News for the Week of July 16, 2006

Age verification has come up in kid-tech news this week as a potential safeguard for young social networkers. Would it work? Read on...

Verifying online kids' ages: Key question

"State attorneys general have called for [online] communities, particularly MySpace, to improve age and identity checks," the Associated Press reports. What parents need to know is that the attorneys general are not just calling for tech safeguards on the social networks. They're also calling for publicly available information on children, something that, up to this point, local, state, and federal US governments have worked hard at not allowing in order to protect kids' privacy.

What the experts in the identity authentication business tell us is that no technology is going to protect online kids all by itself, including age-verification technology. The simple reason is that technology is only part of the equation - it needs information in public records to check against. Info that authenticates people (prove they are who they say they are) is only available on adults - credit information, driver's license, voting records, property records, etc. There is no public information on minors available at the national level, and at the state level only a little more than half of the states make drivers' info publicly available. At a local level, schools keep records on kids under 16, but that information is kept private, and parents have to sign permission slips for student contact info to go into school directories. The $64k question is: How many parents want birth and residence records on their children in a national database?

Two factors beyond kids' privacy might give parents pause: 1) The number of private corporate databases and networks that have been hacked into, exposing hundreds of thousands of adults to credit card fraud and identity theft, and 2) the attraction of children's records, the "cleanest" available (and thus easiest to manipulate), to ID thieves.

So, without a national public database of children's ID info, age verification can't be done for social networkers under 18. There can be authentication of adult social networkers who are who they say they are when they register, but if an adult says he or she is a minor and doesn't give a real name, age verification tech won't be able to match that info to real-life ID records. The bottom line: Even if a law requiring age verification is passed, honest adults will get verified, but dishonest predators will be able to register as kids and contact minors no less than before the law was passed.