WASHINGTON — The Washington Post published an in-depth article Wednesday surveying the age assurance industry, including a discussion of its role in the debate around anti-porn age verification legislation in U.S. states and in other countries.
The article, written by the Post’s Drew Harwell, covers both the growth of the industry in recent years and concerns about data privacy, particularly the privacy 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 recounts 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 article describes companies like Yoti, Incode and VerifyMyAge as “digital gatekeepers” that are increasingly partnering with governments and large social media platforms 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 tracks state bills and contacts local officials in order to understand where the company's tech might fit in.
To “fit in,” age assurance tech must cater to a variety of state laws. Harwell notes that Tennessee’s law requires an age check every 60 minutes that a user is on a site, while Alabama’s mandates that explicit sites warn visitors that porn “desensitizes brain reward circuits” and “increases the demand” for CSAM — though an appeals court struck down a similar rule in a Texas law, calling such warnings unscientific and unconstitutional.
The article also points out issues around false results, margins of error and other ways in which age verification solutions can end up preventing adults from accessing legal content.
Aylo’s Sarah Bain told the Post that these laws have not stopped people from looking for porn.
“They just migrated to darker corners of the internet,” she said.
