Google Demanded My Drivers Lic Before Letting Me Read an Article
ME: Yesterday I tried to read an article and google blocked me demanding I upload my driver’s license, passport, or other information to prove my age (I declined). What was that all about?
GoogleAI: The prompt for age verification is due to Google's new system, which uses AI to estimate users' ages to comply with a global push for online age-verification laws. This system may flag adult users as minors, restricting access to certain content until their age is confirmed with a government ID, credit card, or a selfie.
How Google's AI age verification works
• AI age estimation: Google's system analyzes user activity, such as search history and YouTube viewing habits, to estimate a user's age.
• Widespread enforcement: While initially affecting only a "small set" of users, this system is now rolling out more widely and affecting multiple Google services, including Search, YouTube, and the Google Play Store.
• Restricted content: When the AI flags an account as potentially belonging to someone underage, it applies the same restrictions as if the user had self-identified as a minor. This includes turning on SafeSearch and restricting access to mature content.
• Incorrect flagging: The system is not foolproof and has been known to incorrectly flag adult users, causing them to be locked out of content they previously accessed without issue.
Your options for age verification If your account was incorrectly flagged, you can verify your age using one of Google's approved methods:
• Government ID: Upload a photo of a government-issued ID, like a driver's license or passport. Google states it stores these documents securely and deletes them after your age has been successfully verified.
• Credit card: Provide your credit card details to confirm your age. Any authorization is temporary and will be fully refunded.
• Selfie: Use a selfie-based verification service.
Privacy concerns and context
For users who are hesitant to provide private documents to a large tech company, this situation presents a privacy conflict. While it's Google's official process, providing personal information is a risk many users are unwilling to take.
This initiative is driven by pressure from lawmakers in various countries, including the U.S. and U.K., who are pushing for stricter age-verification measures to protect minors online. However, this is also a highly debated issue, with concerns raised about the impact on adult users' privacy and freedom of access to information.
22 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 45.3 ms ] threadI posted because of the very obvious effort to remove anonymity from the internet. BTW, my post is a copy of my inquiry to Google AI and the AI response.
By way of context of the request:
I am from the USA. I do not recall the article. I didn't read it because there was no way I was going to provide the authentication Google demanded. I was using Chrome as the browser at the time. I was also logged into my Chrome account. I am 73 years old btw.
I found it interesting that a selfie was ok. There have been sites for several years now that will generate faces of imaginary people. I wonder if that will work.
Mine goes back to the Gmail invite days, around 20 years ago. I’m wondering if account age alone would prove I’m now over 18. Of course, I have YouTube Premium, so they already have my credit card. I can’t imagine uploading my ID. That’s a bridge too far.
I take the same approach with aggressive paywalls. Decline and move on.
No. Not gonna happen.
It's annoying how much lately they pretend this isn't true with this age gating on YouTube and such. But it's literally their job to identify you personally and put you into that age bucket.
So will a bigger chunk of the web now become inaccessible to incognito mode or user agents browsing without recognized provenance?
The Internet used to be a domain of handles and alter-egos. Anonymity was cherished because it protected us from (then) mostly imaginary evils. Now that those evils exist, are legion, and are being traded on NASDAQ, we are teaching children to surrender their anonymity and live without masks in a digital panopticon.
We need to revive old-school handles for children and teach them the value of anonymity.
We're well into the second generation of kids raised to see a signup screen and say "Yes, I'm over 13/18/21/whatever" to get to content, mixed with a huge cohort of "the entire family is using one computer and shared account" users that will garble any sort of profile-based analysis, any estimates they're doing are shooting a blunderbuss in the dark. I can imagine a school-child urban legend mindset of "log into a new account and browse irs.gov for a few hours to make sure it thinks you are an adult" developing.
This is so clearly an industry in a "if we try to do something ourselves, we can hopefully cut off pressure towards something legally binding" panic (see video game ratings), but if they're not actually blocking effectively, you'd think that would be very interesting news to the people arguing for blocking.
If the rest of the world watches the UK step into shit and still say "we still want to get ourselves some of that", I'd much rather it be done by a government than a bunch of private companies. A government service has no commercial motive to deliver anything but the most minimal "this user has verified age 18+" responses, and has a legal responsibility to service all comers.
Leaving it to the private sector creates an splash damage scenario: spinning up or licensing a compliance service is couch-cushion change for the Facebooks and Googles of the world, but breaks a million independent small players. We've already seen this in the UK with forums closing rather than trying to comply. And you know the firms that offer ID verification aren't going to let all that juicy PII go to waste and delete it.