How Age Verification Will Ruin Your Internet

En masse Internet ID verification is hurling towards us with the speed and force of a planet killing asteroid. [0] The impact will annihilate the open web as we know it and mandate an absolute authoritarian state where not only are you always under surveillance – but you’ll always have to seek permission to access an ever expanding list of forbidden media. [0, 1] The “I have nothing to hide” crowd is telling you “don’t look up! ”, “there is nothing to see here”, “this is all for your safety and the good of the children”. So when we say: “no, this is a problem, this is authoritarian”, it’s us who are framed as the bad guys for wanting to protect our privacy and freedom of information. Under the guise of protecting children, “the nothing to hide”-ers will now make it so that anytime you want to read a book, listen to a song, watch a movie or play a video game, they will create a permanent record of who accessed exactly what and when for an indefinite amount of time in databases outside of your control. [1, 2] They’ll tell you that’s not what this is for, but they also used to tell us mass surveillance was only to fight terrorism and nothing else. Oh, how the goalpost has moved in only two decades. Rules that mandate that adults upload their photo I. D. s to access any content deemed “unsafe” are coming to a local jurisdiction near you. [3] You probably heard about this trend when states and countries began passing laws to force porn websites to provably age-verify their visitors. [0] This would usually mean that before you could even open that page, you’d have to upload your photo ID or provide a face scan. A simple click on the “yes, I am over 18” would no longer cut it. [4] But this doesn’t affect porn websites alone. Spotify, a music and podcast streaming service, began mandating that people verify their age before they could watch a music video. [5] YouTube Music wouldn’t let a user play a 35-year-old Nirvana song unless they uploaded their photo ID to the platform. Twitter would block accounts in bulk whose age they couldn’t verify – completely removing them from the public forum. [6] Reddit would age-restrict communities like r/IsraelCrimes, r/UkraineWarFootage or AnonymousAlcoholics. [7] This wouldn’t just affect their accessibility but also their visibility – since any content that is legal but could be potentially unsafe to children will be purged from the listings and moved to the gated corners of Internet platforms – impossible to discover unless you actively searched for them. Governments in the UK, EU countries and US states are putting new laws in place that cement age-verification across a widening class of websites. [8, 9] In countries like France, Germany or Japan, it starts with the porn websites and dating apps. [10, 11] Because who wouldn’t want to protect children from exploitation, right? But In Australia, UK and the EU, the goalpost has already moved to include social media apps where the onus is put on the service providers under threat of heavy fines. [12] The widest scope is in the UK’s Online Safety Act, which recently passed into law, and includes anything from hate speech, discrimination, or content that depicts violence in any form, real or fictional. [10, 13] These laws mean that even your next movie night or a gaming session on Steam won’t be permitted unless you prove your age with evidence. That evidence may come in multiple forms but your choice may be limited to only a few. [14, 15] Uploading your photo ID like a passport or a driving license is the most sure way for providers to avoid non-compliance. That can either be done by uploading your ID to the service itself or to a third party company providing age verification on their behalf. In either case, you have no guarantees that your photo ID will be separated from whatever you are consuming. If you don’t have or want to provide an ID, you may submit your credit card, banking info or a phone number – but only if you have a contract with your carrier. Pay as you go numbers won’t fly. Another option is facial age estimation where you provide a scan of your face for an AI to estimate your age. Some services like Google or Twitter use tools to determine the age of your account, based on which they seek to guess if you are over 18. Those systems, though, are flawed and often defer to ID checks when they fail. None of these options are preserving your privacy nor anonymity. Even if we accept that these age-verification services won’t store information about what specific video, book or game you want to access, they’ll still have an identifiable profile of your Internet records. So it’s introducing yet another party into the mix on top of providers, advertisers, data brokers, hackers and governments. And that’s a big if because there is no technical guarantee that these companies who seek to make profit off of age verification, will exercise self-restraint and won’t collect and retain your data beyond verifying your age. In every case, you will be told that this is to protect the kids and that this isn’t about surveillance. But if this weren’t about surveillance, it would have been built completely differently. It is theoretically possible to have privacy-preserving age verification – because you don’t need to know the precise age nor the identity of a user – you only need a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to “is this person over 18 at the current

date and year? ”. If you have a device with secure element, you can encrypt that information in a way that couldn’t be accessed by any app nor service – kind of like your passwords or biometrics already work on your phone. They don’t leave your device and apps can’t access them. But they can ask for authentication which you can provide with a face unlock, a fingerprint or a lockscreen PIN code. It is equally possible to build an open source digital wallet that securely encrypts your driving license or other ID, which you can use to selectively prove you are of age without providing any other information from your ID. But none of the mainstream age verification services provide privacy guarantees. Their verification methods do not separate age from your identity. They only offer unverifiable promises that you have to blindly trust. They are not open source, so we can’t see how they actually work and what they really do. They are for-profit with venture capitalist and investor funding, thus heavily incentivized to keep finding new ways to increase earnings. [15] Don’t let them tell you this isn’t about censorship – it 100% is about censorship. Age verification exists to restrict access to content that is legal. They have this new phrase, they call it “legal but harmful”. [4, 10] “Legal but harmful” means that websites like Wikipedia won’t be able to comply, because plenty of their pages contain articles and media that might fall into the “harmful” category. [16] Wikipedia doesn’t have the capacity to operate an age-verification system, because it would violate the Wikimedia Foundation principles on data collection. [16] What will happen to Wikipedia and similar sites, is that content depicting historical events or discussing sexuality will be deemed “harmful” and will become undiscoverable. The onus will fall on the search engines to put their links out of the search results completely or somehow throw the whole search behind age verification. The impact of age restriction is censorship. If they didn’t want to impose censorship, they wouldn’t include language in their bills that lump together shows like the Game of Thrones with IPs like the Lord of the Rings. We have been dealing with this language debilitation on TikTok, YouTube and across social media where we created a whole new vocabulary to describe events of suicide or pedophilia in euphemisms that won’t be picked up by the algorithm – replacing them with made up phrases like “unalive” or a “PDF file”. This is an insult to the human experience. And it is now being officially sanctioned by the law. If you noticed that I refuse to submit to this architecture of control and submission, support me on my Patreon because you can clearly see that YouTube is punishing my channel with vengeance. People looking for ways to escape these rules are switching to VPNs that for now work to bypass local laws only because they make them appear as if they are coming from a different country. Most, however, are choosing free VPNs with poor reputation that only worsen their situation because these VPNs are often selling their data and exposing them to security risks. [17, 18] Now I could tell you that there are only few reputable VPNs that I use and would recommend – like Mullvad, iVPN or ProtonVPN. But VPNs are not a solution to this problem. They only work for now but the governments are aware people are using them to bypass their laws. And if we do nothing, it’s a matter of time before our privacy tools will be outlawed as well. Soon, there won’t be a country you can choose to VPN from because they’ll all have the same rules. I’ve been saying this for a while but we cannot just sit back and hope things won’t get worse. Things are getting worse because we aren’t fighting back. We have to fight back. These laws are so authoritarian they rival even the laws of China and Russia. And they are coming to our “cherished democracies”. These laws need to be protested and the careers of these politicians must be ended. Vote them out, but don’t just wait for the next election. I am not as delusional as Kurzgesagt to tell you to vote with your wallet and vote at the ballot. DIRECT ACTION! Civil disobedience. And don’t be so outraged at these words. There is so much you can do without violence and it’s overdue we finally do it. Organize or participate in sit-ins, sign petitions, strike, demonstrate, boycott, blockade… take inspiration from your fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, who fought for the rights you enjoy today – such as the right to vote, to have the weekend off and to end child labor. [19] I am done being polite to these people. They are authoritarians. They are architects of submission. They are fundamentally anti-human. My podcast on Patreon has basically become the main channel at this point so join patreon. com/thehatedone to listen to my podcast and engage with our community there.