Some age verification systems are no match for enterprising children, who have found that drawing on a fake mustache with a makeup pencil is enough to skirt the blocks of adult websites.
U.K.-based nonprofit Internet Matters surveyed a thousand children about age verification checks online, and about half said that age checks were easy to bypass.
“Children demonstrated a clear awareness of how to bypass age checks, either through their own experiences or by hearing about methods from others,” the report says.
“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,” it added.
Age verification laws continue to roll out around the world, often under the guise of online child safety, but whereby adults are required to prove their age, typically by uploading a copy of their driver’s license or passport to a third-party company before being allowed into an adult website. Critics say these laws allow the creation of databases that can be hacked or leaked, and threaten the open and decentralized internet.
Half of all U.S. states have some form of age-checking law in place, as does the United Kingdom, which spurred much of the global effort.
As such, companies like Apple have rolled out software updates to device owners to comply with the growing number of age-checking laws. Web companies like Reddit and Meta are using a mix of requiring users to upload their government-issued documents and creepy guesswork that involves algorithmically guessing a person’s age. Others, like Discord, have delayed their rollouts amid user backlash and security issues.
This is not the first known bypass that kids have figured out in recent months since the rise in rollouts of age verification checks. Some kids have found that pointing their webcam at adult-looking characters in video games also worked, or in other cases, simply pulling obscure or funny faces was enough to skirt the checks altogether.
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Zack Whittaker is the security editor at TechCrunch. He also authors the weekly cybersecurity newsletter, this week in security.
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