Hey Brian, great to see you today. Thanks for joining me.
Oh, always a pleasure. Good to see you as well.
So let's dig into TikTok. Why not? Everyone else is talking about TikTok, so I thought we'd get into a different take on the topic. I want to talk about age verification. So it's your specialty. It seems to be an issue on TikTok regardless of who you talk to. So let's explore that a little bit, if you're up to it.
I'd love to, because age verification is important across so many different industries, TikTok being one I think people are rightly concerned about.
So let's give it a little bit of context. Of course we don't know the status of TikTok in the US. We know that there is a 90-day extension for related parties to work out ownership. So let's assume that there will be a resolution. TikTok is still active now — it was gone dark for a hot minute, but now it's open and available for users to participate. But the topic of age verification is one that is contentious. First of all, you have to be 13 in order to get access to the platform. First question is: how do you prove your age when 13-year-olds don't have driver's licenses? So there's no government-issued ID.
To verify age — look, there are companies out there that are doing it through parental consent, and part of that parental consent is proving who they are in relationship to the child.
Now it sounds cumbersome and it might be, but to protect a 13-year-old — name a parent who probably wouldn't want to do that. So I think there's a big argument or debate right now over privacy protection and profit. And I think that businesses really need to care about protection and privacy, and I think a lot of parents are behind that. But if you're a 13-year-old and you really want to get access to TikTok, is it a requirement that your parent allows access, or can you establish an email address and self-report an age — which is 13, if you're not 13 — and get access?
Yeah, currently there's not enough protection about that. You name so many websites — whether it's TikTok, whether it's a website for a gun manufacturer, alcohol, pornography — so many of them just say, are you 18 or over, or 13 and over? Click this button. There is no proof. So the same way that we make you prove who you are when you're getting credit, when you're doing anything else — if we really want to protect our youth, we need to make sure that we know who they are. And so much of the self-reporting also requires, well, who are you, where are you, what are you — and again, you're giving away information that allows you to have your identity stolen later in life or now. So in my mind, yeah, let's make it a little bit difficult, because to me it's worth it for the protection.
So let's move on now to 16 and 18-year-olds, because there are certain things that you have to be 16 or 18 to do on the platform, including going live. Going live, meaning broadcasting your opinions or whatever it is you want to do in front of an audience, requires certain proof of being 16 or 18 years of age. I've done some research on that. I've looked at different TikTok going-live people, you know, those who are trying to get followers, who said that the process is really very cumbersome. There are three ways to do it: you can have a picture taken of your face and there's technology that basically says you look like you're of age; there's the driver's license presentation, that you then get a code that you have to put — the driver's license and the code for facial recognition and a picture to be taken; or there's the credit card authorization, which is also a third proof. Everyone says it takes forever. People say that it is often very cumbersome, that they're not able to do what they want to do for weeks at a time. And the recommendation is to take your chance with technology and have your face recognized and go with that. What is your view on those three options and the process itself?
Well, if you go through each of them — right, so using a picture to project your age gives a range. They can't say you were born on April 17th; they don't know when it was. So again, what are they going to catch? And then the other thing that always worries me about that is deep fakes are getting really good. I have no idea how well that technology works against a deep fake. I know there's good technology to detect them, maybe, but then what do you do? Because it's not perfect. So is it really the age? And then what's the range? And then, okay, well, if it's 21, 18, 16, 13 — whatever was required — if you have a two-year age range, then you know you're going to let a bunch of people through.
The driver's license and the photo only works if you're really good at detecting a fake license. And a lot of that always still requires a photo of the license to compare to a template. And I'm going to tell you — and I always do this, and you've seen me — I have tons of card tricks that pass the template. So okay, what do we do after that? And then the credit card thing, it's like money in, money out. They're going to drop some money in and pull it back out. And how often do we all look that deep into our credit card bills? Okay, so someone's going to steal my identity and realize, hey, Brian doesn't look — but if it's a dollar in, dollar out, I'm not going to notice. And it's all time-consuming, as you said. And no matter what the product is that we are trying to make sure that kids don't get access to, you need instant. And if it's 3 minutes, 30 minutes, 3 days — no matter what it is, no, that doesn't work in e-commerce. It has to be instantaneous, and it has to be highly, highly accurate. Otherwise you're kind of annoying half your client base or more, and you're losing good customers, and you're letting kids in who probably shouldn't be allowed.
Yeah, a lot of the complaints were legitimate users who are trying to go live or to take the next step with their business relationship with the platform, and are frustrated because it takes so long. Why does it take so long? Why does it take three weeks or 30 days for this process to work itself out?
