After seeing what happened to Omegle, a question stuck: is there a simple way to do age verification that both keeps people safe and doesn't contribute to a surveillance state?
After a year of hard work, that question resulted in AGEWARDEN. Each part of the service puts people first. No tracking, nothing stored (it's more difficult these days to NOT collect data :smh:).
Please give it a try if you have a moment https://agewarden.ai/demo. Feedback is very much welcomed.
GG
No offense but this is probably worthless is an adversarial environment.
So what is a solution? Parents. What about those that don't have parents? Surely they have guardians. Adults who guide the next generation instead of delegating them to technology.
Voice actors, deep fakes, replay attacks (recordings from a TV/computer/phone) - mitigated. As in my earlier comment where teen voices have a signature, these all have unique signatures as well. The ongoing part is staying up-to-date with the latest synthetic (deep fakes/AI generated) as those are getting better each day.
There should exist frequencies impossible to reach for anyone but post-pubescent men.
Of course that would make it teen-age verification at best.
This is a solution that hopefully will cease to be relevant as soon as the remaining infrastructure is finished.
Some people may be okay with that, others may want to browse the web in privacy.
> What doesn't work is requiring each service to independently perform verification which leads to a massive expansion in the proliferation of personal data.
And that's the AGEWARDEN difference, we keep no data, literally. I don't even know who's visited the site. Send your AI to the FAQ page for analysis: https://agewarden.ai/faq, I want to make sure we clear your bar.
I checked around a bit more, and this seems to directly contradict the HN title:
https://agewarden.ai/customer-agreement
> AGEWARDEN is an age estimation tool. It does not verify identity and does not guarantee 100% accuracy. Customer is responsible for determining whether AGEWARDEN satisfies the legal requirements applicable to its business and jurisdiction.
If someone told me they had 100% accuracy with inference, I'd call them out.
Thank YOU for calling it out :)
Now the problem turns into being able to tell men from women.
EDIT: this of course isn't a serious proposition.
Then again I wonder what effect this would have implemented on e.g. a porn site. Women also watch porn, but with enough tuning I think it shouldn't produce too many false positives - if only due to the demographic of the users.
Surely the vocal cords and larynx of an adult woman are on average larger than those of a 10yo boy?
Yes and no. Like geology, the more you dig into audio, the more is uncovered and available.
A child/teen with a deep voice has very unique perturbations that don't exist in other cohorts across feature sets. Adults may share some characteristics, but not at the levels found in specific age groups.
> I... told it in a higher then normal voice that I was a kid, and it said I was under 18...
Good. If you're pretending to be a kid, you should be blocked. The launch is for sites that allow adults only (should have made that more clear in the post).
Deep voiced teens are THE HARDEST. What I commented earlier about the amount of data available in a clip of audio, that's real - teens have unique signatures that only show in their cohort.
Thanks for testing!
I was expecting, at the very least, to see Apple make their App Store 18+ checks available to developers at WWDC this year. Yet, there's still nothing except the self-reported (useless) "Declared Age Range." Apple has the best integration story of all of them, and could bring it to their entire ecosystem (native iOS apps, mobile Safari, all of MacOS), yet they haven't. Why?
Also, nothing comes to mind regarding browsers, android devices, or non-mobile devices. As far as I'm aware, no one seems to be in a rush to make this available. With non-Apple hardware, I can see it being trickier, but still, I haven't seen many (any) attempts. Why?
It probably doesn't help that many don't see the difference between "deep-state surveillance digital ID verification" and privacy-preserving ZKPs to verify age.
Agreed.
> Also, nothing comes to mind regarding browsers, android devices, or non-mobile devices. As far as I'm aware, no one seems to be in a rush to make this available.
Exactly, it doesn't benefit companies to NOT know as much about you as possible. Reminded me of this: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
Tiberium•1h ago
EDIT: The website itself partially answers my question:
> Self-declaration, the "I am over 18" checkbox, is explicitly prohibited by every major regulator in the UK, EU, and Australia.
But then:
> Facial scanning works, but it builds infrastructure that outlasts the check. A system that estimates your age today can identify you tomorrow. Platforms that rolled it out met immediate backlash and reversals. Users do not trust platforms with their face.
How would we trust your platform to not store voice fingerprints, then?
(On a side note, all descriptions all LLM-written, but that's expected in 2026)
wentw0rth•43m ago
> wouldn't it be far easier to bypass this than even face (live video) verification... or am I missing something?
Missing the experience of learning just how much information is in a clip of audio; replay/synthetic attack mitigation is baked in, and more cost-effective to run vs. video, and less creepy.
The mission: make the process easy (and inexpensive) as possible so that people can be verified at scale, without giving away their personal data and being the product.
wentw0rth•13m ago
> How would we trust your platform to not store voice fingerprints, then?
This is a good question. Other than having it be more expensive to keep this data, and if it were true, destroy the company whose core tenant is literally that... you can't.
If you have suggestions for an independent audit, more than happy to add that to our stack where applicable.
When I say it's hard to not collect data, woof. Any fresh AWS account just LOVES to slurp it up by default.