One question - where the heck are these kids' parents? I think most people on dating apps are under the impression that other users are of legal age.<p>If your child is searching for <i>adult</i> partners, complete strangers, over the Internet, you as a parent have a lot to answer for.<p>That being said, none of that justifies what happened to the minors mentioned in the article. Ultimately, there are a lot of bad people out there. It would be great for children to not be exposed to such people.<p>But I think the necessary change is parental supervision, <i>not</i> government intervention.
Error: variable "the platform" was used before it was defined (heavily implying she was on a dating site, not Instagram as was the case).<p>> Last month the BBC reported on the death of a 14-year-old schoolgirl who killed herself in 2017 after being exposed to self-harm imagery on the platform.
and the scope creep for the bad Online Identification begins. First it was no porn, then it was no dating. Soon it will be no rw to access to UK internet without age+ID. Disconnect the UK before the damage spreads!
We were running a chat app network dating platform. User profiles were from chat apps & majority of the users were from Facebook Messenger, many in asian countries especially women from Philippines used their child photograph as their profile picture.<p>After I realised the issue, we integrated Amazon Rekognition API to detect age range < 18 & block the profiles who had a child's picture on their user profile. The issue is that Rekognition isn't perfect & we lost several users because of this integration & false positives, yet we continued to use it till the end for moderation. We were processing >200,000 profile pictures each month for this.
There is the danger that if these services don’t nip this in the bud, it’ll become a social problem akin to enjo-Kosai in Japan, which not only lends itself to exploitation of minors but also encourages needless conspicuous consumerism.<p>For the most part, aside from using someone else’s credit information, these businesses have information on age and with facial recognition should be able to flag most falsified accounts.
The solution seems relatively straightforward to me, but maybe I'm missing something. If you want to engage on a platform designed explicitly for adults doing adult things, you give them your driver's license number or non-driver's ID number. They can instantaneously verify that with the government electronically and determine the age of the person associated with that license number.<p>To further prevent problems - like kids taking their parent's ID and then changing the name and age - dating sites could bind the age of the site profile to the license provided. So if junior uses his old man's ID, he's going to show as 45, not 18, and he won't be able to change it. That has the additional benefit of stopping a lot of the lies related to age on dating sites.<p>Lastly, they could also bind the first name only to the profile, hide the last name from other users, and allow a nickname or preferred handle to be displayed. So you can't upload a license for John Doe, age 30, and then say in your profile that your preferred name is Tony and you look 15. This would be a red flag to anyone. But makes perfect sense for Robert who likes to be called Bob, or William who goes by Bill, and actually look their age.
Will this end up another misguided "think of the children" measure that will just make more consentual adult sex illegal? Or will it be accepted with open arms by dating sites who want all your PII to sell? ('anonymised' of course) (CoughmatchCough)<p>Am I just jaded or does this seem to be the way things are going?
The apps are tools, it's up to the humans to do or not do stuff.<p>In these cases, how are children getting in first? Where are the parents of these children??<p>Then, it's not the apps that create abuse, but the users on the other side. There could be a set of rules that the apps should make users agree with, and remind from time to time, like be kind, don't get angry if it doesn't work out, report strange behaviors/underage profiles/illegal stuff if you happen to detect one, ...<p>Is it that complicated to be adults in 2019?