Online threats to children are real, but the headlong pursuit of age verification that we’re seeing around the world is unacceptable in its approach and far too broad in scope — and we simply can’t afford to get this wrong.
To be clear, parents’ concerns are valid and sincere. Few people would argue that kids should have unfettered access to adult material, to self-harm how-tos, to social media platforms that manipulate them and expose them to abuse.
But it’s the very depth of those worries that is being cynically exploited. Age verification as is currently being proposed in country after country would mean the death of anonymity online.
And we know exactly who stands to gain: The same tech giants who built the privacy nightmare that the internet is today.
Surely it’s the death of anonymity for those who want to access stuff which would be age restricted in any other scenario (like a real shop). The rest of the population (most?) don’t care to access that stuff & don’t want it and can carry on being anonymous.
And yes that gives the likes of Facebook et al a problem because they’ll have to categorise their content, but the whole point of this current fad for governments to legislate to restrict stuff is that the big tech companies could have (made efforts to) fix it but chose not to because it’s (waves hands and wails) hard.