Australia’s Age Verification So Bad, a Golden Retriever Fooled It

Australia’s social media ban for under 16s is continuing to fail in spectacular fashion, serving as a warning for others.

While I did expect that Australia’s age verification laws would fail in pretty spectacular fashion, I didn’t expect things to fail this badly.

Throughout the age verification debate, apologists kept insisting that “industry standard” age verification technology would be used. It would use artificial intelligence (AI) and facial recognition technology to ensure that it would get the job done right. It’s a claim so laughable, only the technologically ignorant and the people paid off to push this nonsense could believe it. This especially given the many failings of both AI and facial recognition technology.

The failings of the technology being tapped for these impossible tasks are, of course, well documented. There have been studies pointing out that age verification is a failed concept. Moreover, research from Australia also confirmed that facial recognition technology is an abysmal failure when trying to figure out people’s ages. Of course, such pushes for age verification are by no means evidence based, but rather, based on cult-like beliefs where this magical unicorn technology totally exists and all that is needed is the laws to ensure it gets used. All evidence to the contrary must be rejected outright no matter what.

As if to prove the research surrounding the technology correct, failures in the technology have already been documented with under age people passing the so-called “industry standard” facial recognition checks. All the AI and all the facial recognition couldn’t keep under 16s from accessing social media again.

The real question is, what level of sophistication is needed to fool the age checks? I mean, we know that they can be fooled with video game characters, fake IDs, going to non-compliant websites, VPNs, and even the comment sections of old podcasts, but as it turns out, you don’t necessarily even need an ultra realistic video game character in photo mode to fool the age checks.

As it turns out, a random picture of a golden retriever can accomplish the task of fooling the age checks as well. From Techdirt:

Kids are claiming that the whole thing is frustrating… while also totally pointless:

Rima, 14, says she and her friends are “pretty frustrated at first” by the ban and they also don’t think it will work.

“The verification techniques are not very accurate, and there are no penalties enforced on teenagers that get past the ban,” she says, adding that she has already verified herself on Snapchat and also made some new accounts.

She says social media is “not that important” to her but she does use it for “advice, studying and talking to my friends, which is quite integral to my everyday life”.

And the lesson kids are taking from this: the adults are condescending and out of touch with the kids today.

She’s against the ban, saying: “From my perspective, it’s kind of insulting to think that they don’t trust me with the internet.”

And, of course, it’s not working. Kids are always going to figure out ways to get around the ban:

It took 13-year-old Isobel less than five minutes to outsmart Australia’s “world-leading” social media ban for children.

A notification from Snapchat, one of the ten platforms affected, had lit up her screen, warning she’d be booted off when the law kicked in this week – if she couldn’t prove she was over 16.

“I got a photo of my mum, and I stuck it in front of the camera and it just let me through. It said thanks for verifying your age,” Isobel claims. “I’ve heard someone used Beyoncé’s face,” she adds.

“I texted her,” she gestures to her mum Mel, “and I was like, ‘Hey Mummy, I got past the social media ban’ and she was just like, ‘Oh, you monkey’.”

Or how about this “hack”:

Either way, Adams and her friends don’t plan to go quietly. When one app asked them to submit a selfie for an age verification system, they used a photo of a golden retriever they found on Google.

It worked, she said.

Somehow, I don’t think the golden retriever story is going to make its way to age verification company press releases any time soon. Seriously, though, this is just plain humiliating on the part of age verification apologists and the companies that back them.

At any rate, this story shows, yet again, that the experts were right, the researchers were right, and people who were skeptical about the technology were right. Current age verification technology simply is not up to the task. They weren’t in 2023 when this was really gaining traction and, despite what the apologists would say, precious little has changed since then that even comes close to moving the needle in terms of the readiness of the technology. Moreover, you can’t simply legislate magical technology into existence, expecting other people to simply nerd harder to magically make it all happen. All you are doing is setting the stage for a giant mess in the end and these stories coming out today are clearly demonstrating that.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.