One solution that gets floated from time to time is age verification at the device level. It’s still a bad idea.
Age verification is a social experiment. Will the population today accept mass government surveillance if the people are told that it’s being done to “protect the children”? The hope from the governments perspective is that this time will be different. This time, people will be too stupid to understand the philosophical implications of surrendering basic personal freedom in favour of temporary security.
Unsurprisingly, this worked for some people. Some people fell for this lie because they were told that they were preventing underage people from viewing pornography. When the focus began shifting, the excuse became about “harmful content”. The focus would later change again in light of Australia’s push to ban younger people from social media entirely to be about protecting children from so-called “addicting algorithms”. More surveillance, a moving target, and an ever expanding scope. Of course, as anyone who has ever had any experience sussing out lies knows, when the stories change and the excuses shift to fit a convenient narrative, that is a sure sign that you are being fed lies. For me, of course, this is plain as day, but for others gripping tightly on the notion that age verification is a good idea, any lie, half truth, or misleading statement to keep the illusion that this really is a child safety measure alive is simply “good enough”.
One of those lies, naturally, is that the technology is perfect and it’s only the platforms choice to refuse to implement it that is the problem. It’s a convincing lie given that the behaviour of large platforms is far from perfect. For so many burned by the platforms somewhere along the line, this sort of narrative rings true. Are they not taking down harmful content sufficiently? Well, it makes sense that they would avoid accountability with this whole age verification thing, so it must be true, right? The problem is that this is a logical fallacy – a non sequitur. Just because a platform did something wrong in a different area does not make them automatically guilty of the current accusation. Still, it is a non sequitur that has likely fooled a lot of people in this debate.
One way to properly investigate whether or not refusing to implement age verification is merely a choice by the platforms is to investigate the technology itself. This is where the age verification illusion unravels very quickly. Indeed, age verification technology today is highly unreliable, easy to evade, easy to circumvent, and are an absolute nightmare for privacy and security. Literally, there is no upside to using this technology.
For delusional age verification supporters, all they do is change the story. They make excuses that the technology is changing or that the information available is out of date and, this time, it’s different. In fact, some go even further to say that the failings of the age verification technology are little more than the fault of the platform, claiming that they didn’t implement it right. Some go even further by arguing that the platforms are intentionally implementing age verification incorrectly altogether. This despite the wall to wall evidence that it’s the recommended, best in class, government suggested forms in the first place. I know this because one of the common elements to age verification laws is that the technology being deployed must be reliable. If you were going to intentionally not cooperate with age verification, why would you undermine your own case by implementing something that breaks the law? It really doesn’t make any sense. The root cause is the fact that it’s the technology that advocates so heavily adore that’s the problem.
So, it’s no surprise that the age verification laws that exist today around the world have become failures. There’s no such thing as a technological solution that fits the criteria of being highly reliable while respecting people’s privacy. It’s basically on the same level of mythical technology as a safe back door for encryption. It doesn’t exist. Simply put, the laws are asking for the deployment of a technology that simply doesn’t exist. People who say otherwise are either foolish or trying to fool you. Take your pick.
Complicating matters is the fact that platforms are trying to manipulate the situation in such a way that benefits their monopolistic powers in their respective markets. Rather that point out the obvious and say that age verification laws are merely a legal fools errand, they decided to take a different approach. For them, they are trying to weaponize age verification so that they can retain their market share. How would they go about this? Simply by saying that age verification is a good idea, but it can only be implemented at the device level.
Logically speaking, it sounds like a sexy idea. If everyone verified their age for devices, then there would no longer be problems of faulty age verification detection. All you have to do is lock out the devices to certain platforms until you can prove to the government that you are of legal age to view it. No more errors, no more worries of security, and all will be well. Indeed, with the recent push for the UK government pushing for Digital ID once again, it seems that government in some locations are warming to the idea in this scheme to go full 1984.
Here’s the problem here: this won’t fix the problems of age verification. All you are doing is moving the deck chairs. Instead of having faulty technology be implemented directly on Facebook, you are moving that same faulty technology over to smart phones and, potentially, computer devices. The problems aren’t magically going to just go away by making such a move. If a golden retriever can fool a facial recognition scan on Facebook, what is stopping people from pulling the exact same thing when their smart phone asks for a facial recognition scan? The cold hard reality is nothing. Moving the technology isn’t going to magically make it any better.
All you are doing is forcing more people to submit their personal information. Instead of users of Facebook being forced to use it, you are forcing everyone with a device to use it. This with the intention of crippling anonymous speech of any kind. From a security standpoint, this scenario is actually even worse than simply implementing it on popular websites. More people are submitting more personal information into a system that can easily be compromised. All it takes is a sort of man in the middle attack or a compromised database before it is game over. You can bet black hat hackers are salivating at the idea of hacking a single database and stealing everyone’s highly sensitive personal information in one fell swoop.
The problems, of course, aren’t just technical, either. Such laws are also still vulnerable to court challenges as well. Countries like Canada have Charter protections against unreasonable search and seizure. If the government is demanding that you fork over everything before even accessing the web at all (coupled with real time monitoring of everyone’s movements), it would defy all belief that this sort of intrusion on people’s personal lives won’t go unchallenged in the courts. I would also be surprised that this would go unchallenged in every other jurisdiction.
I get the quest to find some sort of silver bullet to make all of this work. Dreaming up a magical technology that fixes so many problems is fun. The thing is, reality has different plans. The question is, how far is government willing to go before realizing what a monumentally stupid idea all of this is before dropping the idea. Failure is the only option for age verification, and this method of dressing it up by the platforms won’t change that. All you are doing is creating an even longer list of victims of the system in the process.
