AGE VERIFICATION: "WE'RE JUST PROTECTING THE KIDS, BRO!"

Age verification is popping up in a lot of places in an attempt to protect younger people from certain things. Read about how age verification is a huge privacy concern, and how it’s not even solving the problem it was made for.

So Optimal it Hurts

In the United States of America, capitalism is the economic system used; and it basically says: “your goal is to make as much money as possible, but you have to follow these rules (aka. laws)”. The laws exist to make sure that making money also helps society exist and improve, and the goal of making as much money as possible exists to try and reward people for doing things that help society exist and improve.

Now... there may have been a bit of an oopsie when we let entities with lots of money change the rules, but I’m sure it’ll all blow over. Right? Anyways, birthed from this system are many things, but among them are mega corporations. They all found very optimal ways to make money. 

Among this, there is social media. When it comes to age verification, social media is usually the main target. Why? Because corporations found out that exploiting human psychology is very optimal for making money. Unfortunately, exploiting human psychology this way also so happens to have some very negative side effects, especially in younger people. 

So people get upset, create some noise, and call for action. Lawmakers make laws. How do we stop teens and children from being harmed by these apps and software? Easy, just force corporations to check a user's age and disallow them from using the service if they are too young.

So that’s how we got to age verification. As of the making of this article, age verification is popping up around the U.S. and the world. After all, it seems like an easy and good solution. Unfortunately, age verification has some major flaws, and doesn’t even work very well.

THE INEFFICIENCY OF AGE VERIFICATION; GRAPHIC BY ELLIOTT CISCO

The Boston Molasses Flood, Data Edition

When it comes to checking a user’s age, using government IDs or other identification is one option. Users are required to show their ID to prove their age, which then is used to determine if they are allowed to use the service. There’s only one problem. No, wait, there’s more than one problem.

First of all, these IDs are highly sensitive information. Most services claim to delete them after x amount of days, but there’s really no way to know; it’s not like these services are nonprofits that need to be transparent about what they do internally. 

What if there’s a data breach (...Or a flood one might say)? With so many different companies offering age verification services to other companies, there are many points.

“Estimation” Would be a Bit of a Stretch

The other main option used in age verification is biometrics; usually of the face. The idea is that you can scan someone’s face, feed it into some big algorithm, and get an estimation of their age in

order to determine if they can access the service. Now, only 0.01% of people figure this out, but... this method has some faults. First of all, even without rule-breaking Timmys, this system is highly inaccurate. Some people who are old enough to access a service will be blocked and some people who are too young will be let in. But as if it couldn’t get any worse than just straight up not working, it’s racist and sexist as well. The algorithms (usually some form of AI) are trained on data. But there’s usually more data of white men than there are of other people. This makes the AI more inaccurate when used on people other than white men.

Secondly, these programs are incredibly easy to fool. Timmy has many different options for tricking it, such as booting up a video game and displaying a realistic-enough character. Timmy can also ask his parents as mentioned previously. It’s honestly debatable whether these face scanning systems even abide by the laws that required age verification in the first place, simply because of how bad they are when it comes to accuracy.

And you’ll never guess what the third problem is! It’s surveillance again. Biometrics have all the same problems as IDs when it comes to privacy, security, and anonymity. Your data can be leaked, and companies can track you. 

So... all these methods are not exactly the best. Or even good at all, actually. But we can’t not use them because we need to protect kids, right?

No Backseat Parenting, Please

A future internet where everything is age-gated is not desirable, for many reasons. Obviously, children should be protected against harmful content and software (such as social media). But age verification is a security and privacy risk, a way for companies to track people, and doesn’t work very well at actually doing its job. 

Another thing is just that whether a child can access these services should probably be a responsibility of the parent. Yes, bad parents exist and kids can get sneaky, but the downsides of gatekeeping services are pretty bad.

Really, the best solution would be to use law and regulation to make such services that are being gatekept (such as social media) less harmful. But... corporations are corporations, and they’ll lobby and push back against anything that could hurt their profit margins, making this a difficult solution. There are other solutions, such as  to make certain aspects of these services age gated (such as infinite scroll in social media services). But if there’s one thing for sure, the current age verification systems being put in place shouldn’t stay.