Google Adding Age Verification In Korea
Google Korea plans to add an age-verification system to its search engine later this year, in order to prevent users under 19 from finding adult-themed websites in their search results. Users who type in any of 700 words (supplied by the government) will be asked to enter their name and national resident registration number, which will be compared against a national database to determine if the person is over 19 years of age.
Here’s the odd thing: The article only says “Google Korea”, not Google South Korea or Google North Korea. You’d expect to hear stories like this coming from North Korea, but all indications are that this is being done in South Korea (the article does mention Seoul, and Google doesn’t have a search engine for North Korea). This isn’t censorship, and it makes perfect sense to put in extra effort to keep minors away from porn, but…
Effective with this new system, everyone who verifies their age will have their search history potentially linked to their name and national registration number. Nothing has been said as to whether Google will keep that information linked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they do so simply due to annoyance factors (who wants to be asked on every search?). Imagine if your searches were linked to your driver’s license? Yikes.
I disagree. I don’t care what the dictionary says “censorship” is, but I think this is censorship.
What’s wrong with opt-out filtering for everyone?
I think Google Netherlands didn’t even offer filtering back in the day. I’ve been using Google.com (as opposed to .nl) for a long time now, but pretty much every time I delete my cookies, I’ll set my search options not to actually filter my results.
Why not just enable filtering for everyone, unless they opt out of it? Is this due to local regulations? If not, why are they doing this in Korea? Massive public support?
I don’t understand.
Comment by Tim | May 19, 2007