Blog: I’m Suspicious About Age Verification Tech Online…

For a few years now, questions about how to verify the age of various people on the internet have been flying around, especially as it pertains to keeping pornography out of kids’ hands. Most of the time, the verification works on an honor system, where a popup appears, asks if you’re XYZ age, and you can click yes or no. Obviously, however, this isn’t a good system as people will inevitably lie about their age to access whatever they’re trying to access. It’s the same with social media sites where often, you can just lie about your age when it asks for your birthday as you’re making your account.

Thus, because of the obvious flaws with this system, tech companies, often when faced with mounting legal pressure to do so, have started looking into new, more accurate ways of figuring out the age of their users…and the way it’s going is quite invasive. Now, quite a few companies such as YouTube, Discord, Roblox, and others are demanding that users submit a government issued ID or allow the app to scan their face so AI can guess their age. If you don’t, either the app will restrict what features you can use or it will be almost completely unusable.

While on the surface, this seems like a good idea so these tech companies can prevent children from seeing adult content or being groomed, there is a big issue with allowing them to have your ID or to scan your face: where is it being stored? And how safe is your info?

Though many of these companies will say that the image of your ID will be promptly deleted and that the scan of your face is processed on your phone so it’s not being stored by a third party, we’ve found over the years that those assurances sometimes turn out to be lies. For example, in September of last year, Discord experienced a massive data breach, in which the hackers managed to access the third-party customer support services, stealing people’s IDs, names, emails, usernames, billing info, etc. And just think about how many times you get alerts that such-and-such social media site has experienced a data breach. A lot of your info is already out there – do you really want them having access to more of it, especially if your kids’ info is involved?

Additionally, when Roblox rolled their age verification system a few months ago, it soon proved to be incredibly easy to sneak around. People figured out that you could use AI platforms such as Sora to get past the facial age estimation. Pedophiles on the platform, not wanting to lose access to kids, also started buying and trading age verified accounts for whatever age bracket they wanted to prey on.

Speaking about the age verification, this method is also flawed due to the fact that AI is incapable of telling the actual age of a person. It can estimate it, but some people look younger than they are while others look much older, making these estimates inaccurate. In fact, some people have complained that the age verification on Discord thought they were teenagers when they’re adults and made it almost unusable by putting them on the teen setting.

But besides the obvious issues regarding submitting your ID to random tech companies who profit off of selling your data, or doing a face scan, we need to ask if we’re really comfortable with trading extremely sensitive information about ourselves in exchange for being able to chat with friends or play a game. Do I support the idea that certain websites should require an ID to access (i.e. porn sites.) Yes? But when it comes to other websites such as social media, then I have to question if it’s really worth it. Do they not have a better way of keeping people safe without invading our privacy?

Until next time,

M.J.