The internet has influenced modern society mostly for the good. But, there is a dark side that is negatively affecting the vulnerable members of our society. Minors are the target of abuse by several online scammers communities. Today, children are growing in the digital world, they learn and inevitable encounter several challenges themselves such as cyberbullying that carries various forms and harassment. This is because online services are openly available to children without any age verification check.
Unrestricted content over the internet is bombarding the developing brains of children. Even parental control is not enough to secure them daily from inappropriate online stuff. Challenges are rising every day with technical advancement. This bad perspective of technology should be addressed, thought and reformed to protect the children. One of the major issues, that is the lack of age verification systems should be taken into consideration. The online website should verify the age of the consumer before proceeding to provide services to users.
Recognizing the need for a secure online environment for children, in October 2017, World Congress took place named Child Dignity in the Digital World that addressed the issues and missions for congress. It included leaders from science, religion, government and civil society. A well-thought congress took place in the Pontifical Gregorian University’s Centre for Child Protection. The goals were to raise awareness about the online risks for primary online protection and prevention. It included improvement in the provision of children’s online rescue and services. In addition to this, improvement in the online children identification system should be proposed.
Traditional Age Verification Checks
After the strict regulations about age verification, websites started embedding age checks. But they were not reliable or fulfilling the regulatory requirement. Age verification checks included age affirmation pages in which the online user was supposed to check the tickbox if above the legal age. This traditional-age verification method was not serving the purpose of online children’s security as it can be deceived easily.
Today, age verification services providers are using stringent verification means to restrict children from accessing inappropriate content online. Using Artificial Intelligence and other underlying technologies, age verification companies ask the user to upload a piece of evidence that could help them verify your age. This could be a government-issued document or online biometric identification (face verification in most of the cases). Using hybrid technology, the document is inspected online and the date of birth is extracted and checked against the legal age threshold. During this process, document authenticity is also checked to make sure that it is not photoshopped or forged in any way. If the user’s age is verified, he can now access the services online.
Children Online Privacy Protection Act
Only restricting children from accessing inappropriate online stuff is not sufficient. There are duties of online websites to make sure that when they collect children’s data online, they secure it by all means. The reason is that children’s identities are an asset. Fraudsters roaming in the digital world are fond of targeting children’s identities to fulfill their malicious purposes. Identity theft compromises children’s identities which at the end affects the businesses as well as families.
COPPA, Children Online Privacy Protection Act came into force that meets the objective of online child privacy. According to this act, websites are supposed to take in place dynamic security measures to protect child identity online. Websites should display privacy policy links on the homepage of the website if they collect children’s data. Parental consent should be taken before collecting child information online. Parents have the right to revoke, edit or delete their child’s information at any time. Any change in policy should immediately be notified to parents. After changes, parents still can edit or delete their child’s information from the database of websites.
To sum up, age verification checks are important when it comes to secure children from accessing online stuff that is for adults. On the other hand, there are some duties of parents as well as online websites that are providing age-restricted services (such as online drugs, alcohol, e-cigarettes, knives, etc). Parental control is a must before collecting and verifying children’s details online.