Age Verification Legislation

[arcus]

Recently in the UK, legislation requiring age verification has come into place. Similar legislation has passed in Australia and Europe, but have yet to be enacted.

Forums, Fediverse instances, and blog comment sections are at possible risk of huge fines under these laws. Major sites and services such as Discord, Reddit, Spotify, and BlueSky have begun to enforce age verification through facial recognition and ID verification to comply.


UK: The Online Safety Act
Sites must prevent minors from accessing harmful or adult content. "Epilepsy trolling" falls under the ban, but it's unknown how it applies to sites. Sites that fail to comply face fines up to £18 million.

Articles:

• GOV.UK - What does the Online Safety Act do?
• Techdirt - Didn’t Take Long To Reveal The UK’s Online Safety Act Is Exactly The Privacy-Crushing Failure Everyone Warned About
• LFGSS - LFGSS and Microcosm shutting down
• Raconteur - The Online Safety Act is a security and compliance minefield
• BBC - Tech giants blocking some Ukraine and Gaza posts under new online rules

Australia: The Online Safety Amendment
Anyone under the age of 16 is banned from creating accounts on social media sites. This includes any site that's main purpose is communication, such as forums. Sites that do not properly restrict anyone under the age of 16 from making an account faces fines up to $50 million. Video games such as Roblox are somehow exempt. The full details of the bill have yet to be decided, despite there being mere months left for it come into effect.

Articles:

• Australian Government (non-archive link) - Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 – Fact sheet
• ABC - How will the federal government's under-16s social media ban work? Here's what we know
• ABC - Australia is quietly introducing 'unprecedented' age checks for search engines like Google
• Crikey - Teen social media ban: Answering every question about Australia’s ‘world-first’ plan
• Crikey - No fucking sense’: The secret deal which removed a ‘crucial’ part of the teen social media ban

Europe: Digital Services Act
Various countries in the EU are currently considering social media bans for minors, with France and the Netherlands supporting a proposed ban for anyone under the age of 15. Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, and Spain are slated to trial an app for age verification.

Articles:

• European Commission - Commission publishes guidelines on the protection of minors
• POLITICO - EU clears path for national social media bans
• EFF - Just Banning Minors From Social Media Is Not Protecting Them

USA: Kids Online Safety Act
The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is a proposed bill that claims to protect children. Under this bill platforms will be required to use stricter age verification tools, and censor content that is deemed inappropriate for minors. This has been stated by the Heritage Foundation to include trans posts and abortion posts.

Articles:

• CONGRESS.GOV - S.1409
• [Transphobia warning] Techdirt - Heritage Foundation Admits KOSA Will Be Useful For Removing Pro-Abortion Content… If Trump Wins
• Washington Post - Parents rally, LGBTQ+ groups push back on online child safety bill
• EFF - KOSA’s Online Censorship Threatens Abortion Access

These laws are likely to have effects globally. YouTube has announced plans to use an automated system to predict viewer's ages, with age verification required for falsely flagged accounts.

Spread awareness. Contact anyone that runs a site or service you believe may be effected. Write to your politicians if you're in any of the countries effected. Sign petitions, including ones that have already met their thresholds.

Resources:

• (UK) Repeal the Online Safety Act
• (UK) ORG - Tell your MP: The Online Safety Act isn’t working
• (USA) Reject online censorship. Tell lawmakers to oppose KOSA!

[small_cypress]

It's terrifying and hitting lots of different communities.

 I am in an online sobriety support group on Reddit where people share their struggles to quit drinking and lots of private, anonymous information that could get them fired from jobs if leaked. And now they want IDs associated with these accounts? It's keeping people from seeking help.

One good thing is that it's waking up some people who aren't privacy aware. The top downloaded apps in the UK are mostly VPN services.

[Blue]

Way too many people want private information to use it against people. This is just bad. My country is not likely to implement this yet, we're not even in EU, so I guess something good came out of that, but I heard something similar is happening in South Korea now too.

On a slightly happier note, Newgoruds made a statement they won't be asking for ID at all, but will use other things such as account age or previous purchases of the supporter status. Those who do not fit any of these categories at all can make a one-time small fee instead, which, honestly, is not a bad solution all things considered. Will note this is for UK only, and this might go differently for EU countries.

[BlazingCobaltX]

I would like to link back to a thread I made last year and my final reply referring to the Australian law. Unfortunately, I was rather naive and did not think through how this would exactly be implemented. Initially I deemed it as a win, now I am seeing it is a beeline to total government surveillance.

Something about how these restrictions are being implemented seems overzealous and sudden, including the abrupt NSFW delistings on Steam and Itch. I don't have enough technical knowledge to say how it should happen (though I have heard of a blockchain/token system as alternative), but using ID and facial recognition software (often with false positives) is just the most absurd and invasive way to go at it. Then again, YouTube's choice to do it through a predictive model is even stupider. That is to say, none of these methods are remotely respectful of privacy or freedom of speech. Tracking people like this is just waiting for a data leak or governments tracking citizens in name of 'anti-terrorism'.

In that vein, I can't help but think of the increasing criticism towards these governments and their actions to silence citizens, such as the UK's rapid decision to ban Palestine Action. Considering the current political climate, these laws are the perfect smokescreen to sanitize the internet and restrict privacy. While the policy is not yet implemented, I see the Netherlands heading the same way: Despite warnings by professionals that it is not the best answer to kids being negatively influenced by social media, the current government is jumping at the opportunity to implement a similar social media age ban. Probably in exactly the same flimsy way as these other governments are now doing... 

With these changes, governments are pretty much asking for it that netizens find ways to circumvene these age checks. Personal websites, P2P, or even a deep web renaissance? Who knows. The sad thing is the many tech laymen that don't know or care to circumvent these restrictions and use them anyways. The only way to halt this is to not normalise it at all and make these laws completely fail at their intended purpose.

[sokil]

to add onto this, if you're in the US, i'd highly encourage you to read up on the kids online safety act (often referred to as KOSA) and contact your representatives to kill the bill. fight for the future has a page for this which not only allows you to find and contact your representatives, but also breaks down what the law would actually do and has all of the groups opposing it to give you some idea of what kind of censorship and repression is going on here.

Video games such as Roblox are somehow exempt.

sorry, i laughed out loud at this. "protect the kids" except when it's roblox because the roblox ceo wants you to find true love on their platform. it's fine when it happens on the game primarily targeted toward children, i guess.

[crazyroostereye]

How it looks, is the Age Verification System that the EU Commission is working on not necessarily that bad. As much as I have seen about it, It's supposed to work in a Private Preserving Fashion by using Cryptographic Certificates, similar how HTTPS work. And upside is that the EU is developing it in the Open, so other Countries might be able to build up their Infrastructure and use it in the Future.

Especially How Age Verification looks in the US and UK I am concerned. The way of Selfie and Sending Pictures of your ID as Verification is kept by some of these Services is scary. And threatens to upend the entirety of Internet Anonymity.

[starbreaker]

Especially How Age Verification looks in the US and UK I am concerned. The way of Selfie and Sending Pictures of your ID as Verification is kept by some of these Services is scary. And threatens to upend the entirety of Internet Anonymity.

I think that's the entire point, and it's why I keep buying stamps so that I can write letters to my representatives in Congress and the state legislature to oppose this bullshit. It's bad enough that the internet has become cable TV with a comments section; I don't want it to become the Disney Channel, too.

[arcus]

I updated the OP with info on KOSA (USA) and the Digital Services Act (EU). If anyone has resources that are worth sharing around I'll add them to the OP.

One good thing is that it's waking up some people who aren't privacy aware. The top downloaded apps in the UK are mostly VPN services.

VPNs aren't perfect. There's no way to confirm if a service keeps logs or not. Mullvad is the only one that is seemingly okay, but that's going by anecdotes and their lack of controversies.

to add onto this, if you're in the US, i'd highly encourage you to read up on the kids online safety act (often referred to as KOSA) and contact your representatives to kill the bill. fight for the future has a page for this which not only allows you to find and contact your representatives, but also breaks down what the law would actually do and has all of the groups opposing it to give you some idea of what kind of censorship and repression is going on here.

Thanks, I added it to the OP. I was going to dig for sources to show how this could be used for trans censorship, but I didn't have to. The Heritage Foundation straight up admits they want to censor trans posts with this bill.

Especially How Age Verification looks in the US and UK I am concerned. The way of Selfie and Sending Pictures of your ID as Verification is kept by some of these Services is scary. And threatens to upend the entirety of Internet Anonymity.

That's one of my biggest concerns too. Recently, the app Tea was caught storing ID publicly online, despite claiming to delete ID after verification.

[small_cypress]

VPNs aren't perfect

Oh 100%. But two weeks ago most people on the street had no idea what they were. An imperfect awareness and concern around privacy is at least a good sign. It's scary how little people understand about how data can be weaponized, even with stories like Delta's AI surveillance pricing making the rounds.

[Fish]

Melonland never fails to amaze me! I came back to this forum to post after a year (I think) of not posting just to talk about this issue and this thread is the first thing I see!

Yeah, this all feels pretty bad and also like the natural conclusion of the path the broader webs been on for a while. The Ultimate Ad Machine! Companies will use your data to find the perfect product to sell to you by tracking every little thing you do both on the internet and in the real world. Here in the States, we're already seeing our private healthcare companies sell our data to tech companies. I don't even want to imagine what they're planning there, especially now with this push for ID.

Well, on the bright side, apparently bots make up over half on internet traffic now so companies are probably gonna struggle to harvest data if its just all bots. Place your bets, folks! AI Ragebait Bot vs Facebook Site Tracking! 

As for the child safety angle, whatever happened to online safety lessons and those cool sites that were made for kids? I think most kids these days are just on the same sites that adults use, which is pretty depressing and I can see how that would lead to some safety issues. Seems like the solution might be better teaching and recreating safe spaces for kids online? Orrr we could just have everyone give their IDs to private companies 

[ABlueRose]

It's scary seeing how quickly things are changing. With all the complaints I've heard about it though, I hope it won't turn out too bad. It seems like it's making a lot of people aware and concerned about privacy issues, and I hope it'll inspire more parents to be active about internet safety with their children. I know it won't matter to a lot of them, but maybe this could be the push some parents need to realize they need to step up.

[Beki]

As someone from the UK, this whole incident is making me feel hopeless for the future, like in general.

Whilst I can still access sites like Tumblr and Newgrounds, I know how these requirements are affecting smaller sites with less resources to spend on stuff like ID checks, which risks them having to shut down.

On a slightly happier note, Newgoruds made a statement they won't be asking for ID at all, but will use other things such as account age or previous purchases of the supporter status. Those who do not fit any of these categories at all can make a one-time small fee instead, which, honestly, is not a bad solution all things considered.

NG has definitely handled this situation well. However, the one-time fee has to be paid by credit card. You can get some debit cards and a PayPal account at 16 in the UK, whilst you have to be 18+ for a credit card. Sadly, I don't own a credit card. Of course, I could get one, but there are too many barriers at this moment in time. Fortunately, if you can't verify your age, it just means you won't be able to access Adult (A-rated) content. It doesn't mean you can't have an account. I originally thought I would have to delete my account, so not as bleak I guess.

I'm considering taking some time off from the internet. I know that there's a ton of crazy stuff happening in our world I mean, when hasn't there been?, but I have little to no control and being reminded that every day is deflating. I've signed the petition and encouraged others online to do the same, rebloged resources and information, etc. What else can I do?

Additionally, the way people have been discussing the whole thing is mentally draining. For example, the news post on the Newgrounds forum by Tom Flub has a ton of replies with the consensus of "We're cooked" and references to 1984. Regardless of whether they're right or not, the whole thread became hard to read.

Ugh, I'm just tired.

[boreal_cryptid]

On a slightly happier note, Newgoruds made a statement they won't be asking for ID at all, but will use other things such as account age or previous purchases of the supporter status. Those who do not fit any of these categories at all can make a one-time small fee instead, which, honestly, is not a bad solution all things considered. Will note this is for UK only, and this might go differently for EU countries.

gods bless newgrounds... i agree they handled situation well.

sheezy.art also implemented age verification, but only to view explicit art - mature and general are available for everyone. though unfortunately, UK users need to verify their age :(
now i'm just glad sheezy didn't ban NSFW overall...

[Spots]

I've been seeing a lot of discourse about this lately, but no one really seems to have any answer for how to fight against it other than turning to Tor and VPNs. In countries that have had strict Internet censorship for a while, it seems like people have mainly gotten around it by accessing Western sites through things like VPNs, Tor, and random proxies that constantly pop up and get blocked. Every viable defense against Internet censorship so far seems to require there to be a "free world" to bridge to, so we're in a uniquely bad situation where the entire so-called free world is on an any% speedrun to China Internet.

I highly doubt that VPNs, Tor, proxies, etc. are going to work in the long-term because we're quickly going to run out of higher ground to jump to if things continue in this direction. In my opinion, we should be looking more towards things like peer-to-peer networking (especially private/friend-to-friend networks), mesh networks, and distributing data though direct file sharing and synchronization rather than having traditional web services that need to be online all the time and have a single point of failure.

All of the small web stuff like forums, personal sites, and (non peer-to-peer) decentralized platforms are great for fighting corporate entities, but they absolutely won't survive a government crackdown and any publicly accessible VPN or darknet will get quickly smacked down or compromised if too many people use it to circumvent censorship. I think the only real path forward in the long term is through networks that have no public nodes and could only be truly wiped out by taking down every single node. I've come across projects like Aether and Secure Scuttlebutt which both function as somewhat traditional platforms, but don't require any central servers whatsoever. I haven't used either of them myself, but I bring them up to say that it should be possible to run a forum or social media-like platform in a 100% peer-to-peer way and hopefully avoid detection as long as the connections were all friend-to-friend. I imagine that it would also be possible to have a central authority for moderation by using public-key cryptography, too. Users could submit posts by encrypting them with a public key that only the mods could decrypt and the mods could approve them by re-encrypting them with a private key that all users can decrypt. Or, there could just be a moderation log that gets encrypted by the mods and decrypted by everyone else.

Still, it remains to be seen exactly how bad things will get and what the details of each piece of legislation will be. Every country has different priorities for censorship and I doubt that every country will be equally strict or censor the exact same things. So, it might be a little too early to declare that the global Internet is over and we're gonna have to be passing USB sticks to each other in alleys.

[crazyroostereye]

I think that's the entire point, and it's why I keep buying stamps so that I can write letters to my representatives in Congress and the state legislature to oppose this bullshit. It's bad enough that the internet has become cable TV with a comments section; I don't want it to become the Disney Channel, too.

I don't want to attribute malice where it can be reasonably explained with Incompetence. Especially in the places like the UK or US where there doesn't exist the Pre existing Infrastructure to do any sort of Accurate Privacy Preserving Age Verification. As unlike the EU, they don't have a digital ID program that has been going on for years, including Member States which have similar Digital IDs implemented for even longer.

The main thing that annoys me Deeply with the Online Age Verification has been the fact that we delegate it to the State, as in my eyes it still belongs to the Parents to keep an eye on. The better approach in my Opinion is to Legislate the Requirement of implementing better and universal Parental Control Systems for Platforms of a certain size.

An Idea I have been floating in my Mind was an expansion of the HTML Standard for example to implant an Age Meta tag, that then would be read by the Browser and block websites that don't fit the Parental Settings in the browser.