YouTube announced on Tuesday that it will begin to use artificial intelligence to estimate the ages of users in the US, in order to show them age-appropriate content.

The rollout of the new feature comes one day after Australia’s government announced it would ban children under 16 from using YouTube and less than a week after the UK implemented sweeping age checks on content on social networks.

YouTube’s AI age verification on its home turf indicates it is putting into place a form of compliance with the Australian and UK requirements, despite its persistent opposition to age-check requirements.

“Over the next few weeks, we’ll begin to roll out machine learning to a small set of users in the US to estimate their age, so that teens are treated as teens and adults as adults,” wrote James Beser, director of product management for YouTube Youth, in a blogpost titled Extending our built-in protections to more teens on YouTube.

Well...

Police in the south-western German state of Baden-Württemberg are to be allowed to use the analysis software from US firm Palantir, which is controversial among data protection advocates

The software was specifically developed for security agencies and is used by intelligence services, the military and police.

Palantir was founded in 2003 in the United States, notably by tech billionaire Peter Thiel. He is known for his libertarian and conservative positions, his closeness to US President Donald Trump and his criticism of liberal democracies.

With a rapidly changing political landscape in the United States, Canada must move quickly to safeguard valuable Canadian health data, argue the authors of a commentary published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and its reliance on massive amounts of data has increased the value of these data and created new risks on top of pre-existing concerns about health data being used by other countries for national security purposes.

"Serious privacy, security, and economic risks arise when companies in other countries hold and use Canadian data. Given the rapidly changing political climate in the United States, preserving the sovereignty of Canada's health data—notably, ensuring that the data are subject to Canadian laws and legal systems—requires renewed focus," writes co-author Dr. Michael Geist, a Canada Research Chair in Internet and e-Commerce Law, and professor at the Center for Law, Technology and Society, University of Ottawa.

Canada's health system is largely reliant on US providers that manage electronic medical record systems for hospitals and store encrypted data on servers or cloud servers. Although these servers are located in Canada, they are owned by the US companies Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud.

Europe has expressed similar concerns for their region. For example, the recent Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act in the US that potentially allows US law enforcement to access data held by US companies in other countries could be a threat.

OQB @Confidant6198@lemmy.ml

Newgrounds, a gaming forum, has some clever ways for non-intrusively complying with the shambling disaster that is the "UK Online Safety Act".

For years, I've been doing something similar to this when generating internal reports on DNA Lounge demographics: e.g., if someone bought a ticket for an 18+ event 5 years ago, they must be at least 23 years old now.

Newgrounds: Here is our current plan for UK users:

1. If your account is more than ten years old, we will assume you are currently over 18. This is in line with one of the methods of effective age assurance, which involves paying a third party to match your email address against some sort of database of scraped data, which determines if your email has been in use for a long time. We have our own long-term data, so we'll use that instead.

2. If your account ever bought Supporter status with a credit card and we can confirm that with the payment processor, we will assume you are over 18 because you need to be 18 in the UK to have a credit card.

3. If your account ever bought Supporter status more than two years ago, we will assume you are over 18 because you need to be at least 16 to have a Paypal or debit card in the UK (assuming we are right about this).

4. If none of the above applies, you will have the opportunity to pay a small one-time fee via credit card as confirmation of your age.

We are not planning to offer things like ID checks or facial recognition because these require us to pay a third party to confirm each person.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/50162198

From my understanding, an EU Council position doesn't necessarily mean the legislation will be adopted? This really feels like it'll be the time when it'll be adopted. The worst timeline.