But in that, they don’t give a lot of specifics about how exactly companies should actually do the verification of user ages. Meghan McCarty Carino: Scott, what are some of the approaches that states are taking when it comes to requirements for age verification?īrennen: So the first, big online child safety bill that was passed by the states was California. And the member of Congress said, “Oh, that sounds creepy.” And I think that really highlights the challenges here for policymakers, which is that if you want platforms to be more and more aggressive about identifying who children are so that we can protect them, that comes with clear downsides, and there are things about inferential approaches that I understand why a lawmaker would respond by saying, “That sounds creepy.” On the flip side, if you want to identify who kids are, that is one of the methods, and I think, in many ways, a fairly good method to try to determine who the kids on your platform might be. And so the CEO started to go into detail about how they use these inferential methods to do that because in order to protect kids online, you first have to determine who’s a kid. And that was something clearly lawmakers were concerned about. Matt Perault: That latter one is actually - the age inferences - the opening scene for our report because there was this exchange between the TikTok CEO at the hearing where he testified earlier in the spring, and a member of Congress where TikTok was getting pushed on what are the practices that it uses to protect kids online. And so they can do age assurance, or age verification, that way. Basically, platforms are combing through user data to make guesses about the ages of their users. And then finally, there’s this category we call inferential age assurance. The second one is user-submitted hard identifiers, so things like a government ID. And it’s basically where users just give their age, or more often their birthdate. Scott Brennen: The first is what we call age gating.
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