The Issue with Age Verification
Graphic by Emma Novy
Earlier this week, I got an email from Google saying “Google couldn’t confirm you’re an adult, so some account settings have been changed,” which is strange considering I’m twenty years old. The only way to ensure that I wasn’t going to be locked out of my account was to verify my age via either a credit card, an ID, a selfie, or a service called MyVerify. So obviously I opted for the mysterious MyVerify and let them work their magic. After somehow verifying that yes, the account that’s been open for almost a decade is an adult, they switched my account’s settings back to normal.
Recently, there’s been a lot of talk online about the obvious increase in age verifications on websites that never used to have it before. Websites like YouTube, Spotify, and apparently Gmail are beginning to require users to upload their personal information because their AI has detected that the user is under eighteen. However, this detector is often wrong, forcing users on these sites to unnecessarily hand over their information or risk losing their account.
These policies are contradictory to what we all learned about the internet growing up. Every year, there would be a school-wide assembly about internet safety where they emphasized the importance of never sharing any personal information online. That sentiment couldn’t be any truer than it is today. Every year without fail, news breaks of a massive data breach affecting millions of people. With companies asking for more and more of your data just to create an account, the outcomes of those inevitable data breaches will be much more devastating.
The main argument for this increase in age verification (as well as the increase in data collection) is protecting children on the internet. Everyone that had unrestricted access to the internet as a kid can agree that we should be striving for a safer internet. And while it’s important that we prevent children from being exposed to gore and more adult content, it’s also important that we don’t bar adults from being able to access online resources in the process. If companies were truly just trying to protect children, they would promote products like YouTube Kids: a website that parents can trust is safe and, on the rare occasion that their kid isn’t just watching brainrot, educational.
I know that these days, it seems like companies already have all the data they want, so what’s the harm in giving them one more thing? But it’s the principle behind it. You shouldn’t have to give away your personal information just to watch a video debunking the lore of the Barbie movies. You should be able to watch it in complete anonymity, without fear that your biometrics are being sold to anyone with a big enough bank account. So when you’re told to submit this information, don’t hand it over blindly. Think critically about where that information is going to end up the next time a data breach happens (spoiler alert: it’s going to be everywhere).