In the past few months, there have been many websites implementing age verification technologies to confirm user ages. While on the surface they may seem well-intentioned, they not only create further hurdles for free internet access but also raise severe security concerns. The plain and simple is that it may unnecessarily expose sensitive user information to data breaches. But to put it even simpler, there is a question that I have come to face very recently: Does YouTube really need to see my face?

I’ve already got my birthday put into my main Google Account, and it says I need to give it more to confirm it? It’s been the same ever since 2012 or even earlier, wouldn’t the simple age of the account be enough to say that I am probably over 18 years old? It’s ridiculous, confounding, befuddling and straight-up asinine! Dearest mamma of Mia, what were they thinking?

Sure, I could just take a picture of myself to confirm it, but not only would I make myself vulnerable to the aforementioned risks involved, I’m not even sure it would work given my Chronic Babyface Syndrome. When I get a clean shave, or at least as clean a shave as I can get, I immediately look 10 years younger than I actually am, and become a visage of my younger days. I hope to maintain such semblance for at least five more years, to embrace it as myself, but it is doing me no favors in confirming my age.

For now, it’s merely an irritant to my experience for using sites like these and at worse a glaring show of how little these websites care for their own users’ security. I do really hope that they actually recognize this rather than continue on this path, potentially leading to a closed off internet provided by state-sponsored “security”. Maybe there are a couple books relating to that we could read just in-case… anyway, moral of the story: do not give massive corporate bodies your baby face. Or do, if you want it on the dark web in one to two months.