Reddit Surrenders. Implements Age Verification for UK Users

As the UK gets ready to implement age verification, Reddit apparently decided to step ahead of the law and implement age verification.

Governments from around the world are trying to lock down the internet by implementing so-called “age verification” laws and regulations. The narrative is that this is strictly about protecting underage people from accessing explicit pornographic imagery, but the reality is that this is just a stepping stone for greater levels of censorship. This is because age verification that politicians pinky swear is only for porn websites like Pornhub has already had supporters looking at what other kinds of content they can start censoring. This includes video games, app stores, social media, and, more recently, search engines. In other words, you give an inch and the government will take a mile. This as there appears to be no end in sight for just how far government will take their censorship efforts on the internet.

In the UK, that government passed the Online Safety Act, a terrible bill that would unleash a considerable amount of harm on the internet. Those warnings became reality as the law has already resulted in a number of digital fatalities as websites are forced to shut down due to the excessive provisions in the law. While some websites are shutting down and ending careers, others are apparently just surrendering to the laws demands. One such website is social media giant, Reddit, who announced that they would be implementing age verification requirements for UK users. From Mashable:

Reddit has announced it will begin verifying the ages of users in the UK, responding to a new law coming into effect this month.

“[T]he UK Online Safety Act has new requirements to implement additional measures to prevent children from accessing age-inappropriate content,” Reddit’s chief legal officer Ben Lee aka u/traceroo posted to r/RedditSafety on Monday. “So, starting July 14 in the UK, we will begin collecting and verifying your age before you can view certain mature content.”

As such, Reddit has partnered with Persona, a third-party age verification provider. Users in the UK who wish to access restricted content will need to upload either a selfie or their government ID, which Persona will use to verify that they are over 18. Users who don’t pass this check will not be able to access such content, including that which is sexually explicit.

Reddit has stressed that this system is only to verify users’ age, and it has no interest in your identity. Lee further stated that Persona won’t know what subreddits you visit, and has promised it won’t keep users’ uploaded images more than seven days. Even so, having to upload their driver’s license to access adult material will no doubt make many Reddit users uncomfortable.

There’s a lot of pitfalls with this. For one, it shows that Reddit is all too willing to throw its users under the bus. If an onerous law is passed, they would rather just let their users deal with the consequences rather than try and fight such an awful law. This is, of course, a historical 180 given how much Reddit fought against SOPA back in the day.

Another pitfall is the fact that this only further normalizes the activity of handing over copious amounts of personal information to shady third parties just to access the open web. While there have been websites in the past that demanded a credit card to view their material, the web was open to all. What this move does is normalize a sort of “papers please” mentality to the web. It’s only after users paperwork appears to be in order that people can access the open internet again.

Then there is the aspect of personal information. While Reddit insists that they won’t be using this to identify users, that’s not really telling the whole story. The concern is the fact that personal information is being forked over and processed. What happens to that personal information? In the thread announcing this, users pointed to this concern:

Have you considered using an alternative to Persona? It’s a shell company located in the US, handling EU data. From what I have experienced with LinkedIn a lot of the data is even handled by CR’s outside of the US. Is there no EU provider of these types of services? With the amount of distrust of non-EU tech suppliers growing, it seems a bit odd to choose Persona as the company handling the personal data.

One user responded with this:

I was checking on this thread to see if I had any reply to my comments or if anyone also talking about it got an answer- so you might want to scroll down for this, but in no way shape or form is this compliant with UK or EU GDPR legislation.

Buried in their privacy policy it states that the company will create a biometric scan of you using your id (nice bit of special cat data there), can retain it for 3 years and sell it to third party advertisers.

So, unsurprisingly, there are concerns about this. This has long been an issue with companies that process such information in the first place. That concern was also reflected within the community.

At any rate, this is definitely not a positive development in the saga of mass government censorship going on in the world right now. It’s one thing when government pushes such laws, but it’s quite another when the big players on the internet just throw their hands up and actively surrenders on top of it all to these onerous requirements. It shows that there are websites who are less interested in defending the rights of their users.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.