An Age Old Problem

With an increased number of services hitting the internet space, control of these services needs to improve and include control mechanisms that prevent the ‘unauthorised use’ of these services. I am talking about one form of control in particular though – age verification.

The current model of age verification is a simple question and click box “Are you over 18?” – yes or no. Hardly a 100% fool proof method of verifying the users age. Even when prompted to enter a birthday into a website, it doesn’t take a teen too long to figure out that they need to knock a couple of years off their DOB in order to bypass the age verification system.

Japan has recently installed new cigarette vending machines, which are able to perform age verification before serving up a package of branded smokes. The system works by using a digital camera, some facial recognition and a clever piece of software that is able to pick up on features of the potential customers face and verify their age. Apparently it has a pretty high success rate and unless you have particularly young looks for your age, the system is flawless.

But how do you transfer that methodology to the web for customers of online film rental for example? The answer is that you can’t – yet. Credit card authentication goes some way to verifying the customer and can be extended to verify the customers age, but expecting every customer to pay via credit card as opposed to debit cards or other methods of payment such as Google checkout or PayPal (which are amongst the preferred payment methods for online transactions).

Its an issue that needs to be addressed (for film age verification purposes, online shopping purposes, etc), and I’m sure there are a number of R&D departments across the globe thinking up ingenious methods to verify your age.