By Fria Reyes, PrivacyGuides | Fact-Checked by Irfan Ahmad
The feature uses an age estimation AI model to determine if you're an adult or not. Apple says the age model runs locally on your device or with Apple's Private Cloud Compute, so theoretically neither Apple nor any third party should have access to your selfie.
To confirm that you're an adult, your selfie is analyzed using age-estimation models that run both on-device and on Private Cloud Compute, which extends the security and privacy of your Apple device into the cloud. The results are combined on your device. When your selfie is analyzed on your device and on Private Cloud Compute, it isn't accessible to anyone, not even Apple. Once your age is confirmed, your selfie is deleted and isn't retained in any form.
Previously, you could verify your age if your Apple account was old enough to meet the age requirements, by having a credit card attached to your account (debit cards don't work), or by scanning your passport, driver's license, or government ID.
All but the first method have their privacy problems: providing credit card details means giving identifiable information (although Apple already requires you to give payment information in order to download even free apps, so it's not much different than what most people already have to do).
Scanning your ID can expose sensitive personal documents to third parties. The online messaging platform Discord famously had a data leak of around 70,000 IDs from a third party they used to verify ages from ID photos.
Selfies can suffer from wildly differing effectiveness and security. The age verification in Discord was hilariously defeated using the in-game photo mode in Death Stranding.
The effectiveness depends entirely on how good the age estimation algorithm is, and there will always be a false-positive and false-negative rate.
Poorly-implemented selfie verification can have disastrous privacy consequences as well. A firm that handles age verification for companies like Roblox and ChatGPT, Persona, leaked their database of selfies and it was discovered over 269 checks were performed on faces, including if they look "suspicious."
It seems like Apple's version is much better in that regard, definitely better than having to send sensitive documents off to a third party.
If you live in Australia, Brazil, Singapore, South Korea, the UK, or Texas (United States), you'll have to verify your age, but if you're not from one of these regions you won't have to worry about it for now.
Read next: What would happen if the internet went down?
by External Contributor via Digital Information World
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