With YouTube set to roll out their AI-based age determining system in a few days (August 13th in the U.S.) as an indirect result of the UK’s Online Safety Act, it would be wise for users to check out what potentially could impact their account should the system make an error that you are underage (and in order to verify that you are not, will require submitting a government ID, selfie, or credit card).
There is also supposed to be an August 13th boycott of the platform (while I will do my part, I don’t think a one day nonuse of the platform will amount to anything; my stance on that is anything economic related needs to be sustained for a long enough period where the impact is enough to get businesses to blink first).
Activating Restricted Mode (to test)
Clicking on your user profile avatar (top right corner), one of the choices near the bottom is an option called Restricted Mode. Clicking into that option will reveal a toggle where it can be activated (the site will refresh) upon exiting out from this menu. Remember to turn it off after trying it out unless you want a self-filtered version of the site.
What many have found is that some of their content simply disappears when Restricted Mode is on. In my case, one of the onsen related videos (the one with Chiaki) was no longer displayed (just an initial quick notice). What this means for content creators is they will likely begin seeing a drop in their analytics (views + engagement) which will also impact their revenues if they are monetized (in my case, it doesn’t matter since I do not have monetization enabled).
Some channels (like Deep Humor) which have been highly critical of this entire AI-based age detecting system, also noticed a blatant pattern in how his own videos disappeared in this mode; they were all the recent ones of him being critical about this. Coincidental or not, I can see how this entire system will be used to censor content Google/YouTube does not want viewers to see. And part of this coercion is to get creators (who are monetized) to submit to this verification (since Google’s ulterior motive here is to capture something like that government ID as they already have your other information that was submitted prior in order to become monetized. Remember that Alphabet (Google) primary revenue generator is advertisement (thus everything they do is related to gathering as much personally identifiable information as they can).
This isn’t too different from the “your channel has lost access to advanced features” thing which has impacted me twice already. This most recent one was back in January 2025 and in spite of selecting the “build channel history” option (which usually takes around 2-months), I still haven’t gotten it back and really do not care; I’m just employing this option to see how long it takes. Given that it is now mid-August, it’s becoming more obvious that this is how YouTube (specifically parent Google) wants to compel you for that ID verification (or if they can get that 6 second biometric style video of your face, would suffice even better for them in their data collection scheme).
With this age guessing AI system, it will add on to the above because there is no way there won’t be a huge amount of false positives of users account being erroneously flagged. The proper response by everyone should be “hell no, you aren’t getting my government ID or selfie (which is vague as to what they really want; on the “lost advanced features” page, they ask for a 6 second video scan of your face where you follow prompts similar to what you need to do with something like Face ID but faster). If that entire thing doesn’t raise a red flag (because they are capturing at least 6 seconds of biometric data of your face), I don’t know what to write. But hearing about how many submitted to Instagram’s request for a government ID or video during their own recent AI-fueled account suspensions, I don’t have much hope that many will start ditching the platform in large enough numbers for Google to care.
For some curiosity based reasons, I’m actually pining for at least one of my accounts being wrongly flagged because I will then have personal proof of the false positive data. Up until today, I left their personalized ad systems enabled including whatever it tried to guess. As part of this, I also had my YouTube history turned on. I turned all of that off on my main account (I will do another posting on this Google account privacy stuff since that is a separate data store of history from what is tracked on YouTube). I will be turning off all of this on my other accounts (each has very curated experiences) by the end of this coming week.
2 Comments
Comments are closed.