16% of Parents Help Their Children Bypass Online Age Checks, Study Finds. One 15-Year-Old Just Uses a Fake Moustache (independent.co.uk) 166
The Independent reports that "more than a third of children in the UK have found a way around age verification measures" for social media sites and other online platforms. And new research from online safety organisation Internet Matters "suggests one in six parents have helped their child to get past age verification checks, with children reporting 'tricking' platforms into thinking they are older. "
Parents also said they had caught their children drawing on facial hair in a bid to evade the technology. One mother said: "I did catch my son using an eyebrow pencil to draw a moustache on his face, and it verified him as 15 years old"... From a sample of 1,000 UK children, 46% said they believed age checks are easy to bypass, while 32% admitted to having done so.
49% of the children surveyed said they'd still encountered harmful content, according to the online safety activists. The group called the figure "unacceptable," and complained that age verification measures "are often ineffective in practice or easy to bypass."
49% of the children surveyed said they'd still encountered harmful content, according to the online safety activists. The group called the figure "unacceptable," and complained that age verification measures "are often ineffective in practice or easy to bypass."
Of course (Score:5, Insightful)
The age verification is to force those over the age threshold to be registered, and their social media etc submissions correlated to them.
If gov genuinely cared about kids, there are a lot of easy actions they could do before this.
Re:Of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed completely. If a parent helps the kid register, there shouldn't be any problem here. Working as intended as far as I'm concerned.
Re:Of course (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed completely. If a parent helps the kid register, there shouldn't be any problem here. Working as intended as far as I'm concerned.
A case could even be made these are the most responsible parents. They know what their kids are doing and are paying attention (as opposed to their kids doing it behind their back, or the parents simply not caring). Good on them.
And as a bonus, the kids are learning at a young age that government is frequently an impediment to life that needs to be worked around. That lesson will serve them well for life.
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This whole faffing around with scanned photos etc. will never work well and is a privacy/identity theft disaster in the making. The EU age verification app is better, since it doesn't transfer private information to the online service, other than the minimal "yes, I am at of least the required age". Pass tokens are not reused which prevents tracking and unused passes are renewed automatically every three months.
But to use it, you need to have set it up with a passport, electronic ID, bank account codes etc.
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You seem to be assuming everything age restricted is only available for adults. What about say content restricted for ages under 13?
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So maybe having a more advertised option about these things and then the stick of a fine to the parents if the kid is using a SIM not for kids it's going to cover most of the cases.
Of course nothing could stop a horny teen
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Telcos have offered for ages SIM with plans with a safe site firewall option
Wider deployment of TLS over the past 12 years, wider use of too-big-to-fail CDNs for DDoS mitigation (such as Cloudflare), and DNS over HTTPS have made firewalls operated by the ISP less effective by hiding from the ISP what websites are being visited.
GenHD. In 4D. (Score:2)
..Of course nothing could stop a horny teen to trade usb sticks with all the movie made by John Holmes with one with all the movies with Ilona Staller.
Holmes and Cicciolina? Seriously? You expect us to believe Gen HD would not be triggered with Visual Tourette’s over the thought of having to watch a shitty 480p VHS telescreen?
As if they’re gonna even be in the mood with anything less than 8K 4D porn running stank-ass plug-ins, within a decade.
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This.
Whenever a politician claims that something is "to protect the children", you can be 100%, absolutely certain that it is not about the children.
Forest for the trees (Score:2)
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It's not trivial to get credit cards in the UK. Say you were bankrupted even a long time ago. Or, I heard, say you never borrowed money or you never once paid late fees, surcharges, etc.
On the other hand, suppose you just stole somebody's wallet. Bet you could get that $1 charge through before they canceled it, and they wouldn't notice.
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It's not trivial to get credit cards in the UK. Say you were bankrupted even a long time ago. Or, I heard, say you never borrowed money or you never once paid late fees, surcharges, etc.
It's not particularly difficult either. Most people haven't declared bankruptcy, been involved in financial crime or other rare event that will make you ineligible for credit. Given the number of challenger banks out there if the high street banks turn you down you've got options and options for days. Hell, a lot of the challenger banks are skirting the rules on credit to get new customers, Starling for one offers a line of credit (overdraft facility, effectively the same thing) on almost every account, def
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If you meant a credit card is easily to legally obtain, I don't see how a kid with no credit can get a credit card.
If you're talking about tracking, mutually exclusive logic wins here: Identifying someone in order to prove their age is the exact opposite of n
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The trouble with using money to prove something is that not everyone has it. Certainly not a spare $500 to give to each age verification service. Which we then hope is returned in a timely manner and with interest.
The issue described in the article is very similar to alcohol and cigarette purchases. A very well established law protects children here. In theory it should not be possible for them to obtain either because it's illegal to sell to a child, and it's also illegal to purchase for a child (yes, I'm
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Cigarettes/alcohol purchases are not the same because the shop keeper is the gatekeeper, witnessing the transaction. When I was a teen employee, I couldn't sell alcohol to anyone, having to call an older employee to complete the sale. I see that one can buy such stuff on-line today, but, again, a credit card is required.
Re:Of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Healthcare, daycare, education, school breakfast and lunch. Shall I continue?
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Healthcare, daycare, education, school breakfast and lunch. Shall I continue?
Things that are literally all in place int he country under discussion...
Welcome to the Strait of Hormuz boy and girls (Score:3)
Never any socialist crap like daycare or free meals. But yes to conscripting them anytime from age 18-25.
Re:Of course (Score:5, Insightful)
I’m saying if the party of family values really wanted to do as they claim they wouldn’t be taking away things that actually help children.
Perfect example. https://www.edweek.org/policy-... [edweek.org]
Re: Of course (Score:2)
hes correct that its for tracking though
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If gov genuinely cared about kids, there are a lot of easy actions they could do before this.
Such as?
They could issue all children Social Security Numbers at birth.
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If gov genuinely cared about kids, there are a lot of easy actions they could do before this.
Such as?
They could issue all children Social Security Numbers at birth.
How would a US social security number help a UK child bypass age verification checks?
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If gov genuinely cared about kids, there are a lot of easy actions they could do before this.
Such as?
They could issue all children Social Security Numbers at birth.
How would a US social security number help a UK child bypass age verification checks?
If the solution were to actually work (phase 1 of Internet ID cards), then other governments would adopt it. Not shun it.
(Adopting the US social security system, merely means you recognize a value in a unique ID for every citizen. Don’t assume I’m suggesting others change their current system of senior pension.)
age is not maturity (Score:5, Funny)
Instead of assessing age, they should measure intellectual maturity. Only people who are sensible enough to shun social media should be allowed to join it.
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Indeed. But that would exclude a lot of voters.
Hm. Come to think of it, maybe we should put the a similar limit on voters? Like when you do not understand basics things, you cannot vote?
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A more effective measure would be to ban the people who do not understand basic things from running for office.
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Hehe, our formerly ruzzkie hasbara bro, emigrant from Prigozhin's old troll factory in Lakhta, St. Peterburg is at it again. This time from Haifa or Ramat Gan, I guess.
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Except a blockade is actually an act of war. Thus, hostilities have not ended, notwithstanding any "War Powers letter" and the President's claim to the contrary.
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Only people who are sensible enough to shun social media should be allowed to join it.
Especially slashdot!
Re: age is not maturity (Score:2)
Ooh, that excludes me then
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This is hilarious. We have the most heavy handed DEI administration in history. You name a cabinet member and I’ll tell you how they’re terribly disqualified for the job and were only hired on the basis of being a stooge. Is that not your definition of DEI?
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"Define social media" user generated media combined with direct contact via messages, chat, etc.
Software EULAs (Score:5, Interesting)
My son is trying to learn video game development, but you have to be 18 to download unreal engine, apparently, with no option to have a parent approve for you, d of course I helped him bypass it.
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Why not just use Unreal Engine? I'd do the same thing as this parent.
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Why not just use Unreal Engine?
Unreal Engine is proprietary software with a free replacement that is adequate for beginners. That's why.
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But knowing the industry-standard tools might make the education pay off a little better.
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FWIW it's not double the effort - game engines share similarities. Also, if Fortnite money dries up (and it is reducing), the "ever-changing" nature of our tech fields might hit UE as hard as it has been hitting Unity.
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While that's a good suggestion, learning something well that's in the minority means he may have to learn a second thing well if he wants to move on professionally--that's double the effort.
(a) it's definitely not double the effort. I haven't looked at them, but they're guaranteed to have a lot of conceptual similarities.
(b) The differences are likely to be highly educational. Seeing how different engines approach similar problems will help him to understand the range of possibilities. Even better would be to learn something of the underlying theory and maybe build a (toy) engine himself to really understand.
If you're a software developer, have you learned only a single language? Do yo
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Re: Software EULAs (Score:2)
UE "eons ahead" of Godot in what way? (Score:3)
How is Unreal Engine noticeably superior to Godot in a way that noticeably affects a beginner learning video game development for the first time?
Re: UE "eons ahead" of Godot in what way? (Score:2)
Enjoyment is an important part of learning. If one took brings more joy than the other while learning, then that's an argument in favour of that tool.
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By being an industry product that they could potentially take 1:1 experience with into a company without re-learning anything. Godot won't help your resume if you're applying for a job at an Unreal shop.
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Why not use Godot? Free, no authoritarian age verification, and should meet the goal just fine: to learn video game development.
There's a good reason to learn what is largely considered an industry standard tool rather than an industry edge case.
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Why not use Godot? Free, no authoritarian age verification, and should meet the goal just fine: to learn video game development.
Because he's 10 and he wanted to try it out and it has a nice GUI for a lot of the tasks that Godot doesn't. He also wants to check out the thing that he sees in the splash screen for the games he plays. I don't want to discourage his interest by redirecting to something he might not understand and can't find as many video tutorials on.
He's learning C# in parallel, but in the meantime, until he learns to code, you can write an entire game loop in Unreal without writing any code at all, and that means he c
They do not care (Score:5, Insightful)
It was never about age verification at all, so they do not care that the actual age checks fail.
The infrastructure, the global legal frameworks and policies are in place, that is all that mattered to them.
Re:They do not care (Score:5, Insightful)
there are two groups behind this: the government security people who just want the infrastructure in place for future crackdowns, and the neo-puritans who actually want all "objectionable" content gone forever and the people behind it stoned to death.
but yeah, neither group is ever going to be upfront about their goals
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Obviously. One step deeper into a surveillance state. They already have that police-state mostly in place.
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Who is "them"?
What you're hypothesising is basically a cross party conspiracy that they've somehow in a bout of absolutely unprecedented competence managed to keep secret. I don't buy it.
Predictive policing and religious conservatism (Score:2)
Who is "them"?
Anonymous Coward mentioned two categories of "them" [slashdot.org]. In case you don't see AC comments, I'll rephrase:
1. Government agencies interested in performing the same sort of predictive policing that led to Terrorism Information Awareness [wikipedia.org] of the early 2000s.
2. The sort of religious conservatives who ultimately want sex and violence purged from even media intended for grown-ups, as we saw with Collective Shout pressuring payment processors to pressure itch.io to remove erotic works [slashdot.org].
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Yeah but this speaks multiple countries.
What you're claiming is that somehow there's an international cross party conspiracy between American government agencies, American religious fundies and some much more left wing governments in Australia, France and the UK, and somehow no one has blabbed.
That's beyond credible in my book.
This is not too say I agree with what the outcome is, but it's just not a conspiracy. Thing is there are real problems with the tech giants and most populations don't really agree tha
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What you're claiming is that somehow there's an international cross party conspiracy between American government agencies, American religious fundies and some much more left wing governments in Australia, France and the UK, and somehow no one has blabbed.
There's no organized conspiracy as much as a less-formal worldwide shift in the Overton window toward more surveillance and less tolerance of erotica and nontraditional gender expression. Left-wing governments in other countries are just as eager to surveil their citizens. Look at how the People's Republic of China has expanded criminal background checks into a numeric "social credit score." The UK has its own share of conservatism; just look at Brexit and the "TERF Island" movement [wikipedia.org]. And as long as global e
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It's just theater (Score:2)
Its goal is not to do something effective to solve the problem addressed, but to pretend to do something to solve that problem. Pretty much like airport security. If they were to do something really effective to address the problems, in the case that occupies us here accessing many sites would become so difficult and inconvenient that most people would just stop doing so, with the concomitant revenue loss for those sites. In the airport security case passenger throughput would grind down to a treacle, which
Good start (Score:3)
Even if this crazy minimum-age shit weren't happening, it's generally a good idea to give incorrect information. Have one birthday for site x and a different birthday for site y. Use one of your parent's birthdays here, and a celebrity's birthday there. Pollute the public data and cause confusion.
If minimum age laws help to encourage data public data pollution (all of which arguably shouldn't be public at all anyway), then at least one good thing will have come out of it.
Let's get it up to 84% of parents helping their kids bypass age checks.
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I like using jan 1st as my birthday because it's usually easiest to enter on a pull down. Then I pick a year that puts me in a demographic where the ads aren't too annoying (in case they slip through my ad blocker).
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Even if this crazy minimum-age shit weren't happening, it's generally a good idea to give incorrect information. Have one birthday for site x and a different birthday for site y. Use one of your parent's birthdays here, and a celebrity's birthday there. Pollute the public data and cause confusion.
If I had mod points, you'd get them. Random sites don't need to know your birthday. Neither does GMail, nor facebook, nor any of the others. Using false info is the only way to protect yourself from the next inevitable data breach.
Can't help but wonder ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Can't help but wonder ... (Score:5, Funny)
Are you implying that parents are more qualified to determine what's best for their children than the government? Keep talking like that, and you'll end up in a reeducation camp.
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Are you implying that parents are more qualified to determine what's best for their children than the government? Keep talking like that, and you'll end up in a reeducation camp.
I'd say the government is far more capable of determining what's in the best interest of their children than the parents, but in its current state they don't leverage that capability or even have a desire to do so.
The chances that a parent has the same access to child psychologists, researchers, teacher's associations, and any other groups necessary to determine the child's best interests is laughable. The chances that a parent will base their decisions more from their own biases and ignorance than on caref
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government
capable
Sorry I stopped reading after that
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It's not 1994 and Rush Limbaugh is dead and this hasn't been funny or insightful for decades.
Re: Can't help but wonder ... (Score:2)
I guarantee that there is at least one thing that you trust "the government" to be capable of. Maybe it's invading other countries. Maybe it's arresting people. Maybe it's building schools. Maybe it's enforcing laws that you think are fair. Maybe it's making sure that roads are built. Maybe it's doing research in certain domains. Maybe it's protecting rich people because they earned it by working hard. I don't know about your values so I can't tell which one it is, but unless you have disapproved with every
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I stopped reading after "I'd say the government is far more capable of determining what's in the best interest of their children than the parents"
Governments get overthrown for shit like that, and rightly so. People like ranton should be first against the wall.
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The chances that a parent has the same access to child psychologists, researchers, teacher's associations, and any other groups necessary to determine the child's best interests is laughable.
OTOH, child-rearing is incredibly context-dependent. Every child is different and judgment needs to be applied to determine what is appropriate. The government certainly doesn't have the same awareness of the child's situation and needs as the parent. The government could, in theory, pay child psychologists, to gather information about the child, perform interviews and analyses and produce a recommendation/strategy, but that would be prohibitively expensive.
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The government could, in theory, pay child psychologists, to gather information about the child, perform interviews and analyses and produce a recommendation/strategy...
I cannot think of anything more dystopian.
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Because there are two groups of parents. Those that raise their kids well and are involved in their lives. The other group uses the screen as a baby sitter and don't really truly care what their kids are up to as long as they the parent can get their screen time with out being disturbed.
Unfortunately one of these two groups are becoming a larger group than the other.
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Well define problem. A parent who is active and supervising a tool not intended for people of a certain age is one thing. An absent parent bypassing checks to get kids to stop nagging them only to leave them exposed to something we have identified as not suitable for them is quite another.
Replace the title: 16% of parents help their children get drunk. 16% of parents help their children smoke cigarettes. 16% of parents help their children access pornography. 16% of parents help their children gamble. In thi
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If more parents taught their children responsible drinking habits, we'd have fewer alcohol related problems with the 21-25 crowd. My mom let me have a wine cooler or blended mudslide or grasshopper (yum, mint) about the age of 12. I could only have one and of course I couldn't go anywhere afterward. We never invited friends over to drink or stupid shit like that either.
I never got drunk until I was 21 and partying with friends and that was still in my own apartment and not out in some random dive.
Turns out,
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If more parents taught their children responsible drinking habits, we'd have fewer alcohol related problems with the 21-25 crowd.
Does a parent who helps their kid buy alcohol represent a responsible parent teaching a child, or an irresponsible parent just getting their kid drunk.
I agree with you for the record, but my fundamental point was that parenting may or may not be better for the child than government regulation. Ultimately it comes down to how good the parent is, there's no universal answer.
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"Why wouldn't we want our kid to chat with anonymous adults on the internet? My kids are mature enough for that, and that probably isn't the same excuse the diddlers use."
I would do it (Score:2)
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And another 50% won't admit they did it (Score:2)
You know how many parents will jump through hoops just to get their kids to stop badgering them about what they want? Yeah, I don't believe the 16% number.
Won't somebody please think of the children? (Score:2)
Think of how much data they represent to our marketing partners!
I should point out (Score:2)
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What are you talking about? The current age restriction systems in place for alcohol and tobacco--whereby an apathetic cashier checks a tiny, outdated photo of you--works perfectly. It's 100% effective at being an age restriction system. What are you suggesting, we all have chips implanted at birth?
I assume this is how companies want it to work (Score:2)
Age checks turn access into a game (Score:2)
Kids like games and are good at finding workarounds for silly rules.
Meanwhile, clueless politicians live in a fantasy world where they believe they can eliminate anything they don't like by passing a law.
If this were about protecting kids (Score:2)
Then parents would face the death penalty for letting their poor innocent children access the infinite horrors of social media.
I am one of those parents (Score:2)
Did it for Facebook primarily, was the preferred social media of the time.
The caveat we gave the kids was that before adding a single friend, they added both parents, and their grandparents.
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shure (Score:2)
Social Media is a toxic cesspit (Score:2)
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Hmm... (Score:2)
49% of the children surveyed said they'd still encountered harmful content, according to the online safety activists. The group called the figure "unacceptable," and complained that age verification measures "are often ineffective in practice or easy to bypass."
Sounds like the survey wording was biased. Since those children have to navigate to websites, and often/usually click "I'm over 18", to view that content, I imagine these children had at least some idea as to what they were doing, so don't know how the content would be classified as "harmful" - except by other people wanting to restrict that content. I can see labeling stuff like that "inappropriate" for those underage, but those kids probably didn't get there by chance.
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Hillary Ben Rodham (Score:2)
Credit rating databases now cover multiple generations. When enrolling, ask for the father's name or mother's name and do some online verification (Facebook) and some math.
A 15-year old Hillary Clinton would be Hillary Rodham.
fixed title (Score:2)
16% of parents just want screens to keep raising their children.
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I can only hope this was pure sarcasm, since anyone suggesting to arrest parents as a solution is going to be assumed to be feeding their own prison and orphanage investments.
Arrest records, job loss, credit score impact, bankruptcy, and potential child separation. All, for what again?
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All, for what again?
While what you replied to might well be sarcasm, don't believe for a second that criminalizing this behavior isn't part of the plan. Even if you accept that the number reported are not inflated, the mere fact that the questions are being asked suggests that somebody is trying to justify something.
Those kids have to learn that the computer is their friend, er, that the government knows best for all things for all people. Or else.
Utah will (Score:2)
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What did you get in return for giving up basically all of your genitals by getting them cut off?
Reduced mental workload in having to put on a show of meeting society's behavior expectations for one's assigned gender all the time.