WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Washington Post published an in-depth article on Wednesday surveying the age assurance industry, including a discussion of its role during the debate around anti-porn age verification legislation in U.S. states and other countries.
The article, written by the Post’s Drew Harwell, covers both the growth of the industry in recent years, and also concerns about data privacy, particularly of minors.
According to the Post, “With promises of protecting children, a little-known group of companies in an experimental corner of the tech industry known as ‘age assurance’ has begun engaging in a massive collection of faces, opening the door to privacy risks for anyone who uses the web.”
Harwell begins and ends his article describing how British age assurance solution provider Yoti “developed an AI tool that could estimate a person’s age by analyzing their facial patterns and contours” and then partnered with South African schools to scan children’s faces in exchange for a small donation to a safety charity.
“Riaan van der Bergh recalled dutifully scanning his daughter and son, ages 11 and 10, in their suburban Johannesburg living room one afternoon, telling them the technology could help keep kids safe on a perilous web,” Harwell writes. “But other parents, he said, hated the idea with an ‘extreme passionate fear.’ The skepticism was ‘overwhelming’ especially from the moms.”
The Post called Yoti, Incode and VerifyMyAge “digital gatekeepers,” which are increasingly partnering with governments and large social networks, such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
“OpenAI uses them for its ChatGPT chatbot,” Harwell writes. “So, too, do a number of online gaming and adult-content sites, including Pornhub and OnlyFans.”
Incode’s Senior Director of Strategy Fernanda Sottila told the Post that her company “internally tracks state bills and contact local officials to ‘understand where our tech fits in.’”
The article also pointed out issues around false results, margins of error and other ways in which the age verification solutions may end up preventing adults from accessing legal content.
Harwell also explains that Louisiana “became a national model for government age-verification demands when it passed a law in 2022 requiring age checks for any website deemed ‘harmful to minors’ or designed to ‘pander to the prurient interest.’ Eighteen states have since followed, including Tennessee, whose law requires an age check every 60 minutes a user is on the site, for extra monitoring. Alabama’s law demands explicit sites warn visitors that porn ‘desensitizes brain reward circuits’ and ‘increases the demand’ for CSAM’ (An appeals court struck down a similar warning in a Texas law, calling it unscientific and unconstitutional.)”
Aylo’s Sarah Bain told the Post that these laws did not cause people to stop looking for porn.
“They just migrated to darker corners of the internet,” she added.