Literally every type of age verification ever put into place has been circumvented by children. EVERY SINGLE ONE.

Age verification bypass tool soon to be made illegal:

I can’t wait to email this to my MP

Canada Bill S209 needs to die. It’s bad legislation.

I'm in my mid thirties and I'd still buy a mask or something to trick these systems if and when this becomes a thing in my country.

As someone who spent my formative days figuring out how to bypass early digital locks my school was putting in place to "protect us" ... The system loses this game. Every time. You are taking kids with nothing but time, no apparent drawbacks, and everything to gain... And placing them against "good enough" implemented by people who could give two shits about it.

This will continue to lose until they twist the knobs too tight and hit false positive central... And oops now the populace hates it. Control for thee is fine until its for me.

Tale as old as technology itself.

How about instead of trying every complicated stupid way to regulate users and especially children ..... you regulate and control companies and corporations instead.

Vincent Adultman

People act as if it was a bug and not a feature. This was intended. After people sufficiently make fun of the current solution that everyone knows how easily it is broken, the next step is requiring both ID and face scan and comparing photo on ID with face scan. Congrats, privacy is removed completely. Every poster is now tied with real life identity.

We should get all of our advice from little kids. They have not yet been bound by knowing what is or isn't possible. The meek shall inherit the earth.

Today in: "Just let the parents parent."

It's good to see a reminder that depending on the majority of parents to act in absence of real, tangible regulation is doomed to be a failure.

Good, good -- teach the children that authority is bullshit. This kind of thing is more effective than book learnin'.

I couldn't stop laughing when one of my kids showed me a picture of his 10 year old friend's effort with the texta. We are talking comical magician curly moustache. Roblox verified that account as 18 though and now that account can't talk to his school friends.

Is it legal to “verify” my age to be a minor? Would less of my information be collected?

…not that any of it is accurate anyway.

Blame to all who made such stupid software and then called it "age check"

Oh no. All that's left now that the age veifications are bypassed are the extensive public surveillance. Better leave that running.

We want your children to be safer online so we forced them to self-identify with biometric data? Isn’t that part of what caused this in the first place?

Privacy, security, and regulation is the answer here, not more surveillance capitalism. But that’s anathema to the business models of every social media company so instead we get this ham-fisted attempt at jamming the square peg of “digital advertising surveillance” into the round hole of “protecting children”. The mechanical action damages everything involved.

This system is specifically and very effectively designed to monitor, analyze, addict, and sell people, and this “solution” just ends up being more engineering to that end. Asking it to selectively age-gate content is like inventing a global network for information transfer and then becoming outraged when it’s used for file sharing. Copy is an intrinsic operation of digital data, and exploitation is an intrinsic operation of social media. We’re asking it to do the opposite of what it’s created to do.

Parents should be in charge of filtering content for their children, and the government should be in charge of using the collective power of the people to regulate companies that exploit them instead of serving them. Asking social media companies to do it is backing the wolf truck up to the chicken coop while the guy hired to protect the chickens tells you “The wolves will protect the chickens from other predators!”

the SOY gmod method vs the CHAD fake mustache

I guess now we must ban pens and markers because children might draw fake mustaches and bypass age verification.

So long humble pen. We will miss you.

As I understand it, most adult content producers aren't actually interested in having minors using their sites. It seems like the easiest thing to do would be to have them add some "Adult Material" flag in their metadata, and let consumers respond as they wish to that tag - whether that's done through browser settings, router nannyware, or whatever.

Is there a technical reason this isn't what's being pushed for? I'm sure there's lobbying and "optics" reasons for not doing this, but is there any practical reason for not pursuing this, or something like it?