Lauren's Blog: The Website Age Verification Train Wreck
https://lauren.vortex.com/2025/07/30/the-website-age-verification-train-wreck
We all want to prevent children from being harmed on the Internet, but
exactly how to do this without creating even more problems for them
and for adults has turned into quite a complicated and political
situation.
There have been broad concerns that various website age verification
systems could be privacy invasive, ineffective, and in some cases
actually might cause even more harm to children than not having the
verifications there in the first place. And now with more and more of
these systems appearing -- the Supreme Court just declared them legal
for states to require for commercial porn sites -- we're starting to
see various of these predictions coming true.
Remember that age verification systems -- whether for porn sites, or
social media sites, or pretty much any site like the situation China
where virtually all Internet usage can be tracked by the government --
doesn't only affect children and teens. No matter your age, you have
to prove you're an adult for access. And that opens up tracking
possibilities that many politicians in both parties would love to have
here in the U.S, with various state and federal legislation already in
place or in litigation. And this quickly creates a situation where
your basic privacy involving what sites you visit, what topics you
research, what videos or podcasts you view or listen to, on and on,
may be seriously compromised in ways never possible before now.
There have already been breaches of age verification systems that
publicly exposed users' identity credentials, a treasure trove for
crooks. We can reasonably expect directed hacking attacks at these
systems as they expand, and if history is any guide many will be
successful. Some of these systems use government credentials, some
require credit cards, some are using systems to estimate your age from
your face, or by how long you've been using a particular email
address, and so on.
Many adults who don't want to hand over a credit card or their
driver's license -- and their privacy -- to these firms have already
found various bypass mechanisms, and it appears that -- as expected --
kids are already WAY AHEAD of adults at this.
A broad age verification law just took affect in the UK a handful of
days ago and is already being widely breached, with it trivially easy
to find public discussions with users trading bypass hints and tricks.
The degree to which these systems are political theater is emphasized
by rules that for example order sites not to tell users that they
could use VPNs to bypass the checks in many cases -- as if VPNs
haven't been used to bypass geographic restrictions for many years --
and most age verification systems are geographically based.
But it actually gets even more bizarre. Some of these age verification
systems do indeed try to estimate your age from your face as seen on
your camera. Of course if you don't have a camera on your device or
don't want your face absorbed by these systems you're out of luck in
this respect. For that new UK age verification system, kids very
quickly realized they could use a video game that generates very
realistic faces to bypass the age verification system. And of course
as the nightmarishly advanced AI-based video generation systems
continue to evolve -- we know where this is headed.
The worst part about all this is that age verification systems broadly
applied as some politicians desire, not only have the potential to cut
children off from the ability to access crucial information about
their own health and safety in cases of abuse, but could actually
drive children to all manner of disreputable sites -- the kind that
can pop up and vanish quickly -- that could potentially do them real
harm but will never abide by age verification rules.
Age verification seems like an obvious solution to a range of
Internet-related problems. But the reality is that many observers feel
that it creates more problems than it solves, creating new hacking
opportunities and privacy risks, and that in many cases the kids will
find ways to bypass it anyway. When trying to fix a complicated
problem on the Internet, or anywhere else, the first step probably
should be, "Try not to make things even worse." An idea worth keeping
in mind.
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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