Even After Its Own Data Protection Agency Said There’s No Safe Way To Do Age Verification, France Wants To Do Age Verification For The Internet (original) (raw)

from the verify-this dept

It’s become the in thing to do everywhere, these days: try to institute age verification for the internet. There’s been an ongoing, unsubstantiated, moral panic that the internet is somehow “dangerous” for children, even as most of the evidence suggests… it’s actually mostly good for kids and the evidence has supported that for years.

And, for whatever reason, the terrified, panicked, political class has decided that the answer to all of this must be to… age verify everyone on the internet, and put the burden on websites to keep out “kids.” Of course, as we’ve explained, age verification is a terrible idea that does not make anyone safer, and can actually serve to make kids a lot less safe. This has also been known for years, and that’s even in its weaker form, such as in the US were COPPA (the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) seems to have a side effect of teaching kids that lying is good, because it means that’s how they can get onto services where they can communicate with grandma.

Of course, defenders of these new laws will say, but this is different, because now we’re talking about actual age verification, rather than what we have today, which is more of a “self-certification” situation. Except, age verification technology is terrible, a massive privacy nightmare, and not proven to work particularly well. We’ve discussed how the largest age verification provider is… Pornhub’s parent company. But also how other age verification providers reached out to me to tell me not to worry about age verification technology, because all they’d need to do is to scan everyone’s face to visit websites (and not just images, they’d have to do video to make sure you weren’t just holding up a photo).

At a time when people are (much more reasonably!) concerned about privacy, demanding that every website scan everyone’s faces and store that information does not seem like a move in the right direction.

But, don’t take my word for it. Why not take the word of the French data protection agency, CNIL, perhaps the most strict data protection agency in the EU (to a fault, I’d say). Even they said that there is no possible way to do age verification that is reliable, and that every possible solution violates user privacy rights.

Given that, it’s kinda shocking to see that France is going to move ahead with its own age verification plans for the internet.

On Wednesday, French MPs adopted legislation requiringsocial media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and Snap to block access to minors under 15 — unless they have authorization from their parents — or face fines of up to 1 percent of their annual global turnover. Technical solutions to verify users’ ages would need to be rubber-stamped by the audiovisual and privacy regulators — Arcom and CNIL — and Arcom would be empowered to sue non-compliant companies.

This is an extension of an earlier law that required adult content websites to verify ages. But for years, those sites have (correctly) pointed out that there is literally no way to comply with the law. Rather than fix that, French officials simply expanded the law to social media companies.

I look forward to the day a few decades from now when we can look back on this nonsense moral panic and laugh, the same way we now laugh at earlier moral panics, including those about how chess, novels, the waltz, radio, television, pinball, comic books, jazz, rock n’ roll, movies, dungeons and dragons, and much much more were polluting the minds of children and had to be stopped…

Filed Under: age verification, cnil, france, privacy, social media