal. That if you have nothing to hide than you shouldn’t have to worry. An analogy I came up with that sometimes helps is removing all the doors in public bathrooms. If you have nothing to hide than you shouldn’t be worried, right? Are you comfortable with your mom or employer knowing your browsing habits with your ID and/or face attached to it? What about that time you posted a meme to your friends discord server making fun of Donald Trump?
What about that time you posted a meme to your friends discord server making fun of Donald Trump?
This is a good example because they can and have started going after this type of stuff. I think it’s still going to be failing for some time, but that they even try, that people even get arrested is terrifying.
The best way I can explain it to people is that you think you have nothing to hide now but you think that because you agree with the government. Maybe a good way to explain it to conservative folks would be to say something like “what if they imprisoned you for sharing your religious beliefs?”
We’ve been beating “age verification” for years. Back then it was just simply clicking “yes”
They are beating age verification, but they are not beating the Identity verification, their face scan data is still being sent to some database.
They’re going to keep all users’ scanned faces (even if they say they don’t). And they’re going to create a perfect profile for each one of us.
Just wait until they hack one of these companies, it will be fun.
We need to make it illegal to age verify.
people have face verified on Roblox with 1 tooth jonkler.
It teaches them civil disobedience and that they shouldn’t trust the state. At least something positive out of this shit show huh
