“The worst thing” for online rights: An age-restricted grey web (Lock and Code S06E16)

This week on the Lock and Code podcast…

The internet is cracking apart. It’s exactly what some politicians want.

In June, a Texas law that requires age verification on certain websites withstood a legal challenge brought all the way to the US Supreme Court. It could be a blueprint for how the internet will change very soon.

The law, titled HB 1181 and passed in 2023, places new requirements on websites that portray or depict “sexual material harmful to minors.” With the law, the owners or operators of websites that contain images or videos or illustrations or descriptions that “more than one-third of which is sexual material harmful to minors” must now verify the age of their website’s visitors, at least in Texas. Similarly, this means that Texas residents visiting adult websites (or websites meeting the “one-third” definition) must now go through some form of online age verification to watch adult content.

The law has obvious appeal from some groups, which believe that, similar to how things like alcohol and tobacco are age-restricted in the US, so, too, should there be age restrictions on pornography online.

But many digital rights advocates believe that online age verification is different because the current methods used for online age verification could threaten privacy, security, and anonymity online.

As Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, wrote in June:

“A person who submits identifying information online can never be sure if websites will keep that information or how that information might be used or disclosed. This leaves users highly vulnerable to data breaches and other security harms.”

Despite EFF’s warnings, this age-restricted reality has already arrived in the UK, where residents are being age-locked out of increasingly more online services because of the country’s passage of the Online Safety Act.

Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Jason Kelly, activism director at EFF and co-host of the organization’s podcast “How to fix the internet,” about the security and privacy risks of online age verification, why comparisons to age restrictions that are cleared with a physical ID are not accurate, and the creation of what Kelley calls “the grey web,” where more and more websites—even those that are not harmful to minors—get placed behind online age verification models that could collect data, attach it to your real-life identity, and mishandle it in the future.

“This is probably the worst thing in my view that has ever happened to our rights online.”

Tune in today to listen to the full conversation.

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