Age Verification Laws

The first topic that you address in your piece is about how all of these age verification laws around the world de-identify people in the net and open up surveillance opportunities.

And I just saw an article today of journalists worrying that these laws, these age verification laws, were going to allow the de-identification of sources and journalists themselves, and therefore increase the amount of surveillance capability that governments have over whistleblowing.

So talk us through who gets the information and what kind of surveillance are we talking about?

Yeah.

I think with that, I think, yeah, you touched on, I mean, the biggest part of that, it's just the idea that there is going to be a lot of like de-identification with like kind of increasing anonymity of what.

I guess identification.

I said it wrong.

Oh, sorry.

Yeah.

De-anonymization.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

Okay.

I understand that.

Okay.

Yeah.

yeah de-anonymization okay that makes much more sense um but yeah okay so i think with that um what i was really thinking in the piece was just kind of about like the actual basis of this privacy issue um people post online because they want to be able to share their thoughts they want to be able to like participate in an online community and with actually de-anonymizing and increasing the amount of information that people have about each other and that platforms have about these people, there's always going to be more of a safety risk that's created in that, especially with age verification and kind of knowing what age group everyone is in, especially with like adults having access to children who are like younger, who are on these same platforms.

and kind of like interacting together, it's really hard to actually maintain those, um, roots of safety.

And so that's kind of what I wanted to bring up first.

Um, and yeah, I feel like that was like the main thought behind that.

And, uh, you bring up the fact that most Americans, a lot of Americans, um, lack a driver's license.

Many don't have photo IDs.

That's also coming up in the save act, this, um, election interference act that the Republicans signed.

would like to pass, or the president would like to pass, but it was not going to be passed.

But that if you had to present a photo ID to vote, there would be all kinds of disenfranchisement.