YouTube's age verification system is back to calling adults kids (www.androidcentral.com)

YouTube’s latest age-verification rollout—spotted in a second wave across the U.S., U.K. and parts of the EU—has been mistakenly flagging some adult users as minors. Multiple Reddit reports and coverage from Android Police describe people seeing the warning “We’ve changed some of your settings. We couldn’t verify that you’re an adult,” after which users can either accept a restricted experience or reverify their age. Verification currently requires uploading an ID, providing a credit card, or submitting a selfie; affected users say long-standing adult accounts (some over 18 or even 20 years old) are being misclassified. The issue matters because Google’s AI-driven age-estimation aims to enforce regional legal rules, restrict mature content, and serve non-personalized ads to minors, but false negatives create major user friction and privacy trade-offs. False classifications erode trust, force biometric/ID disclosures, and could drive regulatory scrutiny over accuracy and data handling. Technically, this points to limits in automated age inference models and the need for reliable fallbacks—Google’s Play Store offers a third-party verification option that YouTube customers currently lack. For now, users must manually reverify or accept restrictions while YouTube refines the system.