Verifying Kids' Ages Online Not Easy To Do

Age verification is often held up as the solution to ensuring that teens are talking to teens and not adults masquerading as teens online. But as with most "simple" solutions, it's proving not so simple at all.

Anne Collier at NetFamilyNews points to a good discussion of whether age verification on social-networking sites is the viable answer politicians, parents, and state attorneys general say it is. It's written by Jacqui Cheng at Ars Technica, who takes a look a panel discussion held by the Technology Liberation Front. (The transcript can be found here.)

Representatives of North Carolina, where an age-verification law is being proposed, and other state attorneys general said they are pushing for the requirement because it is so easy to falsify age information when signing up on sites now.

But John Cardillo, president and CEO of Sentinel Tech Holding Corporation, pointed out that there is no publicly accessible record on kids—no credit cards, driver's licenses—making it more difficult to verify the existence of a child. Requiring parental permission seems the simplest route, but Cardillo and other panelists argued that can be faked just as ages and identifies can be faked. He tested his theory on Imbee, a social networking site for kids that requires parental permission for registration via credit card info submission, and he was able to register four names of adults he knows with fake dates of birth, a different address (his) and company credit cards assigned to different people in his office. "These are not solutions," he told the panel.

The full transcript is worth reading for parents who think age verification is the answer and are wondering why it is not in place yet.

The unsettling takeaway is that there is no simple solution. It will always come down to smart, safe choices by individual kids online, and an ongoing discussion about what that means between parents and kids.

LINK: Why age verification won't cure what ails social networking sites [Ars Technica]

Related: Conn. Bill Would Require Age Proof Online
MySpace Move: Notification Software for Parents