Venture Capitalists and AI Investors Push Canadian Age Verification Law

Venture Capitalists and AI company executives are pushing a petition to pressure Canada into passing age verification.

The campaign to push mass government internet censorship and surveillance is well and truly under way here in Canada. The disturbing thing is how quickly it seems to be unfolding at least from a lobbying perspective. The moment the Liberal party got a majority government, a so-called “grass roots” movement suddenly appeared out of nowhere and pushed two resolutions at the Liberal National convention demanding the government demanding that Canada adopt age verification both for social media and chat bots.

Mysteriously, those resolutions passed, suggesting that the Liberal government was at least being pressured to flip-flop on the internet censorship scheme. Still, the hope was that it was just some crazy idea that appeared at a convention and that it would stay confined to the convention.

Sadly, that didn’t happen. Shortly after the resolutions passed, the Culture Minister suddenly said that the government was “seriously considering” those censorship plans. This while implying that, hey, the people really want to be subjected to heavy internet censorship and surveillance, so who are they to deny the will of the people? After all, it is just part of the grass roots movement of every day Canadians.

Suddenly, out of the blue, as part of a pure coincidental thing, a “petition” was launched that the mainstream media just so happened to magically become aware of despite having, as of this writing, less than 5,000 signatures. Don’t worry, though, it’s totally above board, totally grass roots, and totally citizen led and nothing more! I mean, never mind that the Liberal resolutions just so happened to also coincidentally come from Quebec. That’s just that, a coincidence! Nothing to see here citizen, move along. From the Canadian Press:

A citizen-led movement from Quebec has launched a petition demanding that the Canadian government pass a law prohibiting children under the age of 16 from creating social media accounts.

The group, Age Standard, says it is also urging for “a concrete mechanism” to ensure the law’s legal enforcement.

“We are parents who have designed and analyzed the systems our own children are growing up with today,” said Jean-Sébastien Giroux, the movement’s spokesperson and CEO and co-founder of Hologram. “We know how these platforms work, why they have no incentive to self-regulate, and above all, we know that a technical solution exists — one that is reliable and already deployed elsewhere.”

Giroux, along with six other parents from the tech and venture capital industries, is proposing that a ban be enforced “using age-estimation technology operated by independent third parties, based on a model already in place in several jurisdictions, including Australia.”

It should go without saying that the talking point that the technology already exists is a bald-faced lie. In fact, the total failure of the technology has been making headline news in recent days. Fed up with the failings of the private sector in developing a mythical technology that both accurately identifies underage people and protect people’s privacy, the European Union developed their own app as a solution to solving the privacy and reliability concerns. The initiative blew up in the governments face when researchers delved into the code and discovered multiple security flaws, a data leak, and easy ways to circumvent it. It represented a massive humiliation for the government and yet another vindication for critics and experts like us.

The icing on the cake here is the inclusion of the eternally stupid “b-b-but AUSTRALIA!!!” comment in all of this. The irony being that the Australian experience has been one of the biggest points of failure for the scheme. As we earlier noted, the kids have long circumvented the age verification systems that were set up and have by and large been completely unaffected by the law. This is the reality that have been met with weapons grade level of denial from the mainstream media and backers of the censorship and surveillance regimes. The Australian example has long been the symbol of why age verification has failed.

The thing in all of this is that the people hawking co-signing this petition actually put their names forward. Truth be told, I’ve been waiting some someone from the age verification camp to slip and potentially expose their motivations for quite some time. It looks like that very thing has happened. While the Canadian Press basically pawned them off as just “parents” who just so happen to be people who led some tech companies, the reality is that a number of their resumes is completely filled with AI company backing and venture capitalism.

Dan Robichaud, who the Canadian Press billed as a “former head of innovation at Intel” has a website where he says he is investing in AI:

Now, I’m all-in on AI—investing my Family Office Capital in disruptive startups and harnessing AI power with genius PhDs at a Leading Artificial Intelligence Research Firm.

Jean-Sébastien Giroux, who the Canadian press billed as a “CEO and co-founder of Hologram”, but the LinkedIn profile also says this:

I focus on leveraging artificial intelligence to transform business operations into self-sustaining centers of excellence.

Jean-François Gagné, is, of course, an executive of the AI company, Element AI.

Claudine Blondin Bronfman was noted for being “chair of the board of C2 Montréal and director of Claridge and Stingray”. Claridge, of course, is an investing company.

Magaly Charbonneau, who the Canadian Press simply billed as “partner at Inovia Capital”, has a website says this:

VP WW Sales and investor at Hostopia.com (acquired by Deluxe Corporation, NYSE:DLX), investor and board member at Anomalous Networks Inc. (acquired by TANGO, NASDAQ:TNGO)

The other two names pushing this petition were professors. Those, of course, being Marc D. David and Olivier J. Bergeron.

Here’s the thing in all of this, isn’t it funny that “AI” and “investor” just keeps cropping up time and time again? So many just coincidentally happen to have their fingerprints all over capital venture. Now, why would a bunch of venture capitalists suddenly be interested in pushing mass government censorship online? Well, they are pushing for private business solutions to this and falsely claiming that the solutions in the private sector already exists.

Indeed, the petition page (which I will NOT be linking to for obvious reasons) boasts that K-ID and Yoti has an accuracy rate that ‘exceeds 98%’. Actual research into this shows that, at least for Yoti, this is not true. In actuality, Yoti was tested to have an accuracy of 42.6% which is far FAR below the supposed “98%” threshold that the petition says. Other solutions that study performed testing on showed that the accuracy for others were even lower with Privately boasting an accuracy rate of 13%. Yes, age verification technology is really that bad.

Anyway, when you think logically as to why venture capitalist individuals and organizations would be keenly interested in pushing this is obviously money. If you invested in K-ID and Yoti and you convince the government to pass age verification laws that require these private sector solutions, guess who stands to make lots and lots of money. Yup, the very types of venture capitalists found on the petition page and in all those nice fancy ball rooms sipping expensive drinks and wearing some very nice and expensive looking dresses and suits. The companies stand to gain a lot if you suddenly have a huge swath of the Canadian population being mandated to use that very technology.

What’s more, if you happen to be associated with AI companies, well, a lot of age verification systems happen to employ AI companies to work behind the scenes – especially when it comes to facial recognition technology. If your AI company just so happens to partner with whoever wins those contracts, guess who gets to financially benefit from such a sweet sweet deal. Yup, the AI company executives who likely wants to pull in huge chunks of money.

This whole thing stinks to high heaven of corruption. The very thought that people are out there pretending to be nothing more than “concerned parents” who are actually also part of the business investment class potentially looking to profit off of mass government internet censorship is enough to make my stomach turn. Direct ties, of course, are something I didn’t find, but there are way too many coincidences here to just dismiss this altogether. At the very least, everything about this cynical push for age verification makes a heck of a lot more sense. While I don’t believe that venture capitalism is the only driver here, it does make everything make much more sense when it comes to the hidden nature of those who back such efforts as well as how these hidden actors manage to just get all of the political access they need and all the money they need to grease the right wheels.

On the plus side here, at least we are getting a better idea of who is trying to censor the Canadian internet – even if the age verification proposal is just at the “consideration” stage.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.