LONDON: A British online safety monitoring organisation has found that children are able to slip by proof-of-age verification on some platforms by pulling faces or even scribbling moustaches on themselves.
Around half the controls covered in the survey were easy to get around, according to Internet Matters, which found that children showed a "clear awareness of how to bypass age checks, either through their own experiences or by hearing about methods from others.”
"One technique brought up was children drawing facial hair on themselves so that the tools verifying them would think they were older, which was reported as working in multiple instances,” the organisation pointed out, after surveying around 2,000 children and parents.
Online age verification, still relatively new, has been in the spotlight since the start of the year, when Australia's ban on under-16s on social media kicked off a global debate on age limits online. Instagram allows a "video selfie" as one of the ways to verify age.
The survey found that safety checks are increasingly common across the internet, with 53% of children reporting that they had been "recently” required to complete an age verification check, with almost 90% in turn asked to go through a "facial age estimation” process – which most found to be "easy” to complete.
"Awareness of how to bypass age checks is widespread,” Internet Matters revealed, with only 17% of children claiming to find it difficult to bypass the measures.
"Methods discussed include using a fake birthday, a virtual private network or submitting a video of another person’s face, or even a character, to trick platforms into estimating an older age,” the online safety organisation said.
"Children continue to encounter harmful content at concerning rates, and age checks to manage their experiences online – while widespread – are often seen as easy to circumvent,” said chief executive Rachel Huggins. – dpa
