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
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.