Anonymity and tamper-proofing in age verification technology are at odds with each other by design. As a result, so-called privacy-preserving solutions proposed by jurisdictions such as the European Union would not work, explained Simeon de Brouwer, Policy Advisor at European Digital Rights (EDRi).
“If the tool is really anonymity-preserving, if it were that good, it would still allow, and it would even more so allow, circumvention, because no one knows who is verifying their age, only that someone is verifying their age and that this is legit… And therefore, a stranger could verify their age on my phone and we would be done with it. So it’s either/or.”
Simeon made these remarks during an online discussion titled “What Age Assurance Means for the Future of Digital Rights, Online Safety and the Internet at Large.” You can watch the live-streamed version of the Zoom discussion on YouTube. The panel featured more than 15 speakers, many of whom argued in favour of protecting online privacy. Some of the key points made during the discussion are as follows:
Age and user verification are changing the relationship between individuals, governments and platforms: Addressing the recent global policy shift towards restricting children’s access to social media through age verification and user identification mechanisms, Mishi Choudhary, founder of Software Freedom Law Centre, India (SFLC.in), said: “It sounds like a small design change, but it changes the relationship between users, platforms, and governments.”
During the discussion, Michael A. Specter, Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, presented findings from reverse engineering one of the most widely used age verification platforms. He made the following observations:
- Only 14% of websites have age verification mechanisms: “The vast majority of sites that were actually required by law to have them, that were actually self-marked as being required by law to have some age verification system in place, actually just don’t bother at all. So of those [that] self-mark, only 14% actually use age verification.”
- People can simply migrate to platforms without safeguards, even before resorting to technical bypasses: “Others here spoke about bypassing the technical measures involved, but we actually just don’t have to reach this. People will just go to a different site that just aren’t going to comply. And if you think about it, [it] actually isn’t that surprising. There’s an inherent incentive, if a lot of the bigger actors that are more obvious pull out of the market or require an age verification gate, to accept the traffic that would be given up by them.”
- The age verification market is highly concentrated: “There’s a lot of concentration in the market. Over 60% of the sites we examined use one provider called Yoti. That same provider is also used by several large social media companies. I believe Meta uses them. I…
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