Underage Online Privacy: Ethical Concerns Surrounding Age Verification Systems

Monday - October 2 2023, 23:38 UTC - 1 year ago

This article explores the growing concerns surrounding the introduction of age verification systems for online privacy laws targeting children and teens. These laws could potentially lead to an increase of online surveillance while also blocking adults from certain types of content, especially those belonging to marginalized communities.

This summer, the Senate moved two bills dealing with online privacy for children and teens out of committee. Both have been floating around Congress in various forms over the last few years and are starting to get some real bipartisan support.

Supporters say these laws are necessary to mitigate the risks that big tech companies pose to young people—risks that are increasingly well documented. They say it’s well past time to put guardrails in place and limit the collecting and selling of minors’ data.But—surprise, surprise—as with most things, it’s not really that simple. There are also vocal critics who argue that child safety laws are actually harmful to kids because all these laws, no matter their shape, have to contend with a central tension: in order to implement laws that apply to kids online, companies need to actually identify which users are kids—which requires the collection or estimation of sensitive personal information.

I was thinking about this when the prominent New York–based civil society organization S.T.O.P. (which stands for the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project) released a report on September 28 that highlights some of these potential harms and makes the case that all bills requiring tech companies to identify underage users, even if well intentioned, will increase online surveillance for everyone.

"These bills are sold as a way to protect teens, but they do just the opposite," S.T.O.P. executive director Albert Fox Cahn said in a press release. "Rather than misguided efforts to track every user’s age and identity, we need privacy protections for every American." .

There’s a wide range of regulations out there, but the report calls out several states that are creating laws imposing stricter—even drastic—restrictions on minors’ internet access, effectively limiting online speech. A Utah law that will take effect in March 2024, for instance, will require that parents give consent for their kids to access social media outside the hours of 6:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., and that social media companies build features enabling parents to access their kids’ accounts.

There’s not exactly a gold standard for how to do this. Some bills, such as Utah’s, require that users provide official age verification, such as a government-issued ID, before accessing certain websites or products. (Er, would you really want X having a copy of your license?) Others, like a law in California, let companies do their own age estimations based on the data they already have from users.

I, for one, keep coming back to the argument that these verification systems could have impacts far beyond the intended underage users. Putting the burden of verification on users and on tech companies could, as S.T.O.P. argues, end up blocking adults from certain types of content. If this happens, S.T.O.P. says, it would limit internet freedom, especially for members of marginalized communities who may be more hesitant to share age information, like undocumented migrants.

As the report argues: "These laws mandate or coerce the use of new, invasive measures that verify users’ legal name, age, and address for nearly every internet service—making it much more difficult for users from marginalized communities to access the internet safely and on their own terms." .

In other words, the report argues, we need to be asking: What is the trade-off between trying to protect our kids and allowing their access to social networks and other types of content and communities, and allowing adults to have their autonomy? .

Obviously, there are no easy answers, but at the least, we should take S.T.O.P.’s report to heart and start having the conversations around this important issue. We need to weigh the potential harms these age-verification regulations could have on adults—especially adults who are part of vulnerable and marginalized communities—while still trying to restrict and protect our children’s access to certain content.