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Show HN: Voice Age Verification (agewarden.ai)

8 points by wentw0rth ↗ HN
I miss the old web. As a kid I could type in "a/s/l" in AOL messenger and chat with someone my own age, without worrying about the dangers that lurk on the web today.

After seeing what happened to Omegle, a question stuck: is there a simple way to do age verification that both keeps people safe and doesn't contribute to a surveillance state?

After a year of hard work, that question resulted in AGEWARDEN. Each part of the service puts people first. No tracking, nothing stored (it's more difficult these days to NOT collect data :smh:).

Please give it a try if you have a moment https://agewarden.ai/demo. Feedback is very much welcomed.

GG

7 comments

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Tiberium
I'll be honest: I don't have experience with audio stuff/age verification, but wouldn't it be far easier to bypass this than even face (live video) verification, let alone full KYC with ID? At that point it's not that much better than a "I'm over 18" button, or am I missing something?

EDIT: The website itself partially answers my question:

> Self-declaration, the "I am over 18" checkbox, is explicitly prohibited by every major regulator in the UK, EU, and Australia.

But then:

> Facial scanning works, but it builds infrastructure that outlasts the check. A system that estimates your age today can identify you tomorrow. Platforms that rolled it out met immediate backlash and reversals. Users do not trust platforms with their face.

How would we trust your platform to not store voice fingerprints, then?

(On a side note, all descriptions all LLM-written, but that's expected in 2026)

cwmma
I (41 man with very deep voice) told it in a higher then normal voice that I was a kid, and it said I was under 18. I suspect if I was a kid that used a deep voice to say that I was an adult it would also fool it.

No offense but this is probably worthless is an adversarial environment.

dev213
at first I was a bit shocked at the price of $0.10/verification (having never implemented KYC before). But after looking it up, more traditional KYC/age verification services cost up to a couple euros per scan which is crazy to me. Never thought about the cost of such systems before.
lifeisgood99
ASL is literally a meme that everyone is an old male predator on the internet.
noodlesUK
I think that if we are considering technical solutions to the social problems here, the answer is well understood by professionals working in age/ID verification. You allow someone to perform a more thorough check verifying your age and identity (such as the government or your smartphone vendor), and then you use a privacy preserving protocol to provide a proof of whatever attribute (such as age) you are trying to verify in the absence of the remaining personal data. This can be as simple as exposing a "is age over {16, 18, 19, 21, 25}" api in the OS or browser, or as complex as a ZKP as needed. What doesn't work is requiring each service to independently perform verification which leads to a massive expansion in the proliferation of personal data and is incompatible with the modern approaches to data protection.

This is a solution that hopefully will cease to be relevant as soon as the remaining infrastructure is finished.

Tiberium
(Not a lawyer, not an expert, just my possibly ignorant/wrong comment)

I checked around a bit more, and this seems to directly contradict the HN title:

https://agewarden.ai/customer-agreement

> AGEWARDEN is an age estimation tool. It does not verify identity and does not guarantee 100% accuracy. Customer is responsible for determining whether AGEWARDEN satisfies the legal requirements applicable to its business and jurisdiction.

EPWN3D
How do you distinguish between a live person and a high-fidelity recording?