Yes, the key thing is it might have extracted useful info from otherwise confusing data, it might have mixed up info from the data incorrectly or it might have just made it up.

So it can be useful, if you can then validate the info provided in more traditional means, but it’s dubious as a first pass, and sometimes surprisingly bad when it’s a scenario you thought it would work well at.

For solutions that back on actually “verifying” the age by requiring credit card or government ID, those suck.

As described, this is an administrator self describing the age, which doesn’t mean much to anyone except kids of people who apply parental controls to systems their kids have access to.

Accounts already require your “full name” but we don’t consider that “full name verification”.

This proposal seems to be in the spirit of least intrusive means to let parents opt into this stuff if they want, with no ties to identity compromising third party/state “verification”.

Question is whether this sort of solution that at least gives parents some chance will satisfy the lawmakers long term. For the wave of laws now, it seems to suffice to self attest age.