This is yet another bill that is being introduced that is being pushed as a way to “protect the children”. But like every other age verification proposal, part of it is really about the other motives (of various parties having the ability to collect personal data and being able to surveil citizens to some degree).
This bill would require operating system providers to verify the age of any user of an operating system. The issue is naturally in the details; how to go about doing this while protecting peoples privacy and personal information. Government and private companies have done a piss poor job at that with data leaks/breaches.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wrote a short but great article last year about why this should not come at the cost of our privacy and freedom of expression. Governments are notorious for abusing their power (especially when the wrong types of people end up in control).
The drama regarding Discord’s attempt earlier in the year to roll out age verification for their platform, highlights an exploding parts problem when they were called out on the partner they used. While I believe it’s a smaller vocal minority who will self-remove themselves from the platform (if they end up being flagged for verification), I believe a larger majority will comply IF they ever need to verify (whenever they roll it out).
I’ve already covered my stance on this stuff; besides financial platforms, any non-critical sites that requires having to scan a photo ID or perform any biometric validation off device, gets excised from my system and usage because I have a zero tolerance approach to invasive requirements like that.
As of this writing, I’ve been spending much less time on the remaining platforms that I am still on. I’ve written about my self de-platforming objectives and have been spending as little time online as possible (my Discord account has actually been disabled for most of this month; most of the people I need to communicate with have an alternate contact method). To be honest, I am near close to being unplugged from most platforms besides iCloud and YouTube (which I access on a different account to search for relevant news items that I embed in some postings).
Based on my usage experiences now, I do believe the impacts of a lot of this stuff will be muted should states (I believe there is a similar bill pending here), individual apps/platforms, and this Federal law proposal, result in more draconian measures being implemented for validating that age information. And this again highlights why I made this decision to handle the sites that I run on my own (versus using these companies platform where it may end up becoming encumbered with all of these verification procedures).
As for this bill (H. R. 8250), it is still in the introductory phase and at the moment, the age verification process is benign (just requiring entering a date of birth to confirm if you are over the age of 18, sort of like how most sites have been until recently where it is based on this honor system). I of course know this is not what some folks want though (and believe there will be a push for more stringent checks); they want to be able to actually validate some actual proof (like a government photo ID). And this is where the bill gets more interesting.
If the date of birth yields an age under 18, then a parent or guardian will need to verify a date of birth. How that will be done hasn’t been addressed. This will also require a process for application developers to be able to access this date of birth and to store this information securely. Additionally, there will need to be parental control settings that will allow parents/guardians to define what anunder the age of 18 person can access.
Again, this is like reinventing the wheel when parental controls already exist in most commercial operating systems and on many commercial routers. The point again is that it should be the parents being responsible for their children when it comes to that network access (if that is too much responsibility to ask for, then don’t procreate in the first place). But it is what it is where we need government becoming involved unfortunately.
