Discord just canceled its planned age verification rollout, for now

jonah:

Mandated verification to access information is always a form of government overreach and censorship.

On this, we agree.

jonah:

With some platforms like YouTube this justification is iffy to me, because they do not host pornography, but when it comes to Discord I believe they do allow channels to share pornography and other NSFW content, and I can see why a platform operator in that situation might want something more robust than a “yes I’m 18” button.

I don’t agree that access to NSFW content should be restricted to 18 year olds (or whatever arbitrary age your society dictates) by any supposed moral authority be it a government or a private company. Parent’s should be responsible for the parenting of their children.

Firstly, NSFW is a completely arbitrary term; sex education, homosexuality and religious texts can or have all be interpreted as pornographic or NSFW in nature.

Secondly, where there is content that genuinely is harmful to children, which there is undoubtedly a lot of, that is the parents’ exclusive responsibility. It is bewildering to me that governments cannot get it through their thick skulls that the reason people no longer choose to have children is in no small part due to the complete and total destruction of both the family unit and parental authority.

Also, I am upset by the American defaultism taking place here. In many European countries the age of consent is between 14 to 16 and yet Discord is going around restricting access to NSFW content to 18+ year olds out of a misguided desire to play morality police.

jonah:

To prevent more robust age verification from happening even voluntarily, we’d need to go beyond our calls to stop mandated age verification, and start calling for all online age verification itself to be outlawed. I’m not sure if that is a justifiable position, honestly.

I completely disagree. My stance, based on my principles, is that no one should be allowed to process my personal data except on the basis of my explicit and freely given consent. Even if you could convince me consent shouldn’t be needed for data essential to the operation of a service, my age is decidedly not such data.

jonah:

The biggest argument against voluntary age verification is the massive security risks involved, but the difference is that from the pure security point of view, these problems are solvable, unlike the unsolvable problem of government censorship in mandated schemes. And from Discord’s announcement it sounds like they are planning to handle this better than other platforms.

Robust and private age verification is an unsolvable problem. Even if we accept the false premise that the objective is to “protect the kids” and we assume there is any desire to implement a privacy-preserving method of age verification, that desire will crumble since the guarantees will not be robust enough. A truly private age verification system could not prevent a parent from verifying their own age for all their children’s accounts. This, mind you, is a good thing in my mind, since again it should be up to the parent to, together with their child, set reasonable limits on what they can access.

jonah:

I think it would be more reasonable for the government to outlaw unsafe forms of age verification. For example, the government should make it illegal for companies to ever collect images of people’s government IDs, that would be within their right. But other forms of age verification like via credit card purchases that don’t require logging credit card numbers indefinitely, or with digital ID systems that let you share only your age and no other info, or biometric systems that work entirely on-device and don’t send those scans to a third-party vendor… I’m not sure those should be disallowed

I don’t think the government should be interfering in these matters at all, and these private companies would not be pushing the issue if not for the pressure from governments. I never had age verification during my childhood, and I think I turned out fine.

jonah:

If platforms like YouTube and Discord voluntarily implementing age verification in a secure fashion prevents age verification mandates from being applied to services like Signal or decentralized networks like Mastodon and PeerTube, is that worth it?

No, not at all. Just because you can avoid the issue by using Signal or similar doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight for the rights of the people who aren’t so well informed and just want to get on with their day-to-day lives. That’s without getting into the fact that even well-intentioned privacy-preserving age verification will inevitably be extended and misused in the future. If you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. Therefore, we can’t allow it to stand even now, at its least harmful stage.