Drawing Beards: How UK Kids Bypass New Online Age Gates

We're all worried (at least, most of us are) about what our kids and grandkids are listening to and watching online. My kids are all grown long since and can watch whatever they like; two of my six grandkids are also adults now. But we still have little ones in the family, they have their tablets to watch dinosaur videos, baby ducks, and monster trucks on. The question is, what else are they watching?

To that end, some jurisdictions are requiring websites with adult content to verify the age of a viewer before allowing them to proceed. Seems a good idea on the surface, but when they consist of "click this box if you're 18 or over" or "enter your date of birth", well, those are pretty much the definition of futile. Now, some sites are using facial recognition tools to judge the age of a user, but some kids in the United Kingdom, as reported recently, have found those pretty easy to spoof, too.

Children in the United Kingdom are thwarting online age verification systems by drawing facial hair on themselves to appear older, multiple news outlets report.
A report from a U.K.-based nonprofit focused on online child safety found that nearly a third of kids admitted to bypassing age checks within just a two-month period.
A parent reported that their 12-year-old used an eyebrow pencil to draw a moustache and was verified as 15.
Some kids are using fake birth dates, someone else’s login, a parent’s or sibling’s device, or another person’s ID. Others are using videos or pictures of video game characters to fool facial recognition tools.
Children said they bypassed age checks in order to access social media platforms they were not old enough to use, or to join an online game or gaming community.

The fake birth dates, that's easy enough, as we already discussed. As far as another person's login or ID, that's hardly a new trick; when I was a kid, I knew several guys who resembled an older brother closely enough to "borrow" his ID and use it to buy beer, which they resold at a profit to the rest of us who weren't lucky enough to have an older brother that we looked enough like.

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But some of the other methods, those are a little more creative. Drawing on facial hair, though? That's got to be some facial recognition in serious need of reworking, if a prepubescent kid can scratch some lines with his mom's eyeliner on his beardless mug and access... well, whatever it was he wants to access. (I think we have a few pretty good ideas.)

So, what's the answer? Here's the answer, and I'm going to tell you: Parenting. Tech is all nice and good, including attempts at age-verification measures. But as these British kids, along with plenty of their American counterparts, have shown, is that bright, mischievous young minds always have and always will find a way to spoof those technical marvels, and that it's really not even all that hard. But it's a lot harder to spoof an attentive parent. Set your kid's parental controls on their device. More importantly, keep an eye on them. Know what they are watching. You won't catch everything. That's just not possible. But knowing that Mom and Dad are involved, engaged, and paying attention will do more than anything else to make a kid think twice before he taps in the URL for the NC-17 version of OnlyFans.

Editor's Note: President Trump is fighting to ensure America's kids get the education they deserve.

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