Naked Science Forum

General Science => General Science => Topic started by: vhfpmr on 25/07/2025 12:51:59

Title: Age Verification
Post by: vhfpmr on 25/07/2025 12:51:59

Online age verification comes into force today apparently.

According to OFCOM on the BBC this morning, if you give a company your email address it can be used to establish your age from "patterns of email use"? (At 1h56m23s (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002g52f))

If I give someone an email address what information can they obtain from it, and how?

Title: Re: Age Verification
Post by: Eternal Student on 26/07/2025 04:06:11

Hi,

   You linked to some BBC audio content.   They also provide some written information which I have just copied-and-pasted below:


- -  - - - - - - -
Email-based age estimation

How it works

You provide your email address, and technology analyses other online services where it has been used - such as banking or utility providers - to estimate your age.

What are the privacy issues?

Verifymy are one of operators, and it told the BBC its research identified this as the method users would be most comfortable with.

Mr Lulham says the technology checks if an email has been used to interact with a range of websites such as financial institutions.

Verifymy said data could be kept for up to 28 days, but added it would often be less, would be encrypted, and no data would be shared with the website being accessed.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
 

[ Taken from  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ceq7ye3q2zwo ]

       There is very little information about exactly what this  "technology" actually is when they say   "technology analyses other online services...."    Apparently the algorithms involved are proprietary and no details are likely to be made available to the general public.  It would be alarming if banking websites were just making a database of all the email addresses of their clients available to a service like "verifymy", however... they might be.....
     There's some information available here:   https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/consultations/category-1-10-weeks/284469-consultation-protecting-children-from-harms-online/responses/verifymy---white-paper.pdf?v=385741
    That is supposed to have been a white paper submitted by verfiymy to OFCOM about their age estimation technology.   I've scanned through it and would draw your attention to page 12 where there is flow chart style diagram of what the technology involves.   In particular please note that the core workings of the process are described as follows...

      The submitted email address is analysed using proprietary algorithms and external data sources.    This includes reviewing sites such as....  finacial institutions, mortgage lenders or utility providers... 

    I can only understand the "external data sources" to mean that at least some financial websites are making some of their data available to verfiymy.

    Anyway, that's all I've been able to find out so far.

Best Wishes.

Title: Re: Age Verification
Post by: alancalverd on 26/07/2025 09:31:34

So a kid wishing to view pornography just enters his mum's email address and the world (because the internet knows no bounds) knows her bank details.

The best age verification would surely be to find out what porn sites he visited 10 years ago?

Title: Re: Age Verification
Post by: vhfpmr on 26/07/2025 11:29:41

Thanks ES. It's not something I'd paid any attention to until I suddenly heard something yesterday about gleaning personal info from email addresses, but I suppose if it's not openly available to online searches it's not much different to the data already filed with the credit reference agencies.

Quote from: alancalverd on 26/07/2025 09:31:34

So a kid wishing to view pornography just enters his mum's email address

No, because he won't have the password sent to the email account.

Title: Re: Age Verification
Post by: Petrochemicals on 26/07/2025 14:10:21

How are adults going to outdo thier child in technology ? Children are being taught to programme computers from the age of 5. There is file share and the dark web, you can get any content from places like playstation community. At best it has made it marginally more awkward.

The sooner people realise that the internet is outside their own house rather than a picture inside it the better the world will be. If I dropped my child in the middle of London I would be held responsible, but give them the internet and it is someone else's responsibility.  Someone comes to your door saying they are from your bank and they need your credit card you would call the police, do it on the internet and it doesn't seem to be a problem.

The internet is a realm with all of the depravity and lunacy of the real world, amazingly normal rules do apply.

Title: Re: Age Verification
Post by: alancalverd on 26/07/2025 15:19:39

Quote

Quote

from: alancalverd on Today at 09:31:34
So a kid wishing to view pornography just enters his mum's email address

No, because he won't have the password sent to the email account.

Depends on where the OTP is sent - could be to the kid's phone. Or he can access mum's emails if there is an unsecured home computer. And once one kid has broken through the barrier, he can download all the stuff he wants and send it to his friends.

Title: Re: Age Verification
Post by: vhfpmr on 26/07/2025 19:21:40

It's started already.

I'm 66 and TwiX has blocked me from reading someone's comment on a nostalgia thread on the grounds that they don't know my age. TwiX has the email address I use for deflecting junk mail, not the one I use for banks etc.

Title: Re: Age Verification
Post by: SeanB on 28/08/2025 07:12:27

Yes now millions of UK sites will have a lot of info about you, and they are not known to be great at protecting themselves. Most of the data breaches that lost all my info to the dark web were a blend of government sites, large telecoms suppliers, credit reporting agencies, home registers and more.

https://www.corbado.com/blog/data-breaches-south-africa

 a list of the 10 biggest, and i am on most of them simply by living in south Africa, and the explanation of the method ranges from sheer stupidity of having it open freely, to being compromised by an outdated Plex media server that had malware on it.

Now multiply this by a thousand fold and that is what you in the UK will have. Wonder if people could get class action status in actually having a civil prosecution against those MP's who voted this in personally asking for the damages, there are real costs in loss of money from fake accounts being made in your name with all the correct info needed from them, and also for the time and cost to handle each one.

Title: Re: Age Verification
Post by: evan_au on 31/08/2025 23:11:41

The Australian government ran a trial of age verification technologies.
- But well before the trial report came out, the government advised that it would ban children under 16 from Social Media
- Now the discussion is happening about what constitutes Social Media - eg is Youtube Social Media or Educational?

https://ageassurance.com.au/

Title: Re: Age Verification
Post by: vhfpmr on 01/09/2025 11:55:21

VPNs are fun, aren't they.

I've been blocked from my account on a cycling forum, blocked from the set up page on the router, asked for two stage login at the bank, and had the computer clock showing the time for Timbuktu, or anywhere else but the UK.  ;D

No effect on Twitter's age block though.

Whatever the security merits of a VPN are supposed to be, they're completely undermined by having to remember to switch it back on again when it's needed.