During a congressional hearing today about TikTok’s use of biometrics, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said how the company vets potential minors on its platform. Beyond what in-app AR filters need to work after denying the app collects body, facial, or vocal data to identify users, executives I was asked how TikTok determines a user’s age.
Chew’s first answer was as expected. The app uses age gating. This refers to the commonly used method of asking users to enter their date of birth to determine age. TikTok has her three different experiences for users under 13, teens, and adults over 18. The experience the user receives is based on this age input.
Of course, relying on this method alone is problematic. Because children often lie about their age when signing up for social media apps and websites.
After all, TikTok doesn’t just look at the age entered in the text box.
At the hearing, Chu added that TikTok scans users’ videos to determine their age.
“We’ve also developed some tools to look at their public profiles and look at the videos they post to see if…that’s creepy. Tell us more about it.” “
When Chu was able to continue, he explained: So if you post a video, choose to make it public. This is how you get people to watch your videos. I’ll look them up to see if they match the age you mentioned,” he said.
“Right now, this is a real challenge for our industry because privacy and age guarantees are such big issues,” says Chew.
An interesting follow-up question to the CEO’s answer is how TikTok scanned these videos, what specific facial recognition or other technology it uses, whether those technologies were built in-house, Or was it asking if it relied on facial recognition technology, built by a third party. Then, of course, whether the data associating a user with age was stored permanently instead of being used to simply boot the user out of his TikTok LIVE stream, for example.
Unfortunately for us, Carter didn’t pursue this set of questions.
Instead, he blamed the CEO for dismissing age verification as an industry-wide problem.
“We’re talking about kids dying!” he exclaims, citing how dangerous challenge apps like TikTok have allowed to go viral, like Blackout Challenge. (As a result of this challenge, TikTok has removed about half a million Italian accounts and blocked underage users from the platform at the request of local regulators.)
Actual condition is age verification teeth Industry-wide concerns and the lack of U.S. laws regarding children’s social media use have forced companies like TikTok to develop their own processes.
For example, last year Instagram started verifying the age of its users by giving them three options to choose from. Users can upload their identities, record selfie videos, and ask mutual friends to verify their age on their behalf. The latter is relatively easy to avoid if you have good friends willing to lie for you.
Earlier this month, Instagram rolled out age verification tools in Canada and Mexico, adding to existing support in the United States, Brazil, and Japan. The company has previously said the London-based digital ID startup has partnered with Yoti for the video selfie portion of the age verification process.
Instagram has also previously outlined how it identifies users who it suspects are underage.
In addition to investigating flagged accounts, the company claims to have developed an AI technique it uses to guess someone’s age. That model understands how people in the same age group tend to interact with content. Another way he identifies underage users who lie about their age is by scanning comments on “happy birthday” posts that may mention the user’s age. Additionally, Instagram said it may attempt to match a user’s age on Facebook to her age on Instagram, using “many other signals” that it has not disclosed.
TikTok’s method isn’t very clear. (Last fall, TikTok announced it would raise the age requirement to use its in-app live-streaming service TikTok LIVE from He’s 16 to He’s 18).
Last year, Bloomberg reported that TikTok has met with two providers of facial age estimation software in 2021. Both companies offered software that could tell the difference between children and adults, but TikTok executives dropped the deal over concerns such facial scans could lead. Addressing concerns that China was spying on child users, the report said.
Today the US swooped in on TikTok’s CEO, ready to explain the actual method TikTok uses to determine age, but what we got was the politics of making a show instead of getting real answers. All that was left was to yell at the house and make them angry.
