Lauren's Blog: [What say you, Spock?] My Proposed Terminology to
Describe Bypassing Social Media Face ID Age Verification Systems
https://lauren.vortex.com/2024/12/24/terminology-bypassing-face-age-verification
All the talk now is about using AI-based mechanisms to authenticate
social media users as being not underaged for access, through analysis
of their faces on video feeds. The multitude of ways in which this
could fail in both directions (declaring faces either older than they
really are, or younger than they really are, not to mention how you
determine from a face if someone is 15.5 or 16 years old when the
minimum age required for access is 16) are far too many to even list
here.
But given all of the attention, I feel that we need terminology to
quickly describe the entire area of bypass techniques targeting these
age verification/gating systems.
I propose the term:
BALOK
As in, "The 11-year-old easily baloked the system and gained quick
access."
or:
The free software was capable of baloking the ID portal within seconds
to bypass the age restrictions.
BALOK is an acronym for:
Bypassing Age Locked Online Keys
Of course, fans of the original "Star Trek" already know what's really
going on.
Balok was an alien in the first season of "Star Trek" from an episode
called "The Corbomite Maneuver". In appearance he was a very young,
vulnerable child. But in his audio and video communications with the
Enterprise ship, he employed an artificial booming voice and what
turned out to be a menacing appearing puppet to fool the Enterprise
crew into fearing him.
The parallels with the current face ID age verification systems are
obvious.
Children will be baloking the social media age gating systems in a
myriad number of ways, while adults who were supposed to have access
will be blocked due to both face analysis errors and technology access
problems. Not everyone uses smartphones with cameras to access social
media, and many people rightly fear sending video images of their
faces to these or other firms due to justifiable concerns about
potential abuses.
I anticipate both freeware baloking software and baloking as a
(largely free) service. Kids will band together in groups to develop
new baloking techniques. They are extremely resourceful when it comes
to these areas, more so than the vast majority of adults.
Balok knew that it was easy to fool his potential adversaries with a
faked persona. The ingenuity of kids today pretty much guarantees that
their own efforts to balok the social media firms, and in essence the
politicians who pushed age blocks in the first place, will be even
more successful in the real world.
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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