Internet Matters survey of 1,000 kids found ~half can easily bypass online age verification, including via drawn-on facial hair fooling CV-based checks.
Key Takeaways
UK nonprofit Internet Matters surveyed 1,000 children; roughly half said age verification checks were easy to circumvent.
Known bypasses include drawing facial hair with makeup, pointing webcams at adult-looking video game characters, and pulling unusual faces.
Age verification laws now cover half of U.S. states and the UK, requiring passport or driver’s license uploads to third-party companies.
Critics flag these mandated databases as breach and leak risks that centralize sensitive identity documents.
Apple, Reddit, Meta, and Discord are all implementing or delaying age-check rollouts, with Discord pausing amid user backlash and security concerns.
Hacker News Comment Review
The dominant commenter sentiment is that engineers building these systems should do the ethical minimum: ship weak implementations and slow-walk fixes for known bypasses.
Discussion is a duplicate; substantive technical debate happened in an earlier thread (244 points, 175 comments) linked by commenters.
Notable Comments
@Analemma_: “the most ethical thing you can do is make them as weak as possible” and delay fixes for months or years.
