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
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.
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.
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.
people have face verified on Roblox with 1 tooth jonkler.
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?
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?
Not if the predators themselves get to regulate stuff.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It teaches them civil disobedience and that they shouldn’t trust the state. At least something positive out of this shit show huh
