Age verification has always been problematic technologically, but the legal side isn’t much better as Reddit is showing.
The studies have long pointed out that facial recognition is a broken technology. Research has long concluded that age verification is a failed concept. Experts have argued until they were blue in the face that age verification shouldn’t move ahead. The government, however, ignored all of that and just stuck to being true believers™ of the technology because if they believe hard enough and legislate that the technology be used, then the platforms and third parties will nerd harder and magically come up with a solution all on their own.
This mentality is working out exactly as expected. As the research had long concluded, facial recognition technology is failing to detect underage people. In fact, the technology is so bad, a golden retriever fooled it. If you wanted to know what “world class” “industry standard” the state of the technology is in, this is it.
While the technological side of age verification continues to be an absolute clusterfuck, the legal side isn’t exactly that much better. Another long-standing prediction for experts is that such laws are hugely vulnerable to legal challenges. In Australia, that prediction has now come true as social media platform, Reddit, launched a legal challenge against the law. From NPR:
Global online forum Reddit on Friday filed a court challenge to Australia’s world-first law that bans Australian children younger than 16 from holding accounts on the world’s most popular social media platforms.
California-based Reddit Inc.’s suit filed in the High Court follows a case filed last month by Sydney-based rights group Digital Freedom Project.
Both suits claim the law is unconstitutional because it infringes on Australia’s implied freedom of political communication.
“We believe there are more effective ways for the Australian government to accomplish our shared goal of protecting youth, and the SMMA (Social Media Minimum Age) law carries some serious privacy and political expression issues for everyone on the internet,” Reddit said in a statement.
“While we agree with the importance of protecting people under 16, this law has the unfortunate effect of forcing intrusive and potentially insecure verification processes on adults as well as minors, isolating teens from the ability to engage in age-appropriate community experiences (including political discussions), and creating an illogical patchwork of which platforms are included and which aren’t,” Reddit added.
This outcome should not come as a surprise. Now, how successful this will be is not something I can so easily predict. I may have some familiarity with American law and have a pretty reasonable understanding of Canadian law, I’m less familiar with Australian law. Still, hopefully, the legal challenge is successful, the law is tossed, and the cleanup can begin after the mess this law left behind. These age verification laws should never have been a thing in the first place.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
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