Age Verification

July 25th 2025, the On-Line Safety Act 2023 introduced new provisions to prevent children from accessing "primary priority content that is harmful to children".

Interestingly the emphasis seems to be placed on the restriction of pornography to minors. I find this strange as I thought that the main problem was the use of Social Media by the younger generation where notions of self abuse, narcissism, lack of respect for the opposite sex and misinformation was the issue.

I can't really see the connection between images and videos of the sexual act are encouragements for self-harm. Sure, there are statistics that may indicate a connection and violence in any form is not good, but in my experience the depiction of violent acts seem to pervade because representations of private parts have been banned.

Implemenation

As I say the emphasis seems to be targeted in the wrong direction and the use of Social Media needs to be controlled.

My interest is this subject is mainly about how this is supposed to be implemented. Issues regarding privacy seem to be some of the main problems. Putting pornography aside for the minute, do users want to share more personal information with platforms that have clearly shown a track record of using that information for their own advancement. Do we really trust the Social Media companies with any more information than we have freely submitted to them in the past?

The Independent said about how age verification might be implemented:

Its suggestions include checking through banking details or through phone networks, matching with a photo ID, or devoted online identity services. It also made clear that existing checks such as simply asking visitors to declare their own age will not be allowed.

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Proposed Solutions

The Wikipedia page on Age Verification details the various methods proposed globally to implement verification.

These solutions include:

Birth Date - question is how? - Just asking is not enough
Credit card verification - what if you don't want to release this?
Federated identification - Aylo - needs further expansion on what this means - PornHub and others use this????
Face recognition - compares individuals with official identification photos - so you need to upload a photo
Facial age estimation - again AI and compares image to a "selfie"
Zero-knowledge proof - Uploading your actual ID such as a passport
Knowledge - asking questions that young person would not know the answer
By analysing hand movements - This is an Australian one - https://borderage.com/ - The Ultimate Solution For Age Assurance Anonymous, Reliable, Fast.

Any system that uses facial recognition is doomed as surely many others have noted that most laptops have a physical means to cover the webcam. This has largely been the result of the paranoia of those that are convinced that bad agents can take control of your webcam and expose you to extortion.

Credit Card Information

Unless credit cards are going to be issued with photos on them this will not work and there is no gaurentee that I minor is not using the card of a parent or older sibling.

BorderAge

This is an interesting solution that the Aussies are looking at. Looking at Needemand's website it is not clear on how this is supposed to work. The theory is that the folks at Needemand have determined a link between a persons age and their hand movements. This has yet to be independantly proven.

The Crikey website, another from Australia, sounds a little sceptical. This was from an article posted in Feb 2025.

In an interview with Borderage's chief business officer Jean-Michel Polit:

Polit told Crikey that the seven-year-old company came up with its hand movement model, called BorderAge, after its founder “stumbled” upon medical research showing the link between age and hand movements.

The company claims that it has trained machine learning algorithms on footage capturing tens of thousands of sets of peoples’ hand movements collected since 2017. Polit says that the technology doesn’t use appearance — so things like wrinkles, size, tattoos or jewelry aren’t used as clues — but only the actual movements of the user as captured in the video. BorderAge has been designed to work using less than 30 seconds footage from a smartphone camera.

If the BorderAge solution works it would be perfect for the UK as it claims to by over 90% acccrate and no personal information is exposed. The question is: Does it work?

The author of this website is also highly sceptical that BirderAge have a working solution for Age Recognition. However, this may not matter if they can convince enough comapanies and governments that it does work. The fact that personal information is not exposed could be the key feature that makes it acceptable across the board. The fact that the watchers of porn will have their webcams obscured is just a minor technicality.

Andrew Tate

In my opinion it is the antics of those like Andrew Tate that deserve the emphasis on what Internet users have access to or not.

BiometricUpdate.com

I was a little suspicious of their website as it was very slow. I cannot see why this is the case as they are headquartered in Toronto, Ontario (admittedly about the old masonic temple on Yonge Street opposite the Canadian Tire).

Age Verification

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