Weekly Update 480

Well, I now have the answer to how Snapchat does age verification for under-16s: they give an underage kid the ability to change their date of birth, then do a facial scan to verify. The facial scan (a third party tells me…) allows someone well under 16 to pass it easily. So, is that control “reasonable”? I guess that will depend on whether this case is an outlier or a much more common scenario, and a sample set of one isn’t particularly scientific. Either way, I expect that what we’re seeing is representative of a pretty obvious problem: privacy-preserving age verification is very unlikely to be reliable. It will inevitably result in letting too many young kids through, whilst blocking too many people of legitimate age. Or we end up with people needing to start uploading formal age-verification documents, which creates a whole new problem. Absolutely none of this should come as any surprise whatsoever!

References

1. Sponsored by: Report URI: Guarding you from rogue JavaScript! Don’t get pwned; get real-time alerts & prevent breaches #SecureYourSite
2. This week, it’s all about Australia’s social media ban for under 16s (link to the thread that sparked all the debate)
3. I wrote about “sharenting” back in 2020 (lots in there about protecting kids online whilst also making appropriate use of technology)
4. Our eSafety Commissioner has an FAQ on what the ban means (lot of use of the word “reasonable” in there)