Study finds UK children and some parents bypass online age verification, including fake mustaches

More platforms are pushing age checks on users across apps, games, and social networks, but kids are already finding ridiculous workarounds, from fake birthdays and borrowed logins to simple makeup tricks and video game characters.

A new survey found that kids find it easy to bypass age checks, despite a rise in age verification laws around the world.

For those who think a fake mustache is not fooling anybody, think again. Since 2023, the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act has tasked social media and search engine companies with protecting young users by restricting harmful content and even resorting to age verification to access certain platforms. But unsurprisingly, the tech-savvy young generation is already developing ingenious ways to jump through the extra sets of hoops. A recent study by Internet Matters, a British child online safety organization, found that around one-third of children in the U.K. have bypassed safety measures such as age verification. The safeguard often requires users to take a selfie or show a valid ID to verify their age. “I did catch my son using an eyebrow pencil to draw a mustache on his face, and it verified him as 15 years old,” an anonymous mother of a 12-year-old boy told Internet Matters. “I have helped my son get around them” The survey polled 1,000 children and their parents, with 46% of those surveyed believing that age checks are easy to bypass. Some shared more high-tech alternatives to fool the system, like turning to AI to distort their faces to appear older, or using video game characters to reveal an older face. But sometimes kids don’t even have to get creative. They can simply ask for help, with 17% of parents helping their children bypass age checks. “I have helped my son get around them. It was to play a game, and I knew the game, and I was happy and confident that I was fine with him playing it,” a parent revealed. Many agree that the restrictions, while intended for good, don’t do much to keep users safe. One kid even shared how unreliable the safeguards can be, even when one is not trying to trick the system. “On Roblox there’s a thing where you put your face in and are only allowed to chat with that age group . . . I got 15 when I’m 12, so I’m chatting with people older than me when I shouldn’t be,” a 12-year-old said. But the creative techniques employed by kids are garnering attention and laughs online. “All that fancy age verification tech & millions spent . . . & kids just draw a fake mustache,” one user said on X. “Clever little legends.” The study also reveals that the gaps in the system expose young users to harmful content. Almost half of the children surveyed reported that they’d experienced harm online, with 11% seeing unrealistic body types promoted and 10% reporting hateful content like homophobia or slurs. Additionally, 12% reported seeing violence online, particularly inadvertently seeing videos related to the assassination of Turning Point USA cofounder Charlie Kirk. It’s not just parents surveyed who are concerned. In response to the study, users on social media also shared their discontent toward tech companies that build systems that so easily fail. “A fake mustache getting past age verification systems that billion-dollar companies built is genuinely one of the funniest and most embarrassing tech failures in recent memory,” a user said on X. “The people who designed these systems need to sit in a room and have a serious conversation.”

A new Internet Matters survey suggests the UK's Online Safety Act age checks are easy for many children to bypass. Reported workarounds include fake birthdays, borrowed IDs, video game characters, and even drawing on a fake mustache. The Register reports: The group surveyed over 1,000 UK children and their parents, and while it did report some positive effects from changes made under the OSA, many children saw age verification as an easy-to-bypass hurdle rather than something that kept them genuinely safe. A full 46 percent of children even said that age checks were easy to bypass, while just 17 percent said that they were difficult to fool. The methods kids use to fool age gates vary, but most are pretty simple: There's the classic use of a video game character to fool video selfie systems, while in other instances, children reported just entering a fake birthday or using someone else's ID card when that was required. The report even cites cases of children drawing a mustache on their faces to fool age detection filters. Seriously. While nearly half of UK kids say it's easy to bypass online age checks (and another 17 percent say it's neither hard nor easy), only 32 percent say they've actually bypassed them, according to Internet Matters. Like scoring some booze from "cool" parents, keeping age-gated content out of the hands of kids under the OSA is only as effective as parents let it be, and a quarter of them enable their kids' online delinquency. More specifically, Internet Matters found that a full 17 percent of parents admitted to actively helping their kids evade age checks, while an additional 9 percent simply turned a blind eye to it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

46% say age checks are easy to bypass, and nearly a third admit getting around them

The Independent reports that "more than a third of children in the UK have found a way around age verification measures" for social media sites and other online platforms. And new research from online safety organisation Internet Matters "suggests one in six parents have helped their child to get past age verification checks, with children reporting 'tricking' platforms into thinking they are older. " Parents also said they had caught their children drawing on facial hair in a bid to evade the technology. One mother said: "I did catch my son using an eyebrow pencil to draw a moustache on his face, and it verified him as 15 years old"... From a sample of 1,000 UK children, 46% said they believed age checks are easy to bypass, while 32% admitted to having done so. 49% of the children surveyed said they'd still encountered harmful content, according to the online safety activists. The group called the figure "unacceptable," and complained that age verification measures "are often ineffective in practice or easy to bypass." Read more of this story at Slashdot.