Marketplace Morning reports new Skin in the Game series explores what we can learn about

money and careers from the $300 billion video game industry. Plus, here how an Oakland-based

program helps young people get the skills they need to break into this booming industry.

Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning report wherever you get your

podcasts. Keeping kids safe online is sort of like a Facebook relationship status.

It's complicated. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Karino.

There are growing concerns about the harms of social media for young people, but to protect kids,

platforms have to know who is underage. That's why age verification has become a big focus for

policy makers. Several states have passed laws that require it, but there are trade-offs to

these policies, according to new analysis from Utah State's Center for Growth and Opportunity.

Matt Peralt and Scott Brennan of UNC Chapel Hill Center on Technology Policy

co-wrote that research. I asked Scott, what age verification systems are in place now?

The first is we call age gating, and it's basically where users just give their age or more

often their birthday. The second one is users submitted hearted identifiers, so things like

government ID. And then finally, there's this category, we call inferential age assurance.

Basically, platforms are combing through user data to make guesses about the ages of their users,

and so they can do age assurance or age verification that way.

That latter one is actually the age inferences is the opening scene for our report,

because there was this exchange between the TikTok CEO at the hearing where he testified

earlier in the spring and a member of Congress where TikTok was getting pushed on,

what are the practices that it uses to protect kids online? That was something clearly lawmakers

were concerned about, and so the CEO started to go into detail about how they use these inferential

...