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The Verge Rightly Calls Out Online Age Verification Laws As A Threat To Your Privacy & The Open Internet
from the reporting-means-calling-out-bullshit dept
It’s frustrating how few news organizations these days are willing to call out nonsense for being nonsense. Too many feel they need to do one of those “view from nowhere” things where they pro/con everything. That’s why I appreciate The Verge, a news site that has spent years actually taking a stand. Its latest is a piece by Emma Roth, calling out the spate of age verification laws, and what a disaster they are for privacy online.
The article is great, and goes through a number of things that we’ve highlighted over the past few months, including the French data protection agency, CNIL, saying that no age verification tech protects privacy, and a similar report from the US’s Congressional Research Service. It also details many of the other privacy problems from various “tech” solutions to age verification:
It also poses a host of privacy risks, as the companies that capture facial recognition data would need to ensure that this biometric data doesn’t get stolen by bad actors. UK civil liberties group Big Brother Watch argues that “face prints’ are as sensitive as fingerprints” and that “collecting biometric data of this scale inherently puts people’s privacy at risk.” CNIL points out that you could mitigate some risks by performing facial recognition locally on a user’s device — but that doesn’t solve the broader problems.
Inferring ages based on browsing history raises even more problems. This kind of inferential system has been implemented on platforms like Facebook and TikTok, both of which use AI to detect whether a user is under the age of 13 based on their activity on the platform. That includes scanning a user’s activity for “happy birthday” messages or comments that indicate they’re too young to have an account. But the system hasn’t been explored on a larger scale — where it could involve having an AI scan your entire browsing history and estimate your age based on your searches and the sites you interact with. That would amount to large-scale digital surveillance, and CNIL outright calls the system “intrusive.” It’s not even clear how well it would work.
There’s a lot more in the article, but I also appreciate how it calls bullshit on the whole “we don’t let kids buy alcohol, so clearly we can block them from social media” argument:
Some proponents of online safety laws say they’re no different than having to hand over an ID to purchase alcohol. “We have agreed as a society not to let a 15-year-old go to a bar or a strip club,” said Laurie Schlegel, the legislator behind Louisiana’s age restriction law, after its passage. “The same protections should be in place online.” But the comparison misses vastly different implications for free speech and privacy. “When we think about bars or ordering alcohol at a restaurant, we just assume that you can hand an ID to a bouncer or a waiter, they’ll hand it back, and that’s the end of it,” Venzke adds. “Problem is, there’s no infrastructure on the internet right now to [implement age verification] in a safe, secure, private way that doesn’t chill people’s ability to get to constitutionally protected speech.”
Most people also spend a relatively small amount of their time in real-world adults-only spaces, while social media and online communications tools are ubiquitous ways of finding information and staying in touch with friends and family. Even sites with sexually explicit content — the target of Louisiana’s bill — could be construed to include sites offering information about sexual health and LGBTQ resources, despite claims by lawmakers that this won’t happen.
It’s well worth reading the whole article. I just thought it was nice to see a straightforward, carefully researched article like this in a news publication, that doesn’t equivocate, or try to present “both sides” on an issue. It just goes through a bunch of examples of the technology, highlights why each solution is a problem for privacy (and even gets quotes from people both pro and con about the tech, but doesn’t then shift the overall focus of the article), and concludes by noting what a big deal this could be for privacy and the open internet:
Even if many of these rules are shot down, the way we use the internet may never be the same again. With age checks awaiting us online, some people may find themselves locked out of increasingly large numbers of platforms — leaving the online world more closed-off than ever.
Kudos to Roth and the Verge. I wish more publications were willing to publish stories like this.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, age verification, cnil, crs, open internet, privacy
Comments on “The Verge Rightly Calls Out Online Age Verification Laws As A Threat To Your Privacy & The Open Internet”
Another practical problem with age verification, either its intrusively annoying, requiring verification for every session, making link following a chore. The alternative use cookies makes it somewhat pointless as the cooking identifies the machine not the user.
Re: Adding to the privacy burden
Another aspect of this is that it acts as a brake on people regularly clearing out their cookies. Signing in again to everything is too much effort.
It feels like a lot of effort goes into to increasing the friction if you want to protect your privacy.
Andy Warhol
Hopefully the final article will be about this disgusting verdict the Supreme Court rendered
Sites could move another country where such laws do not exist.
with some secession movements, partcularly a Republic of Northern Mexico, or Republica Nortea, that took in the northern tier of Mexican states, as well as California, Arizona, Mew Mexico, and Texas would Twitter and Facebook in the Republica Nortena meaning they would no longer have to comply with any laws of the United States, since Silicon valley would be in the new country, as well was a few porn sites that would no longer have to comply with Utah’s new age verification law.
If that happened, several major sites would no longer be subject to American laws.
Re: I enjoy science fiction but...
A theoretical country that includes California and Texas seems pretty far fetched. The current one in existence is having enough troubles hanging together. Maybe a Pacific Coast nation stretching from British Columbia to California would work. We’ll take Hawaii of course and maybe Alaska for the hell of it although they’re redder than we like. Can we skip Arizona and nab lovely New Mexico? But worthwhile pickings get slim after that.
“nferring ages based on browsing history raises even more problems. ”
Then you jut Tor browser which does not keep any browsing history.
I could see the Tor browser becoming more popular.
Re:
Nah, they would just infer nefariosity from the lack of any history.
But maybe the browser could present a fake history, full of perfectly innocent adult behaviour. That would be amusing: only children (intent to prove that they are not children) would have perfectly innocent adult histories.
Re: Re:
you would also regulurly delete all cookies and browsing history.
I do that so I don’t have to subcribe to every newspaper on the planet when it says I have exceeded the number of free articles.
Doing this to avoid paywalls does not either the CFAA or DMCA.
it might possible break theft of service laws in your state, but crushing cookies and browsing history for that purpose does not break any federal laws
Law-Makin Devolves
Government commands to the populace (‘law & regulation’) always expand and degenerate into ever more intrusive ‘Control’ of the populace.
Online-Age-Verification is just the latest minor symptom of that huge underlying problem.
Nothing will improve unless the arbitrary rule-making power of Federal/State/Local governing politicians is sharply reduced — and that is highly unlikely.
So get used to your loss of privacy and enjoy your political subjugation.
It's not just privacy
It’s a requirement that any person be granted permission from the government before viewing certain web sites.
Re: what sites are those?
The government needs to allow me to visit sites? Not that I’ve ever noticed. If I hit some kind of barrier in that regards, I’ll find another site to waste my time on. They’re all disposable.
screw this
I have a lil piece of tape over my camera permanently so I’m afraid I have to opt to of the BS age verification stuff. I can live without sites that try to impose that on me, their loss.
The government already uses anti-trust and the SEC to lean on platforms to censor thoughts.
Now, they want the user identified so that they know where to send the IRS auditor.
Face Won't Print
My daughter’s and My faces have never worked for facial recognition. It’s likely why I always get randomly selected for “additional airport screening.” Facebook keeps tagging my face as Satan, not kidding. Also google says my beard is a cat, so it tags me as a pet. I guess there would be no internet for us.