Age verification for pornography access? Research shows it fails on many levels

[Pelican Press 0]

Age verification for ************ access? Research shows it fails on many levels

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

The *********** government has announced an A $6.5 million

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to restrict minors’ access to ************. It’s part of a $1 billion package to address gendered *********. And it now comes alongside a proposal to

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.

The government will consider various

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methods, such as matching drivers’ licenses, credit cards or passports against government databases. It may also explore analyzing biometric information (such as faces, fingerprints or voices), and profiling online behavior (like username, browsing history and cookie data). Each has different privacy risks.

While the government refers to these tools as “age assurance,” many of them are more accurately called “age estimation.”

Published in

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, our new study into one common facial age estimation tool shows such technologies are unreliable, and have a ******* and gender bias.

They are also undesirable—they make ************ a

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and divert resources from evidence-based strategies that can actually help.

Framing ************ as the problem

The link between ************ and ******* ********* is

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. In part, this is because existing research often

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and

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.

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is not a homogeneous category. It includes horror, comedy, romance and documentary, and

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.

********* explicit media can play a role in

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of people excluded from mainstream media.

Despite this,

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to justify the increasing regulation of ************. This includes construing ***** as a

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. The idea of “***** addiction” has also been shown to

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.

The idea to “

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” was first raised by Australia’s then-Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton in 2019, the same year the government tried to introduce a

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to match people’s identities across government agencies.

Furthermore, research into

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shows that young adults are

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. ************ can be a source of

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.

The technical limits of age estimation

Civil society groups have cited

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about age estimation tech. These include:

• accessibility issues for people without identity documents
• the potential burden on small, low-income websites
• queries about what data could be collected, sold or exploited
• and the likelihood of circumvention.

In the

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, young people “expressed their right to safe, autonomous ******* development and exploration.” They were concerned age assurance is of limited efficacy, and comes with

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.

Age estimation software that uses facial recognition relies on stereotypical indicators of age,

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, wrinkles and jawlines. These are highly variable—for example, wrinkles can be

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.

Studies

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that

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often has a significant

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.

In our research, our colleague

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used a

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to analyze a

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. He found the model was most accurate in estimating age in the “Caucasian” category and least accurate in the “********” category.

Boys were more likely to be misclassified than ******, especially in the 0–12 age bracket. People aged 26 and over were generally misclassified as younger, sometimes by as much as 40 years.

Age estimation is already a fraught task when done by humans, who regularly

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. It is no better when done by machines.

Supporting healthy ******* development

Overall, age-based restrictions on access are unlikely to stop people from viewing *****. Teenagers can easily avoid age verification and may even get around age checks using the dark web, putting them at

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Young people often

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from their parents. Sometimes, blurry understandings of “harm” from the media and ****** responses from parents

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more than the actual ***** they encounter.

The best approach to supporting healthy ******* development for young people is to “

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” with them about ****, especially if they can do so openly

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.

Part of healthy ******* development is understanding how ******* representations are

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. ***** literacy—a subset of media literacy—is about

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rather than taking an abstinence-based approach.

Evidence-based alternatives

Restricted-access approaches make a crude distinction between people over or under 18. But the various age groups under 18 have very different needs in relation to **** and relationships. Importantly, this includes 16- to 17-year-olds who can legally consent to ****.

For pre-pubescent individuals, the biggest risk factor involving ************ is when adults use these materials

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. This shows governments must invest in community-led prevention and frontline services.

Meanwhile, post-pubescent individuals need comprehensive **** and relationship education appropriate for their development. Its focus should be on providing the

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, including about consent, communication, gender diversity, non-monogamy, ******* experimentation

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.

Instead of barring under-18s from all *****, a more impactful approach would be to facilitate access to diverse ******* representations. This includes measures such as preventing

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and supporting worker-owned

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to flourish. It includes ending

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and

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.

Importantly, addressing gendered ********* requires taking action on the recommendations of First Nations women, who remain the most affected by family, police and carceral *********.

Age estimation for ************ access is not an easy fix for gendered *********. It will not support young people to contextualize the ******* media they come across. It will not address structural factors behind gendered ********* and ******* *********, including racism and misogyny. In reality, it will only introduce more problems, and at great cost—political and financial.

Provided by
The Conversation

This article is republished from

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under a Creative Commons license. Read the

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Citation:
Age verification for ************ access? Research shows it fails on many levels (2024, June 11)
retrieved 12 June 2024
from

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