With 64.4% of the global population being Internet users, it is obvious that a significant portion of modern life revolves around online activity. According to this recent report, people are spending almost 7 hours online daily, many of them minors.
In the USA, kids as young as 8 already have mobile devices, increasing their chances of connecting to the internet and its vast amount of content from that tender age. As a matter of fact, 31% of 8-year-olds fell within this category in 2021, a sharp rise from only 15% in 2015. Following this trend, the figure from 2021 is more likely to have shot up in 2023 than reduce.
The increased entry of minors into the online world has, incidentally, coincided with a period when harmful content has proliferated on the web and of course, social media.
There is more violence, pornography, and [sexual] harassment online than ever, a situation that has caused much worry among parents, policymakers, and lawmakers in different parts of the world, all of whom agree that children deserve more protection from the harmful content they risk encountering online.
However, the right way to achieve this has remained a bone of contention.
How American states breach user privacy through ID verification
Some American states, like Germany and France, have taken initiative on the matter of keeping kids away from online porn. Admirable as that sounds, though, there have always been concerns that their solutions will only cause more problems – huge problems.
The American state of Louisiana passed a bill that kicked into effect in 2023, which states that residents must supply ID to watch porn online; and only details from their state-issued IDs can be used to verify that they are old enough.
It’s the first of its kind in America and its focus is only on websites where ⅓ of the total content is pornographic. Utah, another American state, is planning something similar.
It must be reiterated that while the intent to protect kids is seen as a noble one, the method has been roundly criticized as being too dangerous as it could have far-reaching negative impacts on data and privacy.
A 2022 study quoted in this post by PIA found that parents would rather oversee what their kids do personally, rather than leave it to a potentially harmful system. Less than 25% of parents thought age verification for them or their kids was OK, with a huge percentage of folks finding it invasive.
In the European countries mentioned above, age verification usually involves the collection of sensitive information that should otherwise be kept private. Germany, for example, approved an AI system that collects biometric information from internet users to ascertain their age on adult site. Porn-showing sites like XHamster and Twitter, which have refused to use this or other [intrusive] forms of age verification systems are already suffering the consequences.
In France, a government app has to be installed on your device to watch adult content. The app generates a certificate and code that will prove your age and eligibility for access. This becomes effective in September of 2023. The UK and Australia have tried, and are in the process of creating similar age-verifying regulations.
Why the Louisiana Adult ID verification is a disaster for user privacy
And why more people should say no to it…
1. Data collected can be sold, without your consent, to corporations for marketing purposes.
2. The information collected makes the data-collection companies more powerful, similar to Google and Facebook which have massive data gathered from the global population
3. Giving up your private information links your online activities to you personally. Your anonymity is gone.
4. The data banks of these companies can be hacked into, leaving your sensitive information, such as ID, Social Security Number, etc, exposed.
Conclusion: Age verification in Louisiana may keep kids away from porn, but at what cost?
Clearly, Louisiana’s Bill HB142 is aimed at ensuring that minors enjoy enough protection from harmful content online and it may enjoy success. But the working of this new law raises questions that may never go away, and rightly so.
If keeping a number of errant, curious children from pornographic web content will expose every adult to data privacy disaster, then maybe the lawmakers have to ask themselves: is it worth it?
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