I tried to look at a user's page but was met with a notification about "mature content" and asked to provide my DOB. I did, as didn't seem a big deal, then this popped up.

by Aaron2793

42 comments

  1. Estimate age from Selfie. First I’ve heard of that. Does that mean if you appear old enough, you don’t submit ID?

  2. Dreading this since I still get ID’d despite being 35 in a few weeks, so chances of my selfie sufficing are slim. Giving my ID to some American company who won’t get held to GDPR and pinkie promises not to have a data breach… does not appeal.

  3. It disappears if you change your location via a VPN

  4. I’m sure we can find photos of the people who thought this was a good idea and use them.

    In a GDPR world how is this risk even acceptable?!?

  5. Certain freemium software can help with this. Not sure I remember the name but I think it had something to do with electrons and neutrons 😇

  6. I thought it would just be adult sites. It’s literally any NSFW reddit profiles/subs as well. What about Instagram etc? I don’t really use them but my explore page is always full of scantily clad women? 

  7. just set my VPN stuff back up yesterday

    did you know albania also has no youtube ads? pretty cool…

  8. This is so fucking sinister. Parents should monitor their childrens internet usage, this wont achieve anything

    Thing is none of the ID checking services can be honestly trusted.

    The potential kompromat value of a list of the NSFW viewing habits of a population is too high, they cant be trusted to just delete the information.

    People should be free to explore their sexuality online without providing their name to a database. Its that fucking obvious.

  9. Aside from the fact this is caused by an incredibly stupid law, seems like it is a daft implementation. Surely censoring or hiding NSFW content from profiles if you aren’t verified would be a better option?

  10. I am immediately so offended by the guessing age from a selfie. As equally as how much I am pleased when the lady at the checkout till IDs me

  11. send us a photo of yourself so you can see the fetish of your choice, no way this is ending well.

  13. Bloody stupid I can no longer get on r/dragonsfuckingdragons without some company having my face and ID

  14. Do Ofcom not realise that teenagers know what VPNs are? If someone wants to find a certain type of content on the internet they will find it.

  15. ok I’m going to check some birds snatch on r/onlyfans101

  17. Seems like a data breach waiting to happen tbh. Poorly thought out plan, with even worse execution.

  18. The sad things is that it actually takes less time to download, install and start up a VPN than it does to complete that load of old tosh that will no doubt be sold, leaked and leveraged in no time at all.

  22. ‘Estimate age from selfie’ is going to hit me in the ego

  23. “estimate age from selfie” i wonder if you could just send them an image of King Charles and if whatever AI bot they use to determine the age would accept it

  24. Tor should work, as will a VPN. If you’re gonna buy a VPN, might as well use it for other stuff too like torrenting Netflix shows. I could never stoop to acts of such illegality though.

  25. Proton VPN has a couple of free sites you can use. Recommend them. 

  26. 16 yr olds can have sex but god forbid they look at a Reddit thread on how to put a condom on.

  28. Can you get it to “take a selfie” of an AI generated photo of a person? Worked for Facebook 

  30. I can’t believe that I’m gonna have to get a VPN like the people in the great firewall of china. This is absolutely insane. The UK is becoming a dystopian hellhole.

  31. Those octogenarians don’t realise that VPN. companies sponsor a fuck ton of Youtube videos. The majority of teens will know exactly how to circumvent this with an app download.

    Or it’ll just push them to sketchier websites putting them at risks to malware, scammers or unregulated content.

  32. Can’t even view my own profile. Really thought this out didn’t they. What a joke.

  35. Given their track record to date (impressively evil) I’d say there was zero chance this isn’t all going to a Palantir friend/subsiduary.

    Insane it’s come to this and you’d have to be as insane to upload your details

  36. A lot of states in America are doing this too for porn hub can’t even look up pornhub on private mode because it sets it to Tennessee lmao ain’t no way I’m putting my photo ID

  38. Hate it, but I’m also super glad I just naturally look old as fuck

  39. I had a small side job a few months ago before I turned 20 that involved age-restricted ID compliance testing for major UK retailers. The role is only available for those 18-19 so I can’t do it anymore, but it mainly consisted of buying alcohol/cigarettes/vapes etc. in shops and checking to see if employees would follow correct ID procedure. I have a complete baby face and have often been mistaken for a younger teenager (14-15), so I was given everything from bookmakers to bingo halls.

    Occasionally I would be asked to make an online delivery order of something you need to be of legal age to buy, to see if I was asked for ID when collecting it at the door. 9 times out of 10 these were orders on Deliveroo/UberEats etc. where I could get whatever I wanted and was reimbursed (up to a certain price), as long as I also attempted to buy whatever was specified by the client, be it a bottle of cider or a pack of cigarettes. As you might expect, takeaway drivers aren’t the most uptight about who collects orders containing age-restricted items.

    Getting to the point, I was once asked to try and order a kitchen knife for home delivery off the John Lewis website, 20cm minimum length. In theory, there was an online system that would check my ID at the time of purchase, and the courier would check it again at the time of delivery. This was the online verification system used (if not, one by a third party company very similar, I can’t remember specifically). I was instructed to initially submit photo ID, and if that didn’t work, proceed with the estimate age from selfie option.
    Two separate attempts with my UK drivers license were fully rejected by the computer system, as it couldn’t verify my identity, despite fully displaying my date of birth, full name, address, and ID photo. The selfie option also rejected me because the system couldn’t confidently verify that I was over 18 from a scan of my face.
    I was completely blocked from purchasing any age-restricted product on the John Lewis website with the account I used, even though I was 19 at the time and over the legal age limit.

    I was then asked to try the exact same thing on the ProCook website. All I had to do was enter my date of birth through a drop-down box menu when completing the purchase. No further verification. The courier handed a huge parcel with a kitchen knife in it with no questions asked.

    Ultimately, this is an unreliable solution that it seems like the Government haven’t considered for more than 30 seconds. If the main goal is to stop minors from accessing adult content, it won’t work. They’ll find ways around it, as they always do. Chances are, it will end with some of them accessing even more extreme content than what they otherwise would have consequently.
    All this does is inconvenience the masses whilst handing over identification info to sketchy third party companies. There’s no way this can be sustainable, all it’s going to do in the long run is boost VPN subscriptions.

  40. I just wish I didn’t scroll so far back for my birth year

  41. Ive heard that you can just google pictures of UK ID and submit that as proof and it will accept it. Ive heard….
    A lot of my mates are suddenly a 38 year old Venezuela man who might or might not have put his current driving licence on the internet

  42. The verification is comically easy to bypass. Just go to Google images, search for “UK driving license”, choose the first image with a hand holding the license (fingers must be visible in the picture to convince the AI it’s legit), upload that with whatever date of birth shows.

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