Lately there has been a lot of controversy about age verification and it’s implementation in places such as UK and US.
The main critic to this mechanism is due being done through facial recognition or a government ID which are privacy invasive.
So here is my question as someone who comes from IT, wouldn’t it be possible to create a device which just gives out true or false depending if the person is of age, given some kind of piece of DNA (hair, blood, nails) ?
I known there is carbon dating, but from what I understand is a bit of complicated process. The human body however shows it’s age visually and I would be interested to know if genetically there are some signs as well that could be somewhat used in a automatic process.
Again I come from IT, just curious about the implications and your takes on the problem.
As someone who comes from IT, what are you talking about?
You rightfully assert that facial recognition and government ID are privacy invasive, but then you offer DNA verification as a less invasive tool? That’s much more privacy invasive.
Also, it’s impossible to determine someone’s age from some DNA with the required accuracy. The law requires that 18+ content is available to someone who just turned 18 today and not available to someone who’s 18th birthday is tomorrow. That’s impossible to do from DNA, same as it’s impossible to do from just facial recognition alone.
Carbon dating only works for dead materials since e.g. your skin or your skin is only ever roughly a month old and even blood cells only live for ~120 days. Also, again, carbon dating is not nearly accurate enough for the day-accuracy required.
The only day-accurate process that exists is verifying your identity against government ID. And here it hardly matters which kind of ID is used for that (facial ID/DNA/Fingerprint/…) since the issue at hand is the ID itself. Facial ID is by far the least privacy sensitive version of biometric DNA.
This process isn’t great, no question about that, but the alternatives are worse if hard age verification is the goal.
That’s why the whole goal is being called into question, since there’s no non-privacy-invasive option to do real age verification.