Hidden Dangers of Age Verification ⇥ eff.org

Rindala Alajaji, the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Age-verification mandates create barriers along lines of race, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, immigration status, and socioeconomic class. While these requirements threaten everyone’s privacy and free-speech rights, they fall heaviest on communities already facing systemic obstacles.

This is a compelling list of reasons why age verification laws are bad for all of us. I have mixed feelings about their need and implementation so far. In theory, I think checking user ages can be justified in a number of circumstances. Many apps and websites have some boilerplate text claiming they have no interest in serving children, and rely on kids self-authorizing. This is obviously insufficient. Also, Apple wants your iPhone to replace your wallet, but is somehow uninterested in using the information you provide, which is bizarre.

But giving tech companies even more information and control seems similarly fraught. Existing operating system-level options for parents are frequently broken, so why would we entrust them with some form of valid identification? And the current patchwork of laws and proposals could mean a worst-of-both-worlds situation: depending on where the company is governed, you might have to provide documentation to centralized app distributors, and to individual websites and apps. And, as Alajaji writes, the people who will struggle most to satisfy these requirements are already discriminated against.

I have written posts in which I am swayed by proposals for age verification. I am also convinced by the ten arguments Alajaji lists, many of which feel U.S. specific but are probably even more burdensome in developing countries. These problems seem to be varying degrees of insurmountable. But the great freedom created by the web has not yet been met with commensurate responsibility, either.