By Evan Davis - 17 Dec 25 2:37 PM
The Online Safety Act was enacted earlier this year and has now led to the introduction of facial recognition age estimation technology across various platforms - amongst other age verification measures.
However, it's quite clear already that this system is, quite frankly, shambolic. There are already mass reports of children using still photographs of relatives or even using printouts of memes and other still images to bypass the technology and get access to adult-restricted content. The simple reality is that younger generations are infinitely more technologically skilled than their older counterparts - I myself am 28 and used to think I had a very good grasp of techie-stuff, but children nowadays are really putting me to shame with the knowledge they're acquiring!
The concerns are going to (and already have started) to move into the field of AI, which will be a significantly harder challenge to navigate in terms of regulation and age restrictions - but make no mistake, the Online Safety Act has done nothing to protect children online because children and teenagers are simply so much more technologically advanced than even the engineers building these so-called tamper-proof systems.
This is chilling because if the OSA isn't actually making children safer, then we're all being forced to give away more of our privacy and personal information essentially for no meaningful purpose - I recently spent 10 minutes trying to use the age verification tool to access an adult-restricted website, to no avail - getting only a message that I couldn't be verified (28 year old man with a full beard!) - my 17 year old niece in the meantime managed to bypass all of the controls on her social media by verifying herself as above the age of 18 using a picture of a famous celebrity. Ridiculous.
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By khafka - 17 Dec 25 11:15 PM
+xThe Online Safety Act was enacted earlier this year and has now led to the introduction of facial recognition age estimation technology across various platforms - amongst other age verification measures. However, it's quite clear already that this system is, quite frankly, shambolic. There are already mass reports of children using still photographs of relatives or even using printouts of memes and other still images to bypass the technology and get access to adult-restricted content. The simple reality is that younger generations are infinitely more technologically skilled than their older counterparts - I myself am 28 and used to think I had a very good grasp of techie-stuff, but children nowadays are really putting me to shame with the knowledge they're acquiring! The concerns are going to (and already have started) to move into the field of AI, which will be a significantly harder challenge to navigate in terms of regulation and age restrictions - but make no mistake, the Online Safety Act has done nothing to protect children online because children and teenagers are simply so much more technologically advanced than even the engineers building these so-called tamper-proof systems. This is chilling because if the OSA isn't actually making children safer, then we're all being forced to give away more of our privacy and personal information essentially for no meaningful purpose - I recently spent 10 minutes trying to use the age verification tool to access an adult-restricted website, to no avail - getting only a message that I couldn't be verified (28 year old man with a full beard!) - my 17 year old niece in the meantime managed to bypass all of the controls on her social media by verifying herself as above the age of 18 using a picture of a famous celebrity. Ridiculous.
I knew it'd be a complete farce from the start, especially with technology the way it is these days in terms of social media/WhatsApp etc. if one kid found out how to bypass any block then the rest of their school would know by lunchtime.
When I was in school MySpace stuff and didn't exist but the internet was still relatively locked down but even then. We found ways around it within like 5 minutes.
While kids absolutely have easier access to pornography than they did in my day I feel it should be used as more of a learning/teaching experience. Let them know the stuff the they're seeing isn't the reality of sex and work it in with consent and stuff. Hell, you could even start bundling it in with sex education in schools.
You'll never stop it, the horse has thoroughly bolted and been turned into Tesco's burgers at this point. I say salvage what we can and use it as an education tool. That's not to say parents shouldn't still try and limit their child's potential access to porn, they should! But the children will always find a way and when that comes I feel the education route is better.
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By punter99 - 7 Dec 23 11:25 AM
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67615719
One of the most read stories on the BBC website, was this one about the proposed use of facial recognition software for porn sites. At the moment its only a recommendation by Ofcom and it won't happen until at least 2025, if it happens at all, but it does show where things are going.
If anyone thinks that this technology is still in development, or that it has never been used in a real world environment, then they really ought to look at what is going on in China, where facial recognition software is already being used to limit childrens access to online gaming.
The exact same thing is being suggested by Ofcom, for restricting childrens access to porn here in the UK, but once the principle is established, then it could easily be extended to online gaming, or anything that people do on the net. Porn is just the guinea pig that will be used to test it out.
We've been here before of course. A few years back, the govt said that people would need to gve their credit card details in order to access porn, but they later dropped that idea, mainly because of the privacy issues and it had limitations, because a child could still gain access by using their parents credit card, so it wasnt foolproof.
This facial recognition tech is more sophisticated, and it can determine if a child is using an adults id, although the privacy issues remain. Everyone would need to have a digital id document of some sort to confirm their age and that would need to be stored online somewhere, which effectively means id cards for all British citizens including children would be required and there will be objections to that from civil liberties groups.
There are also cost implications for the porn sites themselves. Only the large ones will be able to afford this technology, so I expect the smaller ones will simply withdraw from the UK and block UK users from accessing their sites, because thats cheaper than complying with the ofcom rules.
So in future, porn will most likely only be accessible through vpns, because you can pretend that you are in a different country, but then the govt might require you to have your face scanned before you can use your vpn. At some point, we will get to a stage where this is required for everything that we do and if you look at online banking and how that is no longer possible anymore, without you also having a phone to receive your access codes, then its probably going to be the banks that will introduce facial recognition tech first, even before the porn sites do.
All in all, I think it spells the end for anonymous internet access and the introduction of Chinese style state surveillance, within maybe ten years from now.
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