The title is a little bit misleading, it’s mostly about Imgur not adding the age checking that the UK’s infamously disliked new law requires on possibly mature content.
Age verification is a notoriously difficult problem to solve in a privacy-respecting way, and Imgur is literally about unobtrusive image embeds so I doubt they could even make this work.
The title is completely in line with the known facts. This is the ICO statement which does not mention anything about age checking.
There has been widespread speculation that this is related to age-verification but so far I’ve seen no evidence of this, and the fact that the investigation started in March makes it seem unlikely.
One platform has committed to introduce age assurance methods, to help ensure that children have an age-appropriate online experience.
To comply with child data protection rules, you necessarily have to either:
Know that they are a child by checking their age
Not collect information on anyone
It does look like the focus is mostly on data collection, not content moderation, so I will concede on that point. I should have read a bit more into this before commenting.
That’s true, but the age assurance they’re talking about here seems much lighter than the age verification mandated by the OSA. This page has information from the ICO on this - searching through for “age assurance” it seems clear to me that the ICO is talking about either taking an age field on account creation, or on using some other algorithmic means to estimate users’ ages.
The title is a little bit misleading, it’s mostly about Imgur not adding the age checking that the UK’s infamously disliked new law requires on possibly mature content.
Age verification is a notoriously difficult problem to solve in a privacy-respecting way, and Imgur is literally about unobtrusive image embeds so I doubt they could even make this work.
The title is completely in line with the known facts. This is the ICO statement which does not mention anything about age checking.
There has been widespread speculation that this is related to age-verification but so far I’ve seen no evidence of this, and the fact that the investigation started in March makes it seem unlikely.
Thanks for sharing. I should push back on your statement a little.
And in the Children’s code strategy progress update mentioned.
To comply with child data protection rules, you necessarily have to either:
It does look like the focus is mostly on data collection, not content moderation, so I will concede on that point. I should have read a bit more into this before commenting.
That’s true, but the age assurance they’re talking about here seems much lighter than the age verification mandated by the OSA. This page has information from the ICO on this - searching through for “age assurance” it seems clear to me that the ICO is talking about either taking an age field on account creation, or on using some other algorithmic means to estimate users’ ages.
It’s not a problem at all, though. Parents should be verifying what programs their kids use.