EFF Is Not Opposing Age Verification Hard Enough

Blender Dumbass
December 28, 2024

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#EFF #Australia #Ageism #Paternalism #AgeVerification #SocialMedia #Privacy #Freedom

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...in reply to:

Global Age Verification Measures: 2024 in Review | Electronic Frontier Foundation

www.eff.org

EFF has spent this year urging governments around the world, from Canada to Australia, to abandon their reckless plans to introduce age verification for a variety of online content under the guise of protecting children online. Mandatory age verification tools are surveillance systems that threaten...

View Referenced Publication

Electronic Frontier Foundation, or simply EFF, is doing great work. For 34 years they were sharing largely the same ideals as Free Software Foundation (FSF). Though today I shall complain a little bit on a stance from EFF and how I think they should be pushing harder. Not so long ago Australia decided to ban any platform where users can upload things, to anybody who is younger than 16 years. This is an ageist, paternalistic atrocity and has to be fought with viciousness. Yet EFF seem to only understand the secondary problems with this law.

EFF has spent this year urging governments around the world, from Canada to Australia, to abandon their reckless plans to introduce age verification for a variety of online content under the guise of protecting children online. Mandatory age verification tools are surveillance systems that threaten everyone’s rights to speech and privacy, and introduce more harm than they seek to combat.

I agree with this! This is a good goal. Those age-verification injustices should stop. Yet, it seems they are avoiding the main issue here. Of course that to verify the user's age ( as they go more into detail about, later in the article ) you have to know who is that person and this potentially can ruin people's lives. Pornographic sites, who sell private information to third parties, will include verified lists of people and their sexual preferences, potentially causing a lot of harm to those people, from those who dislike this or that form of sexuality and has money to buy data like this from data brokers.

But that is not the core issue here. The core issue is ageism. The core issue is the overwhelming sense of prejudice against the younger ones as being second class to the adults. People often criticize me, telling me that kids are stupid, or whatever and therefor this or that freedom doesn't come to them. But to that I say that all people are stupid. And there is no reason to believe kids are any stupider than the average adult. There are very little geniuses in the world and those who are geniuses are usually geniuses from the beginning. And if we give freedom to those adults that do not read their contracts, that get addicted to bad things, that are being manipulated and taken advantage of, we should not treat kids, who at least have much more active neuro-plastic brains with any less respect. And we should not rub them from any of the freedoms adults enjoy, however stupid they might be. Doing otherwise in an injustice!

Look at this header:

Kids Experiencing Harm is Not Just an Online Phenomena

This header should be "People Experiencing Harm is Not Just an Online Phenomena", there is nothing inherently childish in experiencing harm.

Then this article goes into another territory which I see as not enough push from the EFF. They claim that:

Without Comprehensive Privacy Protections, These Bills Exacerbate Data Surveillance

And they are talking about very correct observations here. They claim that:

Users will have no way to be certain that the data they’re handing over is not going to be retained and used in unexpected ways, or even shared to unknown third parties. Millions of adult internet users would also be entirely blocked from accessing protected speech online because they are not in possession of the required form of ID.

But here is the thing. If somebody collects the data in the first place, it is already too late. The laws that are trying to protect the collected data from being misused are bad laws, because this data should not be collected.

There are a lot of people and even sometimes full companies that do not obey laws. Criminals might have a good exterior facade. They could be working as data engineers and programmers in firms that process this collected personal data. And they might do shady things with this data on their own. So having the data be collected in the first place is already to lose the privacy game.

People who want to access some information on the internet should not be privately identifiable unless they want to be. If they want to make an account on PornHub and not lie about who they are, I mean, it's their freedom, let them do that. But if they want to lie about themselves, they should be able to. One person could have one nickname on one website and another on another website. It is very valuable to be able to spoof your identity. To use a VPN to hide an IP address. To use a User-Agent spoofer to hide the operating system and web-browser configuration. And if there was some system that records your age. People should be able to lie about that too. Meaning children that will want to access PornHub or something, should be able to edit their metadata before accessing the website, to appear 18+ year olds. Therefor making all this attempt at age verification pointless, if the reason is censorship. Which is by itself a yet another injustice.

But apparently the law-makers are so ageist and so censorship-advocating that they make laws that make all of it simply impossible. The law in Australia basically states that if a young person was successful at accessing the website, it was already a violation, making it absurdly stupid. There is no measure that you could implement that will make sure nobody under a certain age will never access. And you know kids will find every conceivable loophole. It will require an ID? Fine, they'll steal one from Mom. They will require a chat with them in a video call or something, fine, they will use AI, or get one friend that is over the age to get them signed. Even today, in stores around the world a lot of adults just buy alcohol and cigarettes to teenagers who are waiting for them outside. The law will stop nothing. And it shouldn't. We should treat all people the same! If one group has freedom and another doesn't, I don't care what excuses you give to it, this is still an injustice and it has to stop.

But what does EFF say? They say:

We analyzed various age verification methods in comments to the New York Attorney General. None of them are both accurate and privacy-protective.

Like come on. What are you even doing here. Age verification itself is a problem. Not because of privacy, but because of age verification.

Now, let's flip everything on it's head and get to the bottom of why they say what they say.

A lot of people jump on EFF for this or that reason. Similarly to how I just did in this very article. But here is a very important thing to think about when you review what EFF is doing.

They are lawyers. If you look at the page of EFF's staff most of them have something or another to do with law. And because they are lawyers, you can kind of start to understand their writing in a new light.

Arguing that something cannot be done in anyway that will be private enough is a very easy pill to swallow when it comes to the general public. Unlike, arguing for complete disintegration of ageism. One seems to be a lesser cause than the other, but since the other is such a grand cause, it is way harder to convince people of it.

Lawyers job, apart from knowing the law, is to be able to argue their cases very effectively. They are going against lawyers from those who support this or that injustice. And therefor they always have to carefully choose their words, so as to not make the cause sounds incorrect in the eyes of the judge, and also so as not to give the other side any straws to pull on.

EFF is doing a very hard job. They are the secret agents in the law system trying to nudge the system to change from within. Them stating something too grandiose will defeat their techniques. And that's why every-time you read an article from them, it is almost never perfect. EFF will not be Richard Stallman who just says what he believes without wavering to anybody. EFF has to be much more careful than that. They rely on a certain plausible deniability. Because if they would just go and say everything that they believe plainly, they would not achieve anything.

People like Richard Stallman and organizations like the Free Software Foundation have lawyers that can translate the strong beliefs of those people into something that will persuade a judge. EFF on the other hand are the lawyers. And they are always speaking in that manner. They are always speaking as if they are addressing a judge. A judge that has a prejudice against their cause. A judge that has to be dealt with carefully.

Happy Hacking!!!

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