Legislation that comes into effect from the end of the year designed to protect minors is laughably easy to circumvent, if the example from the UK is any measure.
I don’t do a lot of news or opinion content here on ART – it’s called Alex Reviews Tech for a reason – but I have been watching the passage of the Federal Government’s legislation designed to ban under-16 year olds from social media with some interest.
Before the pearl-clutching types get too antsy, I’ll point out that I’m a parent, and as a tech journalist of many years, I know full well that there are murky corners of the Internet that aren’t suitable for younger eyes.
Going down that debate hole is, in my view, very lazy point scoring, but if you must, have at it in the comments below, but note that they’re moderated, so if you just want to get abusive, nobody will ever see it. But I digress…
Keeping the youngsters away from genuinely-bad online material without impinging on the rights of adults – we get into some interesting moral positions here, but let’s just go with that definition for the moment – involves some level of age verification, with visual ID often being touted as a gold standard.
You show what you look like to a camera, always-reliable AI (cough) analyses it and decides if you’re old enough to drink in a pub access material designated as adults-only whether that’s a social media site or a picture of human mammaries.
Ask any company selling this technology, and they’ll talk about how wonderful it is, because it’s simple to use for consumers and ensures that little Timmy can’t access content that he shouldn’t.
Except that for quite some time now, concerns have been raised about both the privacy of this approach – who keeps the databases of faces, and what else might they be used for or leaked to – and especially whether they’re actually fit for task.
Take this ABC report from June, where facial recognition software only correctly guessed the age of respondents in 85% of cases, with some 15 year olds being pegged as being in their 30s instead. That’s one side of the problem… and of course, the other side is the younger cohort deliberately working ways around the blocks.
You know, the way that teenagers especially have been doing since time immemorial.
Let’s be adults here for a moment, and admit that when we were teenagers, we looked for (and generally found) ways around restrictions like these, whether it was sneaking into movies we shouldn’t, underage sips of alcohol or access to “restricted” material. It absolutely happens, and pretending it doesn’t is just sticking your head in the sand type behaviour.
In the UK, legislation specifically targeting pornographic material kicked in last Friday, with a requirement for visual verification of users identified as coming from UK IP addresses.
Rather predictably, VPN usage and popularity on app store charts rocketed – it turns out people like their privacy, especially when it relates to sexual matters, who knew – but rather amusingly, there’s a simpler workaround.
As noted by PC Gamer if you’ve got a copy of Death Stranding for the PC, using the game’s photo mode you can rather quickly take a snap of the main protagonist’s face with your phone, move the in-game camera around if profile shots are needed and pass an age verification check in the UK.
The face of every 15 year old in the UK right now. The resemblance is uncanny, no?
At one level, this is just downright hilarious, because it’s such a stupid and simple way to bypass a “safety” filter.
Sure, the relevant services will probably add a specific Death Stranding filter as fast as they can to try to close that loophole, though that does raise the spectre of folks who just happen to look like the protagonist falling into a false positive trap for no good reason. That also raises the prospect of some lighting conditions for genuine users being mistaken for video game shots too.
The reality however is that Death Stranding is far from the only photorealistic video game, and of course we live in an age of generative AI where it’s stupidly easy to generate either still shots or even short clips of faces that are going to look a whole lot older than 16 years old, all doing whatever an algorithm determines is needed to do to pass this kind of check.
I don’t feel like burning a lake’s worth of water to get something like Google’s Veo to do so right now, but it’s absolutely going to happen, over and over again, and the services and approaches being taken in the UK right now are the same kinds of services and approaches being touted for Australia’s social media ban as well.
To be clear, while I do 100% get that there’s content online not suitable for minors for a host of reasons, I’m not particularly in favour in government legislation around it, and this does highlight one reason why; we’re essentially spending a lot of time and money on a fix that won’t work while handing over personally identifiable information — whether that’s a driver’s licence, a pattern of online usage or a facial recognition scan — and for what, precisely?
Also, if anyone asks, this is what my face looks like now. Honest.
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also as a blind person i wonder how this will work for people like me who can’t see?