Do you ever get that ‘verify your age’ popup when viewing videos online (you know that little thing that has drop downs for date, month and year)? Me too and it is really starting to tick me off, especially when the ‘check’ doesn’t seem to work and I’m not able to view the video in question. I mean what’s the point, it doesn’t verify your age it’s simply an arbitrary test of which D.O.B you decide to choose regardless of whether you’re 5 or 50.

I’m not sure why websites are doing this, it seems to be the new ‘feature’ on videos, especially gaming videos. I can only assume that it is some kind of attempt (maybe they’re required to under some law?) for websites to cover their backs and saying “we did an age check so no one under age should be viewing inappropriate content on our site”, but that doesn’t even make sense, because there is no verification at all, nothing at all is verified, a simple rating next to or before the video (like film age ratings) would achieve the same amount of verification.

Even if you do decide to put in your real date of birth and it says ‘sorry you’re too young’ there is nothing, on any of the websites stopping them from just refreshing the page and choosing a different value. Seriously do they expect a 14 year old child who goes to view a video to abide by the rating? Do we think even if they are naïve enough to put in their real age they’re going to think “oh fiddlesticks, it appears I am too young to view this content I shall have to instead play some spore” or will they just refresh and put in a different date.

Maybe it’s a conspiracy, part of a drive to decrease our available spare time and subjugate the masses, imagine the 5 – 10 seconds it takes to ‘verify your age’ multiplied by the times the verification has been done and I’m sure it will work out to a lot of man hours down the drain for NOTHING.