Summary
The rise of age verification laws seek to prevent kids from entering websites they shouldn’t use, but it will also inconvenience a lot of fully-grown users trying to use the internet normally. Google is taking a step forward and will attempt to guess the age of its users—and the best part, it’s also applying to the US as well, even as there’s no federal age verification law just yet.
Google rolling out a new system designed to identify and apply restrictions to accounts it believes belong to individuals under the age of 18. Initially, it will affect what Google describes as a “small set” of users, but if this testing goes well, it will probably eventually apply to all users down the road. The system will not rely on people self-reporting their age (so it will be ignoring the age you put down when you signed up for a Google account—kids lie in those all the time) but will instead infer it by analyzing their activity across Google’s platforms. Indicators will include a user’s search history and the types of videos they watch on YouTube, and there might be other factors Google is not disclosing yet.
If the AI system determines that a user is likely a minor, a series of default restrictions will be automatically applied to the account. These are the same restrictions an account would have if a minor identified itself properly as a minor at the time of signing up for an account. On YouTube, the platform will enable features like bedtime reminders and will limit content recommendations. For Google Maps, the “Timeline” feature, which logs your location history, will be disabled. Personalized advertising will be turned off for these users, and access to mature and adult-rated applications on the Google Play Store will be blocked.
We just wrote aboutYouTube doing the exact same thing, but Google published a separate announcement from YouTube’s. So this helps to clarify that it won’t affect just YouTube users, but this will be in place throughout the entirety of the Google ecosystem. AI can, and often does, make incorrect judgments. So Google has an appeals process in place for this. Users who are wrongly classified as underage (maybe the AI misunderstood some signals or maybe you handed your phone to a kid and they played Baby Shark 30 times in a row) will have the option to verify their correct age. This can be done by submitting a photograph of a government-issued ID or by providing a selfie for verification purposes.
Hopefully, this won’t make a ton of mistakes, but I’m sadly not too hopeful.
