Online age verification threatens to trap everyone, not just minors, in its web, as the Australian government recently admitted.
As readers may recall (while perhaps also recoiling), Spain is in the process of developing a licence to w*nk online. In July, the Pedro Sánchez government unveiled plans to launch a digital age verification system to prevent minors from being able to access pornographic websites. The country’s then-Minister of Digital Transformation (an increasingly common government position), José Luis Escrivá, announced that the system would be based on a digital wallet app that is currently in the beta phase of testing.
The app will allow adult porn users to obtain anonymous digital access credentials, which according to the government will soon be necessary to enter digital spaces hosting adult content. The government has even spoken of rationing the amount of online porn adult users can consume. It is also considering making changes to Spain’s General Telecommunications Law that will allow it to ban access to all digital platforms that do not incorporate age verification mechanisms. It is not alone in seeking such powers.
In October, Ireland adopted its Online Safety Code, which mandates that digital services protect people, especially children, from harm online. It calls on video-sharing platforms to, among other things, use age-assurance mechanisms to prevent children from accessing pornography or gratuitous violence.
As is often the case with sweeping Internet regulation, there are at least a few positive features, such as restrictions on corporate advertising that urges children to buy something by exploiting their inexperience or credulity, or to ask their parents to buy something. In the UK, the government is considering supporting a private member’s bill that would raise the age at which social media companies would be allowed to harvest data on children.
Ireland’s age verification rules will apply to all video-sharing platforms that have their EU headquarters in the country including Facebook, YouTube, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Instagram. This is an advantage Ireland has over most other EU countries when it comes to implementing online legislation: thanks to its low corporate tax rate, many of the world’s largest tech companies have chosen Dublin as the headquarters for their European operations, granting the Irish government a certain amount of leverage over them.
In Spain, by contrast the proposed digital verification system will only be mandatory for adult content websites hosted in Spain. In other words, once the system is up and running (assuming it ever is), users, regardless of their age, will be able to continue accessing the vast majority of adult content sites on the Internet without any government hindrance. And if someone specifically wants to continue accessing Spanish-hosted porn, they could do so by simply using a VPN.
New Developments on Spain’s “Pajaporte”
Since July, Escrivá has moved on to greener pastures, and is now serving as governor of the Bank of Spain. Last week, his replacement as minister of digital transformation, Óscar López, claimed that the government has already developed the technological apparatus to make the ‘Beta Digital Wallet’ app a practical reality. From La Vanguardia:
During his appearance before the Committee on the Economy, Trade and Digital Transformation, López said that some people have asked the Government to put the initiative on hold until new European regulation on the protection of minors comes into force some time next year. However, he said that “the Government is not going to sit idly by” and will fulfil President Pedro Sánchez’s pledge to approve this tool, without waiting for EU legislation.
The proposed age verification app, which has already been dubbed on social media as “pajaporte” — an amalgam of the Spanish words “paja” (to jerk off or wank) and “pasaporte” — is now being tested by Spain’s National Cryptologic Centre, says López. And its reach is likely to extend far beyond Spanish residents’ porn habits.
In July, Carmen Cabanillas, director general of governance at the Ministry of Digital Transformation, said the tool could also be required to access messaging apps, social media, video sharing sites and internet browsers, which, as I pointed out in my previous piece, is eerily reminiscent of two of the ten use cases (telecommunications, social platforms) depicted on the World Economic Forum’s now-infamous 2018 infographic on digital identity.
More ominous still, López said that “the Spanish tool is being followed closely in Europe” and that “in a year’s time the whole of Europe will be using it”.
As I posited in my July 12 article, “A License to W*nk: Spain to Launch Digital Identity Wallet to Limit and Ration Access to Internet Porn Sites”, the real motive here is not to protect young children from the insidious effects of online porn, which is almost certainly a laudable goal given the violent nature of porn today and the young age at which many children are being exposed to it; it is to begin the process of launching digital identity wallets for widespread public use:
[Now that digital identity is a legal reality in the EU], what we are likely to see in the months ahead is a sudden explosion of Trojan Horse initiatives aimed at instilling the need for digital identity wallets for a host of common everyday activities or services, whether accessing porn websites or, as in India, receiving State benefits. As with the vaccine certificate, the goal is to achieve as broad an uptake in as short a time as possible.
The government of Greece recently provided a hint of how that might be achieved: by making access to certain public services and spaces — in this case, sports stadiums — contingent on possession of a digital ID wallet…
Of course, [these policies] directly contradict the Commission’s repeated assurances that the digital identity wallet is purely optional and that EU citizens will not face exclusion or discrimination for not using one…
Speaking at an event this week on “Governing in the Age of AI”, organised by his own TBI foundation, Tony Blair, one of the world’s most vocal advocates of digital surveillance and control technologies, described Digital ID as “an essential part of a modern digital infrastructure.” He then added, to peals of laughter from the audience, that “we will have a little work of persuasion to do here.”
Five Eye Nations Also on Board
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Five Eye nations are also firmly on board with the idea of online age verification. Australia, which launched its own digital identity app, myID, earlier this year, is looking to ban under-16s from social media platforms, and will need an age verification system to enforce that ban. To the end, on May 1 this year the Albanese government announced the launch of an age assurance technology trial to “protect children from harmful online content.”
The proposal enjoys full cross-party support. Here is Peter Dutton, the leader of the main opposition Liberal Party, explaining why these draconian measures are necessary:
Parents are rightfully concerned about social media’s impact on kids’ mental health and development. That’s why the Coalition backs age limits and privacy-protecting age verification. pic.twitter.com/saInSdbcak
— Peter Dutton (@PeterDutton_MP) November 17, 2024
The comments below Dutton’s video are eye-opening. Virtually none of them are positive. As of writing, the video has been retweeted 319,000 times and liked just 465 times. Many of the commenters accuse the government and main opposition party of seeking to intrude excessively in the lives of children and their parents. Some point out that online age verification is merely a handy gateway for the introduction of digital identity into our lives.
For governments around the world, one of the great advantages of age verification, or assurance as the Austrian government is now calling it, is that it traps everyone in its web — not just under-16s but just about anyone who wants to use the Internet. As members of the Australian government recently admitted, everyone will soon have to prove their age to use social media. And that will presumably mean having to use the government’s recently launched digital ID app, myID:
RE: Social Media Ban for Under16's (aka the trojan horse Digital ID for ALL Australians)
So the Federal Labor Gov't have confirmed at Senate Estimates that ALL Australians will have to go through an age verification process to access social media, not just under 16 year olds.… pic.twitter.com/LgPu5DXdek
— Glen Schaefer (@hardenuppete) November 10, 2024
The last exchange in this grilling is perhaps the most revealing. When the MP on the Senate Committee insinuates that the government’s proposed age assurance system “has privacy and data protection implications for literally everyone who uses social media,” the government official responds by pointing out consumer researchers are on the case to see if there is “consumer” (note: not citizen) willingness in particular aspects that are important to them. In other words, what areas can the government salvage from the proposed bill?
If there is any good news to be had at all, it is in the fact that implementing and enforcing an age assurance system across the worldwide web appears to be a lot easier said than done, as The Guardian reported last week:
[T]he Labor government has not spelled out how it expects Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and others to actually enforce that age limit. Anthony Albanese is facing pressure from the Coalition opposition to rush the bill through parliament in the next three weeks, although a federal trial into age assurance technology has not yet commenced.
Albanese and the communications minister, Michelle Rowland, did not rule out the potential for social media users to have their faces subject to biometric scanning, for online platforms to verify users’ ages using a government database, or for all social media users – regardless of age – being subject to age checks, only saying it would be up to tech companies to set their own processes…
The onus would be on social media platforms to “demonstrate they are taking reasonable steps to prevent access” for young people, Albanese said. There would be no penalties for users who managed to access social media under the age of 16, or their parents, but Rowland said there would be penalties for platforms that did not heed the new laws.
Despite its enthusiasm for online age verification, Australia, like France, appears to have paused the rollout of age verification systems. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both countries found that these systems could not adequately protect individuals’ data or tackle the issues of online harms alone. Meanwhile, in the UK the Keir Starmer government is apparently following developments closely in Australia, with a view to implementing a similar age verification system.
Canada, by contrast, appears to be ploughing ahead with its proposed bill, S-210, which, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation recently warned, is “meant to benefit children, but would sacrifice the security, privacy, and free speech of all internet users”:
First introduced in 2023, S-210 seeks to prevent young people from encountering sexually explicit material by requiring all commercial internet services that “make available” explicit content to adopt age verification services. Typically, these services will require people to show government-issued ID to get on the internet. According to bill authors, this is needed to prevent harms like the “development of pornography addiction” and “the reinforcement of gender stereotypes and the development of attitudes favorable to harassment and violence…particularly against women.”
The motivation is laudable, but requiring people of all ages to show ID to get online won’t help women or young people. If S-210 isn’t stopped before it reaches the third reading and final vote in the House of Commons, Canadians will be forced to [use] a repressive and unworkable age verification regulation.
…
We’ve said it before: age verification systems are surveillance systems. Users have no way to be certain that the data they’re handing over is not going to be retained and used in unexpected ways, or even shared to unknown third parties. The bill asks companies to maintain user privacy and destroy any personal data collected but doesn’t back up that suggestion with comprehensive penalties. That’s not good enough.
Companies responsible for storing or processing sensitive documents like drivers’ licenses can encounter data breaches, potentially exposing not only personal data about users, but also information about the sites that they visit…
Fundamentally, S-210 leads to the end of anonymous access to the web. Instead, Canadian internet access would become a series of checkpoints that many people simply would not pass, either by choice or because the rules are too onerous.
Clearly, governments have a very different conception of how the Internet should look in the future. And lest we forget, many of them are scrambling to impose sweeping digital censorship regimes, with the EU, of course, leading the way. In just the past two years, the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation has lost its ostensibly voluntary character with the passage of the Digital Services Act (DSA), which, as one retired German judge warned, poses an existential threat to freedom of speech in Europe.
But if the recent experience of Australia and France is any indication, government plans to unleash age verification across the Internet are likely to face significant technical obstacles. There is also a chance, however slim, that enough members of the public may cotton on in time to mount a last-ditch resistance. We have already seen this happen with SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act). More recently, the Canadian province of Ontario paused plans to introduce a government-run digital ID due to the scale of public pushback.
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So much effort at behavior control while the killing continues unabated.
But it will be easier to start wars and commit even more horrific genocides if governments can monitor every person’s communication via social media or even texts and emails, and subject anyone with bad thoughts to loss of their bank accounts or jobs.
Last week police in Bavaria raided a 64-year-old retiree’s house because he called a Green Party official an “idiot” in an “x” comment and could be a criminal offense. Also, anybody discussing a past genocide other than one officially sanctioned for discussion could similarly be “canceled,” and I think the assumption being made is the existence of Palestineans will only exist in oral histories at some point in the future.
Not just any Green Party official, but the economics minister and candidate for Chancellor himself! my thought was that everyone with an X account should tweet the same and overwhelm the laywers and the police aiding and abetting this.
I am Spartacus!
It strikes me that the easiest way for governments to stop access to minors is to piggy-back everything onto credit cards. If you can’t use a valid credit card to access an App store then you can be automatically banned from any app that does not conform to govt rules on content.
Of course parents can give children the numbers, but the system puts them at huger risk of online purchases etc. Disputing a transaction automatically puts the parent in the line of fire for prosecution for potential dissemination of inappropriate material. I won’t use the danger words here because it’s the internet 2024.
BTW This is not a “how to do it” for govts. I merely see a very easy way for them to enable an age-restricted system. It came to me after I remembered the one and only time I was IDed buying alcohol. I was close to age 40 in the supermarket next to where I worked as a post-doc. A very new inexperienced cashier asked for ID. I admit I was a knob. I witheringly pointed out my credit card I was paying with: it was one of those stupid ones issued with details of my Cambridge College. Thus not only was I over 18 (having a credit card in the first place), but over 20 (leaving aside how someone close to 40 must look). The customer behind me laughed out loud. In hindsight I should have been flattered…..Shortly after that the 2008 crisis hit and my gobsmackingly high credit limit of GBP30,000 was reduced to 5k.
The credit card requirement is not enough to stop access to porn by minors, there is plenty of free porn, of all kinds, f.ex. twitter has thousands of accounts daily sharing porn videos.
These sort of proposals have been around since Bill Gates was still running Microsoft. In fact, it was Microsoft that proposed about a quarter of a century ago that to go online, that it be required that everybody have a “digital passport”. No passport, no going online. Perfect for tracking people, spying on their consumer habits, etc. The problem? Germany’s Robert Habeck set his state dogs loose on some pensioner that forwarded a meme criticizing Bob. Imagine any politician being able to do the same.
Now to diverge from this important topic. That Peter Dutton in that video that is the leader of the opposition here in Oz that sounds all reasonable and calm? Yeah, about that. He would support any crackdown on liberties here in Oz and is a hard right reactionary. The first things that come to mind about him is him opposing any refugees from Gaza as they are all probably terrorists. And he wants to set up a dozen nuclear power plants around the country that will take decades to build, cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and will only produce a relatively small percentage of our future power supply but with us stuck with the bill. Check him out yourself-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Dutton#Political_positions
I wouldn’t worry if I were you. Unfortunately failed right-wing zealots from Aus tend to get jobs here in the UK (the mad Monk, that crazy woman*, etc).
It is probably revenge for sending our criminals to NSW a few hundred years ago.
(I can make these jokes as I have dual nationality).
*Not the one who hated her portrait….the OTHER crazy one
Struth.
Send their grandchildren back!
Rev Kev,
I love your comments. I am in Australia too (NSW South Coast – God’s country for Canberra Public Servant’s holiday houses).
Peter Dutton is a DISGUSTING politician. Somehow he became the leader of the Tories and, given the crappy nature of our 2 party state, may be our PM soon.
What a horrendous thought that is.
I can’t express in one comment how bad that would be.
Has everyone forgotten that DISGUSTING fat prick Scott Morrison?
It’s like the old Hammer films. Constant reruns of Dracula.
In most countries, kids are not allowed to drive, to drink alcohol, to buy tobacco, to place a bet, to enter a casino etc., mostly because they are supposed not to be mature to make meaningful choices and/or avoid addiction to such stuff.
You do a bit of research, and you find that social networks and/or the Internet create the same level of addiction. As a mere data point, I once said to my classes (12-year olds) they were alike drug addicts. And when they started complaining, I asked them to switch of their smartphones for a few hours. None was willing.
So I am of two minds. I’d like to see the whole Internet split into an kids-allowed area and an adults-only area. And one would need a “proof of adulthood” to enter the adults-only area (NC or TripAdvisor would be ‘adults-only’, as both carry comment sections). But that implies each adult will have to give up its privacy and be subjected to or at risk of senseless prying.
So do we continue to ‘kill’ the kids for the adults’ liberty, do we shut down and/or clean-up the Internet stuff, or do we abandon a bit more of our privacy?
Social media is by and large a toxic waste of time.
However, the way to fix it is absolutely not digital identification.
You would think readers of NC would realize DID is a trojan horse for all sorts of bad stuff in the future… especially if you’ve paid attention to the AI circlejerk these past 2+ years.
Hear Hear.
How about we nationalize all social media too!
Not sure if you’re being sarcastic or not. However, I think something akin to how Channel 4 in the UK operates might be a starting point. It is publicly majority owned (so kinda like the BBC) but operates firmly within the market realm (must attract income from advertisers etc and has limits on how much money it can rely on from central govt which is where it definitively is unlike the BBC).
Maybe I’m naive but I’ve always wondered if there is a way to have a “publicly owned” system of social media that is “safe from govt meddling due to checks and balances like C4”?
Probably pie in the sky thinking but frankly all the systems invented so far seem effed beyond repair.
Just declare them all common carriers in your territories, this makes them liable for practically everything they allow to happen on their service. If they don’t like it they can be banned. It is not as though the CSIRO couldn’t put together a social media platform in record time here. While they are at it they could build a useful search engine.
i’ve been online since i was 11. i know i am an outlier, but i somehow managed to develop a healthy relationship with my computer. as a kid i was only ever on heavily moderated child centered websites, like khan academy, scratch, or this one niche forum for teens. Scratch is the most relevant website here, because i was able to use it to learn how to code and interact with other kids my age interested in programming. (nobody else in my school was, despite how much i tried.) admittedly it’s less of a ‘social media’ and more of a creative website. but i think there should still be spaces like that for kids online. akin to schools. kids can’t learn how to use the internet responsibly without using it in the first place.
another weird thing – there’s a funny amount of discourse online about minor/adult interactions. before i found cool comment sections like this i was on twitter and tumblr, and a lot of people would put ‘minors DNI’ in their bios because their blogs had adult content they didn’t want minors seeing. the joke was, a 17 year old and an 18 year old in the same high school class can’t interact online because one is 17 and one is 18. being 16-19 on the internet is a weird experience because you don’t really fit into ‘adult’ or ‘child’ spaces. (of course, this is true of anything.)
i feel like the issue is less children being online, more big tech companies making things addictive. and big social media is a relatively new phenomenon that people are still figuring out how to deal with. and i truly doubt putting age limits would stop anyone. banning under 21s from buying vapes never stopped anyone in my middle school.
Since we’re playing a bit of what if, my fantasy version of this idea is that a public corporation, not unlike old-line public broadcasters, or alternatively a collective corporation along the lines of Mondragon just build a separate Internet infrastructure for children. On a technical basis it would be easiest off the android kernel, as amazon and Huawei have done forks. A public or cooperative fork for children would have generally useful apps, and ones for entertainment, but would be advertisement free, no dark patterns to track or drive purchases, and would essentially just be a well managed app ecosystem. There would be no browser. Make it free to parents to provide to children, then the desire for a safer Internet and social pressure would do the rest.
The internet as we know it would remain, but the younger user base would be siphoned off.
But also, since we’re talking trojans, the bonus purpose would be the genocide of all the unicorns of silicon valley, as their whole bit is to hook us young and track us and train us in consumption. Ideally many would just stick with a public app infrastructure once they age out, and it could build towards that, with all the freemium products consigned to history.
Age verification is possible to do in a way that doesn’t require a digital ID, but all schemes do require some type of controlled systems (or a centralized system) for identity management. No matter how anonymous the end result is, at the beginning there has to be a “hard identification”.
I’ve been involved in several projects with conflicting needs of hard identity while registering and anonymity after that. Some have been about people’s health, so there has been a request for a strong, but partially reversible anonymity – which does take some effort to designing and can not be an afterthought.
The problem isn’t the mechanics of implementation, or likely lack of the data security (looking at you, India), but that the ID will end up being required for every mundane interactions, no matter how loudly this is denied at the start.
My expectation is that cell phone numbers will be used as the unique ID, and one assigned at birth for new arrivals.
Well, I was assigned personal ID at birth. During the era of paperwork it was often required for very mundane interactions, but it was kinda created for that, so nobody cared. Nowadays it’s may be required only for interactions where strong identification is needed, and it works fine for those.
For a big chunk of the world, that battle was lost in the late 1940’s or early 1950’s.
There is no need to enrich the techno-oligarchs for the slightest contribution to free speech. The old days were more “free” for people like me who remember when social media didn’t exist. What social media needs is not regulation, but complete eradication.
monitoring children’s activities online is a parent’s duty, not the government’s duty. and that was understandably hard for some generations of parents. like my parents didn’t have the internet until their 20s, so they had no idea how to restrict me and my siblings. my older sister and i were given unfettered access to the internet at a young age, but my parents wisened up when my younger siblings got online. people are just figuring out how to deal with a new technology.
and if you’re worried about children being given too much screen time, you gotta ask: why are parents choosing screens over irl activities? it’s because there’s a lack of accessible activities to do, a lack of childcare (youtube is free childcare), and this overparenting where people won’t let their kids roam free.
This have nothing to with stopping children from watching porn. 2000 -2010 was the age of porn. Now internet is censored that its harder to find porn. What they are doing is censoring the whole Internet. They want to make sure people cant chat openly against any government online
Ban gossip, stop the spread of wrongthink!
I personally don’t have an issue with kids accessing porno. It’s okay for kids to be blown up, but not view porno? What kind of crazy shit is that? The porno thing is just an excuse to deprive all of us of our privacy and freedom. The politicos don’t care if kids watch porno online, just as they don’t care if kids get blown up by bombs and missiles.
Those politicos would care about an image like this however and maybe cancel you for it-
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHr21BW5DqkJIeNLATb27diBBqn4qh1Dp2grkrbtMqjY8OjqbBnHZhiAJ2PkTY6zzsWBn-SzkH1pV5elic6HxdRjm_WjAhTCRCDs8JZFjTdJeotfLdlErLr5uvgWnD1Gz_Zmivi18PVzeOJYEt4E_e220_PUTrdarSgWroE7LTuS0tdVn3Rz5SArdGPesn/s877/gaza.jpg
You should rethink that first sentence you wrote.