UK ATOC Wants to Double Down on Failed Age Verification Laws

The ATOC is demanding mandates for devices to magically remove nudity from live streamed content among other things.

Lawmakers around the world were warned that age verification laws were a disaster waiting to happened. The technology was simply not up to the task (nor did they ever have any hope that they would be up to the task) and the laws sets up a privacy nightmare for all those who were asked to verify that they were old enough to view these platforms. Government chose to ignore those warnings and the failures that ensued were as spectacular as they were predictable.

The age verification laws failed in Australia, Europe, and the UK. Of course, as these failures were happening, the mainstream media went into full denial mode, pretending that these laws totally didn’t fail and proclaiming that the Australian experience is that these laws went on with “barely a hitch”. Anyone pointing to the many many ways in which these laws were failing were accused of being, among other things, misinformed because in their wild imaginations, the laws are perfect and things are going swimmingly.

Denial, however, only takes you so far. As the more recent study on Australia’s age verification law showed, 85% of under age users are on social media still. What is more vigorously swept under the rug was the other study pointing out that those affected by the social media ban were less informed about the world happening around them. Still, the former study seemed to jolt even the mainstream media into a brief moment of reality. The hand-wringing became less about how other countries can implement Australia’s oh so perfect law and more how to fix the problems (spoiler alert: you don’t). As it turns out, the answer, as prescribed by the reality denying mainstream media, was to blame these failures on social media and doubling the fines for failing to comply with the magical thinking that age verification laws will work if only companies just nerd harder.

All of this points to just how divorced from reality proponents of age verification laws truly are. If something sounds good in their head, then it’s up to the rest of the world to bend reality to conform to their world view. the thing is, if you think what they have done as reflected above was bad, you haven’t seen anything yet apparently. Not only are supporters in full denial of the legal failures of age verification, but they are also doubling down and demanding more magical thinking and fairy dust. From Digital Watch:

The UK Alliance Tackling Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse has welcomed the UK government’s plan to ban social media use by children under 16, while warning that the measure alone will not stop online child sexual abuse.

The alliance said age restrictions on mainstream social media platforms could reduce some risks. Still, children may move to less regulated digital spaces, including encrypted messaging services, gaming platforms and other online environments where grooming, sexual extortion and abuse can continue.

The propaganda is laced with elements of truth which, as a general rule, makes this propaganda much more dangerous and mind twisting. Yes, it is true that when the UK government started pushing their mass internet censorship program on porn websites, residents moved to unregulated porn websites. That is what some people end up doing if they feel that circumventing age gates are too much of a hassle for them personally. While that is an element of truth here, the organization gets the reason why wrong.

The reason isn’t that the law doesn’t go far enough. Instead, it is because the laws were doomed to fail. The laws are mandating the use of technology that simply doesn’t exist – specifically technology that accurately blocks under age people from numerous popular web spaces while, at the same time, maintaining the privacy and security of the remaining users. This technology doesn’t exist and has no hope of existing in the future. Instead, we got a law that compelled platforms to deploy critically faulty technology that had zero hope of ever actually working at all. That’s why it is so easily circumvented in the first place (not to mention easily hacked, abused, and leaked).

Of course, the organization has decided to push for the exact opposite of what you should be calling for here. That is the doubling down of these obviously broken laws. In addition to the call to expand age verification to include gaming platforms, they also called for even more:

The alliance proposed a package of technical, legislative and regulatory measures. These include stronger safeguards in end-to-end encrypted environments, robust age-assurance systems, mandatory safer-by-design principles, stronger enforcement under the Online Safety Act and clearer regulation of AI chatbots and companion services.

It also called for device-level nudity detection, upload prevention for known child sexual abuse material and measures to address livestreamed abuse, grooming and sexual extortion.

The technological illiteracy found here is staggering, though hardly surprising. I mean, if you honestly think that age verification laws are not only worthwhile to use, but are being deployed successfully, then you basically just admit that you have no clue how technology works. First of all, nudity detection filtering is notorious for confusing nude photos and pictures of sand dunes. From Gizmodo:

London’s Metropolitan Police believes that its artificial intelligence software will be up to the task of detecting images of child abuse in the next “two to three years.” But, in its current state, the system can’t tell the difference between a photo of a desert and a photo of a naked body.

The police force already leans on AI to help flag incriminating content on seized electronic devices, using custom image recognition software to scan for pictures of drugs, guns, and money. But when it comes to nudity, it’s unreliable.

“Sometimes it comes up with a desert and it thinks its an indecent image or pornography,” Mark Stokes, the department’s head of digital and electronics forensics, recently told The Telegraph. “For some reason, lots of people have screen-savers of deserts and it picks it up thinking it is skin colour.”

Here’s the kicker in all of this: the above is talking about still photos. What the organization is calling for is filtering for live streaming video. If the technology can’t properly detect nudity in still photography, what hope does it have for detecting live video streams? There is zero hope on that one.

Second of all, meddling in end-to-end encryption is a non-starter. If you are trying to break encryption to try and enforce laws on anything at all, you are simply breaking that encryption. As I’ve said over the years, there is no such thing as “safely breaking encryption”. All you are doing with such proposals is making everyone less safe by weakening the encryption in the first place. The Salt Typhoon AT&T hack is the perfect example of what inevitably ends up happening when you go down this road. People, including myself, are well past just talking about what could theoretically happen in that scenario. We are now pointing out how such thinking is only moving us towards repeating history.

Third, there is the vague “safer-by-design” principles. What we do know is organizations and politicians have long demanded that platforms remove “all bad things”. The problem is that what is a “bad thing” to one person is “free speech” to another. There is rarely, if ever, clear guidance on what is “bad thing”, only vague references to a laundry list of what someone thinks is a “bad thing”.

If the concern here is exploitation on social media, there are things that social media already does. One is to utilize databases of known exploitation material and using a hashing system to automatically detect and remove that kind of material. It’s not a perfect system, but it is a system that does make a difference. What’s more, social media already uses a reporting system that people can flag and have that content removed. If it’s illegal, that content is known to get removed quickly. In fact, the system is known to actually be a clever work around for Facebook never deleting your profile. If you request your account be removed, Facebook simply doesn’t delete the data. However, if you post pornographic material on your profile, it was known (at least for a time, don’t know if it’s still true) that Facebook would then actually delete your profile altogether. That was actually a thing of you can believe it.

What this organization is demonstrating is that they are just utilizing magical thinking. If they can push for laws that mandate the usage of certain technology, then platforms and tech companies would just “nerd harder” and will that technology into existence. In more practical terms, however, organizations like these will never be satisfied until the entire internet is deleted. That was painfully obvious with this paragraph:

UK ATOC called for a broader, system-wide response focused on prevention, stronger platform accountability and safer-by-design digital services. It said governments, regulators, technology companies and online service providers share responsibility for reducing opportunities for abuse before harm occurs.

Here’s the thing with this paragraph: if this organization truly thinks that demanding cell phone carriers and providers is going to be a magic bullet to stopping all things bad, they are clearly on another planet. This was tried back in the day with file-sharing through Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and protocol filtering. What ended up happening was the deployment of technologies like protocol obfuscation and other forms of encryption to thwart these efforts. That was with bandwidth heavy services. Combating things like messaging and other forms of communication often doesn’t even afford that kind of luxury in the first place.

So, the only thing you accomplish with roping in providers is making the internet that much less safe for everyone involved. Bad guys will work around these measures with ease. Average every day people will suddenly find that their information is getting compromised at a much higher frequency unless they employ the very same techniques more nefarious people use to keep their information safe. That is not a can of worms you want to further open.

At any rate, organizations like this are completely delusional in their thinking. Not only do they honestly believe that the age verification laws are succeeding (they are not), but they are calling for more laws and more wishful thinking to be enforced as well. Age verification laws are ending badly and proposals like this are only going to make matters much much worse.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.