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
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?