My thoughts on age verification.

 I get it, people don't want people under the age of 18 to access things not meant for them. But I do find a few flaws in how most age verification works, especially when it comes to privacy. 

For those who may not know, we have a rise in age verification softwares that require you to take a photo of your face and government issued identification. However, this may raise concerns of privacy. Especially since they most likely keep this information in a database, which can be hacked and leaked if the database isn't fully secured. Not to mention, I don't doubt that there will be a rise in false identification crimes and/or identity theft crimes because of this. I do believe the idea in and of itself isn't bad, especially for pornography websites or sites that allow sexual imagery and topics in their programs. But if it's something like YouTube where such things aren't even allowed in the first place, then it's just unnecessary. 

Now yes, I will be the first to say I'm affected by this as a 17 year old. However, it's mainly when something was at first 13+, but then suddenly forced into 18+ without much warning. A really good example of this is character ai, and before you think to yourself "Ew, an ai chat bot?!" It's the only good example I have at the moment. Now I do believe I know WHY they're doing this, and that is because people leave their teenagers unrestricted access to the app and a couple have committed suicide over their chat bots. And frankly, I can't say that it's not a fair reason. However, I feel like it should be the parents to blame since if they monitored their child's activity on the Internet, or better yet talked to their kid, this could've had a higher chance of being prevented. Especially since it wouldn't be surprising if said child went to ai for attention the parent never gave them, but that could just be me jumping to conclusions as someone who's almost lost people to suicide in the past and almost committed themselves. 

But anyways, that could be the reason for what character ai installed. Since they now have this age verification, and it does require everything I mentioned in the beginning. Not to mention, they're giving minors time limits as if that does literally anything other than letting them loose to probably go to a different ai app. They're trying to act like a strict parent, but they aren't doing anything actually useful. Like sure, it may work on me, who doesn't care enough to really find loopholes. But I'm also in the minority of teenagers who used those chats rationally, many others don't do that for reasons that I have no right to fully judge. I'm not some patron saint, I'm just someone who doesn't care about a lot of things. 

But I digress, I feel like there are other ways to keep minors from doing something stupid: HAVE THE PARENTS ACTUALLY MONITOR THEIR DAMN KIDS!!! And I know that may sound insensitive, but it just seems like the right course of action. But of course, if the world was perfect, I wouldn't be ranting my head off in a blog website and probably making zero sense. 

In case I didn't make sense: I believe that the new age verification will do more harm than good, if they want to protect kids, they should be monitored. That is the easiest course of action, especially with mentally ill teenagers who just want someone to care about them.

If you actually read this entire thing, I appreciate you hearing me out. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, these are just mine.