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
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.