YouTube begins testing new age verification feature amid chaos over Death Stranding photo mode loophole on Discord, and Reddit
YouTube
has started testing a new age verification system in the United States, with the aim of better protecting young users. The move comes into effect with the growing pressure for better online safety.
It's specifically after recently that the users found a way to bypass age checks, using Death Stranding 2: On the Beach photo mode. The development highlights the increased struggle for verifying age online in an effective way.
YouTube experiments with an age verification feature
After facing regulatory pressures, YouTube is finally out there testing a new method for estimating user ages in an accurate way. The trial currently running in the United States aims to restrict underage access to all available mature content.
As per reports, the feature would analyse factors including account creation date, user behaviour, account activity, and even facial recognition age check in some cases.
If the system flags an account to be potentially underage, the access of the users can be restricted.
The users who will get flagged by the system will need to verify their age using their government IDs, selfie scans or credit card details. However, the significant concern that exists here is about the accuracy of the system—AI can misjudge the user's appearance.
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There are many users who doubt that YouTube can reliably guess ages based on nothing but users' activity itself.
Privacy concerns online, though, continue to persist about sensitive documents sharing. Also, despite all the pushback, the move of YouTube aligns perfectly with global trends, such as the UK's Online Safety Act.
What is the age check loophole that potentially led YouTube to test the feature?
While the UK Online Safety Act is standing its ground despite more than three hundred and fifty thousand signatures standing against it, platforms like YouTube have started to push some new checks.
The feature testing comes at a time when the gamers have found a workaround to the law, using Death Stranding photo mode.
Platforms like Reddit and Discord age verification are in place within regions like the United Kingdom. It follows the new Online Safety Act and requires users to have facial scans to access certain content. However, using the detailed photo mode of Death Stranding 2 has proven to be the key for bypassing it.
With the photo mode trick, users point the in-game camera at Sam Bridges to fool the verification AI of the platforms. Facial recognition mistakes a virtual model for a real person. It allows users to pass the checks without having to submit their personal IDs or pictures. It's working for Reddit, Discord and some other systems.
The age verification loophole has highlighted the major flaw—current tech for age verification struggles to distinguish between digital avatars and real humans.
While there are services like Bluesky that have caught this trick, others have failed. Such ease in bypassing the checks has raised major concerns about whether the measures can truly protect the minors or if they just create a false sense of security.
Experts have suggested combining AI with manual reviews—a multi-layered verification, which could possibly help. But for now, the debate still continues about whether or not there exists any measure of safety. With Discord, Xbox and now YouTube age verification redefining the system, the one thing that remains clear is that digital age checks do need more than just the camera scan for working right.
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