Canada’s proposed Bill S-209, which addresses online age verification, is currently making its way through the Senate, and its passage would be yet another mistake in tech policy.
The bill is intended to restrict young peoples’ access to online pornography and to hold providers to account for making it available to anyone under 18. It may be well-intentioned, but the manner of its proposed enforcement – mandating age verification or what is being called “age-estimation technologies” – is troubling.
Globally, age-verification tools are a popular business, and many companies are in favour of S-209, particularly because it requires that websites and organizations rely on third parties for these tools. However, they bring up long-standing concerns over privacy, especially when you consider potential leaks or hacks of this information, which in some cases include biometrics that can identify us by our faces or fingerprints. […]
I can agree with some points, but disagree with a lot of the other things.
Black mail and scams are not new. Just that the internet has enabled it on turbo speed. The culprit we know is social media algorithms aimed initially to maximize engagement and now completely refined to twist reality. It’s funny because during the time I commented and now, Australia banned anyone younger than 16 y/o from all social media. I can agree with this - I have no idea right now as how they will implement this flawlessly though. Companies that are structured for maximum “engagement” should be regulated. Look at theme parks and they have age and height restrictions on certain rides for safety - for the sake of mental health in youth, social media should be regulated in the same manner and attitude. But do video games fall into the same category - at what point are they considered more social media than game? All of these will have to be clearly defined - which I have no faith in politicians to be able to do so. As for the elderly, I can only say, the world changes fast and we must always be vigilant - especially in the age of AI. Fake phone calls, fake videos - what about all that? Even before the internet and social media people were already getting scammed - remember the Nigerian prince in your emails? There just wasn’t enough political will to truly fix the problem. The government is playing whack-a-mole by legislating it via invasion of privacy - I predict this is going to be a policy failure.
Our government can’t even keep the big telecoms in line to stop spam calls, what makes you think that they will even be able to stop some sophisticated scam? We can’t even manage to tax media companies properly. But sure, let’s all give government even more mass surveillance tools. Also, the weakest link in cyber security these days isn’t the computer itself - it’s you/the person.
If this ever becomes a thing, I’d want the spirit of this law written out in plain language on what this can and can’t be used for - especially in court. Also a sunset clause that this topic will be review every couple of years. Anything short of that is just asking for it to be abused.