Google Is Rolling Out Its AI Age Verification to More Services, and I’m Skeptical

Yesterday, I wrote on the way youtube now uses AI to guess your age. The idea is as follows: rather than relying on the age attached to your account, YouTube analyzes your activity on its platform and takes a determination according to how your activity corresponds to users of others. If AI thinks you are an adult, you can continue; If he thinks that your behavior aligns with that of a teenage user, he will put restrictions and protections on your account.

Now Google extends its AI age verification tools beyond its simple video streaming platform, also to other Google products. As with YouTube, Google tests this initial deployment with a small user pool and, depending on its results, will extend the test to more users on the line. But in the coming weeks, your Google account can be subject to this new AI, the only objective of which is to estimate your age.

This AI is formed to search for behavioral models on Google products associated with users under the age of 18. This includes the categories of information you may look for or the types of videos you watch on YouTube. Google is a bit created on the details, but it is enough to say that the spying probably most, if not all, of what you use Google and its products.

Restrictions and protections on Teen Google accounts

We know some of the restrictions and protections that Google plans to implement when it detects a user under 18. As I reported yesterday, it involves lighting YouTube’s digital well-being tools, such as reminders of stopping watching videos and, if it is late, encourages to go to bed. YouTube will also limit the repetitive views of certain types of content.

In addition to these changes to YouTube, you will also find that you can no longer access the chronology in the cards. Timeline records the history of your Google Maps, so you can go effectively over time and see where you were. It is an interesting feature, but Google limits access to users aged 18 or over. So if AI detects that you are a minor, no calendar for you.

You will also notice that your ads will be much less relevant for your interests and research stories. Accounts under 18 have no personalized advertising, which is an excellent choice for all of us – not just adolescents. Of course, it is good to limit targeted advertising to young people, but, as an adult, I certainly don’t need to see the fruit of the work of web trackers manifest as pop-up advertisements. I try to deactivate the personalized ads each time I can anyway, but an ad blocker completely solves the problem.

Finally, accounts under the age of 18 will not be able to access applications limited to adults on the Play Store, which makes sense. If your account is reported as under 18, you will not be able to download or access more than 18 applications.

If Google is being wrong, it is on you

Part of the problem with the outsourcing of this type of work at AI is that the technology is not perfect. In fact, he often makes mistakes and will undoubtedly label the accounts of certain adults as minors. Although the above restrictions are not particularly extreme, you probably do not want to face the encouragement of YouTube to fall asleep or to arbitrarily lose features such as Timeline.

Google is aware of this possibility and has a solution: if the AI is wrong, you can check your age by downloading either your government identifier or a selfie. The latter probably uses a different AI model to determine if you are really over 18 years old, which has its own set of problems, but the fact is as follows: Google follows an age verification trend launched by other sites and services in the face of new laws of various governments. Age verification slowly becomes the standard, demanding users download official identifiers to prove that they are as old as they say.

I am everything to protect children online, but I would say that there should be ways to do so that do not involve sacrificing the privacy of each user on the web.