U.S. lawmakers' motivation for online ID and age verification and tech CEOs' support for these measures signals a significant shift in the approach to online privacy and anonymity.
The proposal for far-reaching online age verification standards, particularly the suggestion by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to impose age verification at the app store level, has profound implications. Enforcing such measures could dramatically alter the landscape of online interaction, making it difficult to engage in online activities without linking them to one's official identity. While intended to safeguard minors, these measures also pose risks of even more totalitarian surveillance and potential censorship and could hinder whistleblowing efforts by attaching a real-world identity to every online action.
These nanny-state policies will infringe upon constitutional rights related to free speech and privacy. The First Amendment protects the right to speak anonymously, which has been a cornerstone of democratic discourse since the founding of the Republic. Remember how many Founding Fathers wrote essays attacking their British overlords under pen names? Moreover, there are concerns about the technical and practical challenges of implementing secure age verification processes that do not compromise user privacy or expose sensitive personal information to potential misuse. Spoiler alert: this is impossible.
The support expressed by X CEO Linda Yaccarino and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel for legislation aimed at increasing online safety for children, including the Kids Online Safety Act and the Cooper Davis Act, underscores the tech industry's cynical push for regulatory efforts to protect minors online. However, these legislative proposals also signal a potential sea change in how privacy, encryption, and anonymity are treated online.
The Kids Online Safety Act seeks to expand online age verification requirements, which could significantly affect how children interact with online content. While the idea of protecting kids from porn or ISIS videos is not a terrible impulse, destroying the rights of adults to post their thoughts anonymously is a horrible idea.
The Cooper Davis Act, which targets private messaging apps and could ban end-to-end encryption, represents a direct challenge to secure and private communication. End-to-end encryption is a cornerstone of digital privacy, ensuring that messages can only be read by the sender and recipient, with no possibility of interception by third parties, including the service providers. Undermining this technology will expose users to increased surveillance, data breaches, and malicious actors while hindering journalists, activists, and whistleblowers who rely on encrypted communication to protect their sources and themselves.
This is the backdoor to Chinese-esque surveillance.
Anyone closely following the tech world will instantly recognize the Chinese-style security barrier this will create. In China, you must have a digital ID to access its censored web. It makes identifying dissidents and stifling enemies of the regime rather easy. Just to reiterate, these are a few of the intensely negative ramifications of asking for your (digital) papers: