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 […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg