The approach the UK government is taking to online safety is already turning the country into a digital privacy dumpster fire. I believe that the proposals for an Australian-style ban on social media for under sixteen year olds will make things much worse. This has concerned me enough that I responded to a government public consultation yesterday, and I’m going to send the following to my MP…

Dear MP

I am writing to share our experiences resulting from your government’s Online Safety Act, and how, intentionally or not, it has sacrificed the privacy, security and free speech of adults, at the altar of ‘child safety’ while simultaneously failing to address the real problem of algorithmically directed content pushed at everyone, with the explicit aim of causing addiction in social media users of all ages.

Recent updates to the iPhone have added mandatory age verification at device level. One assumes this is in anticipation of further age verification laws being made in regions in which it operates. I imagine other manufacturers will follow suit, if they haven’t already.  Our experience starkly shows how technological approaches are deeply flawed and based on assumptions that are likely to be untrue for parts of the UK population. Apple have decided to enforce age verification at device level by way of their online account ecosystem, which is required for use of their devices.  They verify age based on three factors:  the age of the account, whether there is a credit card attached to the account, and whether you scan a ‘government issued ID card’.  The last of these is restricted, in the UK at least, to a photocard driver’s license.  I hope you can already see that this is inequitable, as it discriminates against those who cannot or do not wish to have a credit card (low income individuals or families for example), or do not drive. I do not feel that either of these are legitimate reasons for restricting access to online services and treating anyone who cannot comply as a child.  This is exactly what has happened to my husband – he neither has, nor wants, a credit card and doesn’t drive, and his passport could not be scanned by the age verification system.

While it is laudable of Apple to attempt to verify age in a way that respects their users’ privacy, as using credit cards is subject to rigorous regulation and is thus low risk, not all manufacturers and services take this approach. Many offload age verification to an emergent, unregulated industry which forces users into supplying valuable identity-related data (including biometrics via face scanning) which could so easily fall into the hands of criminals.  This is a mass identity theft and associated fraud incident waiting to happen.

I know you are supportive of the plans for an Australian-style ban on social media for under-sixteens, but I feel that this, while well-intentioned, would compound the problems of age verification with respect to digital privacy and security.  It also ignores the fact that the harms associated with social media are harmful to everyone, regardless of age. We, as a society, are in danger of producing a generation of children without the skills to navigate digital life when they are suddenly ‘allowed’ to access everything at sixteen or eighteen.  A better approach would be through education, for parents and children, on the risks of the online world, as already exists for the offline world (road safety, stranger danger, RSE etc.) and how to navigate the whole world, online and offline, safely.  While the harms of social media are real (as the recent legal case in California, when Meta and Google were found guilty of creating algorithms designed to cause addiction) the answer is through regulation of these platforms rather than of the users.  I am confident that this is the approach that can provide a better digital experience for all internet users, while protecting privacy, security and legal free speech in an equitable manner.

Thank you for taking the time to read this rather long email. This is an important issue, which could so easily have unintended consequences and cause more long-term harm than it reduces.

Regards

Stewart Tolhurst

My response to the consultation was along similar lines. Sadly the only equitable way to enforce age verification is to have mandatory ID (which would need to be cheap or free to obtain) with strong regulation and not tied to any third party services (Germany trying to tie it to Apple and Google is completely wrongheaded) – which unfortunately probably means governmental (and we know how big technology projects tend to go when the UK government is involved). The technology is there and we can’t afford to leave this to the private sector…