{"id":106580,"date":"2025-08-30T00:09:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T00:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/106580\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T00:09:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T00:09:10","slug":"online-age-checks-driving-concerns-they-curtail-internet-freedoms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/106580\/","title":{"rendered":"Online age checks driving concerns they curtail internet freedoms"},"content":{"rendered":"

Online age checks<\/a> are on the rise in the U.S. and elsewhere, asking people for IDs or face scans to prove they are over 18 or 21 or even 13. To proponents, they\u2019re a tool to keep children away from adult websites and other material that might be harmful to them. <\/p>\n

But opponents see a worrisome trend toward a less secure, less private and less free internet, where people can be denied access not just to pornography but news, health information and the ability to speak openly and anonymously. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think that many of these laws come from a place of good intentions,\u201d said Jennifer Huddleston, a senior technology policy fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. \u201cCertainly we all want to protect young people from harmful content before they\u2019re ready to see it.\u201d <\/p>\n

More than 20 states have passed some kind of age verification law, though many face legal challenges. While no such law exists on the federal level in the United States, the Supreme Court recently allowed a Mississippi age check law<\/a> for social media to stand. In June, the court upheld a Texas law<\/a> aimed at preventing minors from watching pornography online, ruling that adults don\u2019t have a First Amendment right to access obscene speech without first proving their age.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, the United Kingdom now requires users visiting websites that allow pornography to verify their age. Beyond adult sites, platforms like Reddit, X, Telegram and Bluesky have also committed to age checks. France and several other European Union countries also are testing a government sponsored verification<\/a> app. <\/p>\n

And Australia has banned children under 16<\/a> from accessing social media. <\/p>\n

\u201cPlatforms now have a social responsibility to ensure the safety of our kids is a priority for them,\u201d Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters in November. The platforms have a year to work out how they could implement the ban before penalties are enforced.<\/p>\n

To critics, though, age check laws raise \u201csignificant privacy and speech concerns, not only for young people themselves, but also for all users of the internet,\u201d Huddleston said. \u201cBecause the only way to make sure that we are age verifying anyone under the age of 18 is to also age verify everyone over the age 18. And that could have significant impacts on the speech and privacy rights of adults.\u201d <\/p>\n

The state laws are a hodgepodge of requirements, but they generally fall into two camps. On one side are laws \u2014 as seen in Louisiana and Texas \u2014 that require websites comprised of more than 33% of adult content to verify users\u2019 ages or face fines. Then there are laws \u2014 enacted in Wyoming or South Dakota \u2014 that seek to regulate sites that have any material that is considered obscene or otherwise harmful to minors. <\/p>\n

What\u2019s considered harmful to minors can be subjective, and this is where experts believe such laws run afoul of the First Amendment. It means people may be required to verify their ages to access anything, from Netflix to a neighborhood blog. <\/p>\n

\u201cIn places like Australia and the U.K., there is already a split happening between the internet that people who are willing to identify themselves or go through age verification can see and the rest of the internet. And that\u2019s historically a very dangerous place for us to end up,\u201d said Jason Kelley, activism director at the nonprofit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation. <\/p>\n

What\u2019s behind the gates is determined by a \u201chundred different decision-makers,\u201d Kelley said, from politicians to tech platforms to judges to individuals who have sued because they believe that a piece of content is dangerous. <\/p>\n

While many companies are complying, verifying users\u2019 ages can prove a burden, especially for smaller platforms. On Friday, Bluesky said it will no longer be available in Mississippi because of its age verification requirements. While the social platform already does age verification in the U.K., it said Mississippi\u2019s approach \u201cwould fundamentally change how users access Bluesky.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because it requires every user to undergo an age check, not just those who want to access adult content. It would also require Bluesky to identify and track users that are children.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe think this law creates challenges that go beyond its child safety goals, and creates significant barriers that limit free speech and disproportionately harm smaller platforms,\u201d the company said in a blog post<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Some websites and social media companies, such as Instagram\u2019s parent company Meta<\/a>, have argued that age verification should be done by app store owners, such as Apple and Google, and not individual platforms. This would mean that app stores need to verify their users\u2019 ages before they allow them to download apps. Unsurprisingly, Apple and Google disagree.<\/p>\n

\u201cBilled as \u2018simple\u2019 by its backers, including Meta, this proposal fails to cover desktop computers or other devices that are commonly shared within families. It also could be ineffective against pre-installed apps,\u201d Google said in a blog post. <\/p>\n

Nonetheless, a growing number of tech companies are implementing verification systems to comply with regulations or ward off criticism that they are not protecting children. This includes Google, which recently started testing a new age-verification system for YouTube<\/a> that relies on AI to differentiate between adults and minors based on their watch histories. <\/p>\n

Instagram is testing a similar AI system<\/a> to determine if kids are lying about their ages. Roblox, which was sued by the Louisiana attorney general<\/a> on claims it doesn\u2019t do enough to protect children from predators, requires users who want to access certain games rated for those over 17 to submit a photo ID and undergo a face scan for verification. Roblox has also recently begun requiring age verification for teens who want to chat more freely on platform.<\/p>\n

Face scans that promise to estimate a person\u2019s age may address some of the concerns around IDs, but they can be unreliable. Can AI accurately tell, for instance, if someone is 17.5 or just turned 18?<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes it\u2019s less accurate for women or it\u2019s less accurate for certain racial or ethnic groups or for certain physical characteristics that then may mean that those people have to go through additional privacy invasive screenings to prove that they are of a certain age,\u201d Huddleston said. <\/p>\n

While IDs are a common way of verifying someone\u2019s age, the method raises security concerns: What happens if companies don\u2019t delete the uploaded files, for instance? <\/p>\n

Case in point: the recent data breaches at Tea<\/a>, an app for women to anonymously warn each other about the men they date, speak to some of these concerns. The app requires women who sign up to upload an ID or undergo a scan to prove that they are women. Tea wasn\u2019t supposed to keep the files but it did, and stored them in a way that allowed hackers to not only access the images, but also their private messages. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Online age checks are on the rise in the U.S. and elsewhere, asking people for IDs or face…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":106581,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[245,60722,276,60726,45,49,48,2770,2841,2561,244,18937,60723,60724,27102,6386,714,60725,5545,1942,2940,61,544,2845,127,883],"class_list":{"0":"post-106580","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-alphabet","9":"tag-anthony-albanese","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-australia-government","12":"tag-business","13":"tag-ca","14":"tag-canada","15":"tag-children","16":"tag-general-news","17":"tag-inc","18":"tag-internet","19":"tag-internet-access","20":"tag-jason-kelley","21":"tag-jennifer-huddleston","22":"tag-meta-platforms","23":"tag-mississippi","24":"tag-politics","25":"tag-pornography","26":"tag-privacy","27":"tag-social-media","28":"tag-software","29":"tag-technology","30":"tag-texas","31":"tag-u-s-news","32":"tag-united-kingdom","33":"tag-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106580\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}