With increasing global regulatory pressure, major social media platforms have introduced strict age verification mechanisms to limit minors from using certain specific features. To balance user privacy, many platforms have adopted an innovative device-side facial age estimation solution. However, unexpectedly, this seemingly cutting-edge technology has recently been easily bypassed by "amateur experts" on the internet using extremely low-tech methods.

image.png

Simple Sketches and Fake Mustaches Easily Pass

In this fun test against AI, a 12-year-old boy drew a mustache above his lip with a eyebrow pencil and was easily judged to be 15 years old and passed the verification. Even more amusingly, some users simply drew two dots and a line on their thumb to mimic eyes and mouth. After turning their head left and right in front of the camera as instructed, the AI concluded that the person was between 13 and 15 years old.

Inherent Technical Vulnerabilities of Lightweight Models

The reason for this embarrassing flaw is that these age estimation models run entirely on the user's phone or computer, and due to limited computing resources, the models cannot be overly complex. AI primarily relies on visual features such as eyes and skin texture for fuzzy inference. Moreover, to avoid mistakenly blocking normal users during the initial promotion phase, platforms had to set the judgment threshold relatively loose, which allowed carefully designed deception methods to exploit the loophole.