alt Hacker NewsSo, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?
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>If Google can guess your age, you may never even see an age verification screen. Your Google account is typically connected to your YouTube account, so if (like mine) your YouTube account is old enough to vote, you may not need to verify your Google account at all.
This has been proven false a bunch of times, at least if the 1000s of people complaining online about it are to be believed. My google account is definitely old enough to vote, but I get the verification popup all the time on YouTube.
I think the truth is, they just want your face. The financial incentive is to get as much data as possible so they can hand it to 3rd parties. I don't believe for a second that these social networks aren't selling both the data and the meta data.
I’ve noticed that many people struggle to simply let things go. Take a hypothetical case where HN requires ID verification. I'd just stop using HN, even if that meant giving up checking tech news. Sometimes things end, and that's fine.
I used to watch good soccer matches on public TV. When services like DAZN appeared, only one major match was available each weekend on public TV. Later, none were free to watch unless you subscribed to a private channel. I didn't want to do that, so I stopped watching soccer. Now I only follow big tournaments like the World cup, which still air on public TV (once every 4 years).
Sometimes you just have to let things go
My main concern is that there isn't a reliable way to know your information is securely stored[0].
> A few years ago, I received a letter in the mail addressed to my then-toddler. It was from a company I had never heard of. Apparently, there had been a breach and some customer information had been stolen. They offered a year of credit monitoring and other services. I had to read through every single word in that barrage of text to find out that this was a subcontractor with the hospital where my kids were born. So my kid's information was stolen before he could talk. Interestingly, they didn't send any letter about his twin brother. I'm pretty sure his name was right there next to his brother's in the database.
> Here was a company that I had no interaction with, that I had never done business with, that somehow managed to lose our private information to criminals. That's the problem with online identity. If I upload my ID online for verification, it has to go through the wires. Once it reaches someone else's server, I can never get it back, and I have no control over what they do with it.
All those parties are copying and transferring your information, and it's only a matter of time before it leaks.
I'm surprised that the EFF does not highlight the best option, here: use a VPN to a jurisdiction that doesn't have such ridiculous laws.
I have never clicked "accept" on a cookie banner, as a matter of principle; I zap them away with uBlock Origin. Should the plague of age verification reach my jurisdiction, I'm sure I will handle it in like fashion.
This makes me wonder if there's a business case for a privacy-preserving identity service which does age verification. Say you have a strong identity provider that you have proven your age to. Just as the 3rd party site could use SSO login from your identity provider, perhaps the identity provider could provide signed evidence to the 3rd party site that asserts "I have verified that this person is age X" but not divulge their identity. Sidestep the privacy issue and just give the 3rd party site what they need to shield them from liability.
Isn't age guesstimation by appearance, even with advanced machine learning techniques, even if attempted by real person with honest effort, just total snake oil? This ongoing age verification push with weird emphasis on generating name-face pairs is beyond fishy.
I'm 32 and submitted a photo of myself for age verification on Instagram and Threads. Was promptly banned, with no resource.
I do look a little younger than 32, due to a healthy lifestyle and religious use of sunscreen but I have a beard and moustache. It's a little insane that I was instantly banned with no way to move forward.
I thought the article was about finding a job when you reach a certain age, which is my problem.
OpenAI uses AI to scan your ChatGPT conversations to determine your age. And even though I've been using ChatGPT for mostly work-related stuff, it has identified me, a man in my 40s, as under 18 and demanded government ID to prove my age. No thank you.
If my options are upload a picture of myself for Google to monetize through ads or not use Google / Youtube then I will be moving on regardless of the inconvenience to myself.
If this is about porn or other content deemed age-sensitive, the moment it becomes difficult to source through "official," mainstream platforms, the content will move underground (P2P networks), making it even more difficult to analyze and regulate. So this is a very shortsighted move.
There were some amusing headlines a while back about Discord's verification being fooled with game screenshots. Does anyone know if that's still the case?
States need to stop sniffing for age really. This is age discrimination.
How well does the selfie test detect AI-generated photos? That seems easy to bypass, especially if you copy the metadata over from a real photo.
Face scan: download and install Gary's mod.
Switch VPN region or upload a random picture generated by AI, problem solved.
I'm honestly a bit mixed on this... I don't think that (especially young) children should have access to explicit, graphic sexual content, especially kink. If you as a parent want your kids to have access, so be it... but then the onus should be on the parent.
On similar lines, I think that something between an unrestricted smart phone and the classic dumb phone is a market segment that is needed.
Estonia basically got this completely right in 2002 with their e-ID. I'm kinda shocked nobody else has figured it out yet. Age verification could be simple, secure, robust, and require only the disclosure of your age, nothing more.
Instead, the rest of us have systems that are both far more vulnerable to privacy beaches, and far easier to circumvent anyway.
> Even though there’s no way to implement mandated age gates in a way that fully protects speech and privacy rights
I think the EFF would have more success spreading their message if they didn't outright lie in their blog posts. While cryptographic digital ID schemes have their problems (which they address below), they do fully protect privacy rights. So do extremely simple systems like selling age-verification scratchcards in grocery stores, with the same age restrictions as cigarettes or alcohol.
> At some point, you may have been faced with the decision yourself: should I continue to use this service if I have to verify my age?
An excellent question, which I didn't see the article really get into.
> If you’re given the option of selecting a verification method and are deciding which to use, we recommend considering the following questions for each process allowed by each vendor:
Their criteria implies a lot of understanding on the part of the user -- regarding how modern Web systems work, widespread industry practices and motivations, how 'privacy policies' are often exceeded and assurances are often not satisfied, how much "audits" should be trusted, etc.
I'd like to see advice that starts by communicating that the information will almost certainly be leaked and abused, in n different ways, and goes from there.
> But unless your threat model includes being specifically targeted by a state actor or Private ID, that’s unlikely to be something you need to worry about.
For the US, this was better advice pre-2025, before the guy who did salutes from the capitol was also an AI bro who then went around hoovering up data from all over government. Followed by a new veritable army and camps being created for domestic action. Paired with a posture from the top that's calling harmless ordinary citizens "terrorists", and taking quite a lot of liberties with power.
We'll see how that plays out, but giving the old threat model advice, without qualification, might be doing a disservice.
Either the platform is trying to age-gate anonymously, in which case it is likely you (or your child) can just circumvent that with fake details; or it's some corporation with ongoing access to large government databases, and probably the government can tap the data it collects in some ways, and you (or your child) should probably be worried about being there in the first place.
It is very easy to lie about age through age gates. I have yet to find one that is actually able to get strong proof of age, fake IDs are easy to upload.
No. Fuck them. I'm not using whatever app. Use a VPN or pirate it.
>should I continue to use this service if I have to verify my age?
Simple answer, never accept this If everyone selected "cancel" you can be sure these sites will stop age banning, they wan $ more than anything else.
If a site asks me one question about me, I stop using if.
Is there a throwaway identity that people are using? A dead person unchecked in Mississippi somewhere? Like every teen in America using the same identity like everyone's extended family does with their uncle's Netflix account?
I don't want to google it because I don't want to be put on a list but I also feel somewhat confident that this is being done. Apparently, HN feels safe to ask questions like that for me.
Why can't the EFF tell people to lie? Because if you can get away with it, lying is almost always your best option. Unless there are actual real world consequences to lying like you may anger the police.
And maybe consider using a VPN.
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What a piss poor article.
"We disagree with age gates but our recommendation is to comply". Fuck this.
I think that age verification is important. While its not perfect, it is one tool to help protect kids.
My kid has recently just quit playing Roblox because of the sketchy facial age check process. She said that her and all her friends know not to ever upload a picture of themselves to the Internet (good job, fellow Other Parents!!) so they're either moving on to other games or just downloading stock photos of people from the internet and uploading those (which apparently works).
What a total joke. These companies need to stop normalizing the sharing of personal private photos. It's literally the opposite direction from good Internet hygiene, especially for kids!