Age Verification Doesn’t Need to Be a Privacy Footgun
“Won’t someone think of the poor children?” they say, clutching their pearls as they enact another stupid law that will harm the privacy of every adult on Earth and create Prior Restraint that inhibits the freedom of speech in liberal democracies.
If you’re totally ignorant of how things work, the proposal of “verifying you’re an adult” before you access adult content sounds, superficially, like a reasonable thing to do. But it’s a patently stupid idea at every level.
In meatspace, if you wanted to go to the adult section of a movie store, you would need to show a clerk your government issued photo ID. They would check that your date of birth was before (current date – 18 years), and if so, they would admit you. This is the sort of experience that people who do not understand technology use to build an intuition for how laws like this operate.
The Internet is not like meatspace. When you supply your government ID to a website in order to verify your identity, at least two of the following security and privacy risks introduced at once:
