Age Verification Technologies
Recently there has been a worldwide push for introducing age verification technologies. Politically this rides on the "protect the children" war-cry, while critics claim it's all a conspiracy to push more spy ware on consumers. My personal believe is, that the internet is not a safe place for children, and some mean of filtering content for children needs to be applied but also, that it needs to be the least disruptive technology available. AI companies have been using this political push to lobby governments to implement their products as mandatory age verification gates. This puts a tremenduous amount of sensitive data, especially since it will involve data of children, into the hands of companies that have a horrible data protection record. Every time this issue came up, my goto answer was that it should happend at the ISP/mobile carrier provider since their complience with data protection laws is much easier to monitor than that of some overseas tech company. My general experience was, that people just hear age verification and instantly block off. Topic not to be discussed. This leaves the field open to the invasive face scan approaches of data grabbing and selling tech companies, since from the point of view of a politician who campaigns on a "protect the children" mantra, there are helpful tech companies who offer a solution and potential pedophiles who want to prevent it at all cost. This doesn't look good for either the data protection or the child protection causes. It was oddly satisfying to learn, that the alternative that I've been proposing is already successfully in use for almost two decades on the other end of the Eurasian land mass. I highly recommend everyone to watch this video explaining the Japanese system and lobbying their representatives to go for this simple solution that keeps agency with parents and educators out of the hand of companies who make most of their money by selling data in legal grey zones. Read More »
