Another study is being tossed onto the pile of evidence showing that age verification is a privacy and security nightmare.
Age verification is a flawed mess chalk full of privacy and security problems. This fact has long been consistent throughout these debates. The problem is that government doesn’t give a flying fuck about protecting peoples privacy and security. Breaking down the freedom granted by the internet is one of the governments top priorities and they’ll do it by pretending to be trying to “protect the children”.
Now, I’d talk about the conclusions by CNIL that found that no age verification solution exists that both is reliable and respect people’s privacy. I’d mention the Australian findings back in 2023 that found that age verification is a privacy and security nightmare. In fact, I could also talk about the subsequent leaks, breaches, and hacks of such systems which effectively proved those findings. The problem is that facts and reality doesn’t matter to government. For them, destabilizing the privacy and security is all worth it in their covert effort to control speech online and restrict access to various life lines for minority groups. After all, the cruelty is the point as government forges ahead with these age verification laws anyway.
In Australia, there are efforts to push age verification on social media which bans youth from accessing it completely. The country dispensed with all pretext that this is about protecting youth from harmful or “explicit” content and just pushed for an outright ban unless you fork over all of your personal information for tracking purposes. Recently, the Australian government even went to the extreme of expanding this to YouTube as well which has sparked even further outrage over this government overreach.
As if to further highlight the blatant recklessness of the Australian government, the Australian government has released what mainstream media describes as a “landmark study” which concludes that, yes, there are a number of privacy and security risks associated with age verification. From ABC:
The report found that a variety of methods were technically possible, including formal verification using government documents, parental approval, or emerging technologies to assess age based on facial structure, gestures, or behaviours.
Concerns with reliability and privacy were identified with all of these approaches. Age estimation technologies were less reliable for girls than boys and for non-white faces and could not provide precise estimates, with an average error of two to three years.
Accessing government documents (for example, passports or licences) carried privacy risks, with the authors identifying a “concerning trend” of some providers holding on to user data unnecessarily, but they were, in general, more accurate.
Parental controls, which are already used loosely by Apple and Google in some contexts, raised both privacy and accuracy issues.
To translate, sure, age verification technology is unreliable, horribly insecure, brutally inaccurate, and are an absolute privacy nightmare, but hey, they can work to identify people some of the time, so it’s just hunkydory! This is pretty blatant recklessness on the governments part. Still, it’s unlikely that the government is going to give a damn and will just march ahead with these laws anyway. Some of you may suffer horribly over this, but that’s a sacrifice the government is willing to make.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
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Honestly the worst part of these laws is its kinda revealing that many people just dont care? I mean people are fighting hard in the UK but many polls are saying way too many people are ok with giving up their privacy completely if it has a chance of stopping kids from seeing a bad…though it is early. As time goes along and more people are inconvenienced I suspect that will change. after all there are two great ‘motivators’ for humanity, apathy and spite. and many havent hit the spite threshhold yet since it hasnt directly effected them yet.
Wait until the inevitable data breaches, and continued slow down/inconveniences. That will wake some up.
I think there have already been data breaches but they were quietly swept under the rug
They absolutely have been. There are leaks and breaches with these systems (3 by my count, but there could very easily be more), not to mention companies that hold on to people’s personal information even though they swear they don’t do that. It’s hard to find these reports because the big media companies REALLY don’t like talking about flaws in the system.
I think it depends on where you look. If you look towards older people who don’t want anything to do with “computers”, then they’ll probably be on board with this idea because they think that the world went to hell once “computers” became involved in society. So, anything that helps bring back the “good old days” (re: their highschool years) is probably good for society, so making the internet worse is worth it in their minds.
Conversely, if you look on social media like on YouTube, there is no shortage of people who are absolutely outraged that all of this is happening and are doing everything they can to fight against these laws. They know this is about controlling speech and they fully recognize why this is all about internet censorship on the part of government.
I don’t give that much weight to polls pushed by the media in areas like this simply because they are one of the major groups pushing for these laws. So, anything that helps sell these laws is a good thing in their view and if the polling looks good, they’ll happily publish those findings. I’m saying this mostly because I’ve seen a lot of push polling over the years where questions asked to people being polled are heavily skewed to produce a specific result. So, for instance, a question might be asked about age verification and the phrasing could be along the lines of “Do you agree that protecting children is important and that we should put safeguards in place to protect those children?” You’re going to get a lot of people who will support the idea even though they don’t really know what they are saying yes to. Conversely, if you asked, “Do you think you should hand over your government ID to view the open internet?” You’re going to get a lot more “no” answers. I think I saw one polling suggesting UK residents largely support it, but I didn’t dig too deep into that one because there were bigger things happening that day. I ultimately didn’t get back to that, unfortunately.