Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The Problem with Age Verification Online

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Description: Age verification technology is becoming increasingly commonplace as lawmakers seek to enact deeply concerning restrictions in the name of “child safety.” Washington Post technology reporter Drew Harwell joins to discuss the threats to our freedom of speech, expression, and privacy this new software unlocks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Imagine going to browse the web, post online, or message some friends, and having to scan your face and provide a government ID. It sounds draconian, but age verification technology is becoming increasingly commonplace, as lawmakers enact deeply concerning restrictions in the name of child's safety. These age verification tools pose significant threats to our freedom of speech, expression, and privacy. They'd erase anonymity on the web and give the government and tech companies unprecedented in power to surveil us. Here to discuss how all of this works and why lawmakers are so hell-bent on scanning our faces is my colleague at the Washington Post, technology reporter Drew Harwell. Drew, welcome to Power User. Thanks for having me.

Okay, Drew, so you just came out with this phenomenal article about the rise of age verification software. What's going on? And why are we suddenly seeing this age verification software all over? A lot of websites on the Internet and a lot of states in the U.S. are starting to require age verification, where if you go onto a specific app or website. It asks you to stop and prove that you're an adult. It asks you to look into a webcam or your phone camera and some AI in the software will scan your face. It'll either scan whether you match, you know, a government ID that you're holding like a driver's license, or it'll just look at your face and make an AI sort of analysis of whether you're an adult or a kid. Sounds very sci-fi,

but it is really the reality now for a lot of the internet and you're seeing more and more states every month pass these laws requiring these things to go on to, you know, not just kind of the obvious sites like porn sites, but also social media and other places on the internet that have always traditionally just been sort of free and open. We're up to 19 states now that have passed age verification laws where they basically say we don't want kids to go on porn sites, social media sites, whatever, and we want to pass these big age gate laws to keep kids out. But we don't really know a ton about kind of how. the tech works, and we're just kind of turning this tech on in a big, kind of sweeping way.

So how does this age verification technology actually work? I mean, can it really identify our ages? I'm thinking of those bad Instagram filters that say that I'm like 57. Right. Yeah, it is the same exact kind of technology. And it's a fairly new kind of technique. It has been around for a little bit longer than you might expect, but the real good technology has come with kind of the rise of AI and just better sort of imaging technology. Aside from social media and porn, this technology is being rolled out pretty widely across other services too. What other services does that include? Yeah. So in the real world, actually, you're seeing these more in like supermarkets and convenience

stores in the UK. There's a bunch of places where if you want to buy beer or cigarettes, it'll do like an automated age scan instead of going to a real person. But even online, like if you want to play a certain video game, if you want to gamble, if you want to gamble, if you want to to order or delivery, if you want to go onto a dating site, a lot of these will run this check to make sure that you are, whatever they think you are, to make sure you're an adult, and you have to pass that check. And even like if you want to live stream on TikTok or go on Instagram and clarify that you're an adult or say that you're an adult, you have to pass this AI examination. But, you know, if you haven't used it already, you probably will soon,

where you open an app and it asks you to confirm your age by looking into this little circle, looking into your webcam or your phone cam, and it sometimes asks you to go forward or backward away from the camera, and it just does its little AI magic behind the scenes to verify either that you are the person on the ID that you're holding up or in age estimation that you look adult enough. It'll say whether you look too young or old enough. How accurate you are are these systems, though? And how accurate are they across sort of cultures and just the wide variety of the way humans look? Yeah, so in general, they're pretty good. There was a federal test by this government research group called NIST that they looked at six different algorithms and they ran like 11 million photos through them. And they found that generally the systems were like, for age estimation, they were, they would get your age right within about three years. If you're 25, it would probably say you're 22 or 28. You know, there was a margin of error there, which is not bad, I would say. You know, it's it's not perfect, but it's not terrible either. I mean, if you're passing laws, for instance, like, you have to be the age of 16 or 18 to be online and you have a three-year room for error.

Totally. Yeah. If you're 21 or if you're 20 and it's saying that you're underage and can't access these websites that are really important to like modern life, I think that's a big problem. And, you know, you asked about how they work across different cultures, different skin colors. This has been a problem with facial recognition for a long time where white guys like me have a higher accurate. rate for these kinds of systems than women, than people with darker skin. You see that a lot with facial recognition, and the research shows that. And with age verification, age estimation, it's a little bit better, but it's still sort of problematic. One of the weird things they found with these tests was that the faces of girls and women, it was less accurate with. They weren't really sure why. The researchers couldn't figure out kind of why. And so just the fact that there's a different experience for different people and that these are kind of like the bouncers of the global internet for like websites that we we all use. I just think that's kind of like surprising and a little unnerving. Not only do people not age at the same rate and look so different, there's no true biological age, I think as Brian Johnson was trying to prove. What about people with disabilities or dwarfism, things like that? How are they affected? Can these age scanners account for such things? Yeah, it's a big problem. And I mean, it's a problem for everybody because a lot of us don't look our age. We look older,

than we are, we look younger than we are, and we're all having to go through the same examination. There was a little person on TikTok, because she's a woman who has dwarfism. She talks about her disability. She has a big community online. She talks about the discrimination she faces. And she, you know, mysteriously one day saw her account like shut down on TikTok where she had thousands of followers. She was told that the account was going to be banned because the app basically thought she was a kid. She was not a kid. She's in her 20s. I talked to TikTok about it. They said, actually this was a human error, but the reality of it was that this woman said she had a lot of friends who had run into the same issue, where they'd also been misclassified as kids. And one,

that's just, it's embarrassing for a company to get that wrong when something is that sensitive. But the truth is that there are a lot of people with disabilities like this that this could affect. And, you know, if this is going to be a gatekeeper for a really important part of the internet, then everybody should be treated the same way. There shouldn't be this potential that your disability could be a factor in what you get to see or read on the web. Absolutely. And it's not just little people. It's so many people with physical deformities. I remember there was the woman or man who was a burn victim as well on TikTok who talked about problems like this. Of course, people with, yeah, any sort of physical deformity or developmental disabilities as well,

seems like a real minefield. Yeah. And when we get to the global side of it, too, like there are a lot of different places around the world where there are people who are, you know, they don't get enough to eat. They have lower incomes. kids hit puberty at different rates. So it's like when you apply this on a global stance and expect everybody to look one certain way to be able to enter the door and go onto the internet, that's just, it's just recipe for disaster. Yeah. Where is this technology being used? I mean, I know that porn sites, I think you've mentioned, you've got to age verify yourself. Social media companies are increasingly using this technology. Where can you expect to encounter it?

Instagram, TikTok, Facebook dating, a lot of these will use them. If you're creating an account and saying you're an adult, you'll often have to go through one of these age checks. Or if I have an Instagram account that says I'm a kid and I try to change it to become an adult so I can do whatever, it'll then run me through that age checks. So they're pretty prominent. Porn is a big one. Porn hub and OnlyFans, they use age checks now, not just on the viewers, but also on the

creator side, where they'll even run checks. on the faces that are seen in video to just say that these people are adults. But even beyond that, a lot of video game companies are now starting to do that. Online gambling, online casinos are using them. GoPuff, which does delivery for food, but also alcohol and cigarettes. They have used age verification in the past. So there's a lot of different places where you might confront it and have no idea what you're looking at. All of this seems so antithetical to the entire idea of the internet, which was supposed to be this, like, open place that you could connect. Was there any sort of, like, example of this type of technology, you know, on the open web versus some of these apps?

It is a big new thing for us. Going back to the 90s, when there was panic about, you know, kids on the internet, and there was a law passed called Kappa, Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. In that law, there was a talk about how do we verify who's a kid and who's not, or how do we verify the parent of a kid and get their consent so they can go on these websites. And at the time, we really didn't have the technology we have now, right? The AI was much more rudimentary. It was more expensive. And so the ways they went about figuring out who was a kid and who wasn't was basically this very crude like, are you a kid? Yes or no? Or like, what's your birthday? And then a bunch of kids would lie. So that was like the status quo for a long time. And also, you know, the companies were

held to a different standard. So like they couldn't collect data on kids. in the same way that they collected on adults. But it only really mattered if they knew these users were kids. So most of the time, they would just try not to know. And so that created all sorts of issues on its own. So this point that we're at now, where it's really requiring scans of your face, sharing data from your government ID with not just Facebook or Instagram,

but like with this third-party vendor that you've probably never heard of, never would have interacted with in your life, except that you have to now go on it to use a website. That is all very new. And it's such a giant like bouncer check on the internet that has always been this like free and free and open place. And not to say that like the status quo is all made everybody happy either. I mean, the fact is that now kids can in a lot of places go onto websites so that a lot of adults would never want them to go on to.

There's been all of these online safety efforts in various states and federally. And when you sort of scratch the motivations of, you know, what's behind them, a lot of lawmakers have made kind of concerning commentary, right? we had Marsha Blackburn saying that, you know, COSA needed to pass to protect kids from, like, the transgender in society or something. Obviously, a lot of states, what they consider harmful to children is information about reproductive rights, sexuality, things like that. You know, when we think of these age verification laws, how can we ensure that they wouldn't be used in sort of negative ways to keep kids from really vital, important information online? Yeah, I think that's the, like, the biggest question of all this. most Americans probably don't want five-year-olds to just be able to go on porn hub.

Like, that's probably a big obvious one. But then, like, if you go past that, like, it becomes different shades of, like, do you think 15-year-olds should be able to use social media? Some people would say no, but a lot of people would say yes. And then it starts to get to a point where, do I want the state that I live in to decide what educational materials my kids look at or whether they can see, you know, stuff about gender and history and all of these things that have become battlegrounds, in schools, it is a slippery slope because once you kind of stand up this technology that sets a

different internet, no matter, I mean, depending on what your age is, then the lawmakers start to get to decide what your kids can see. And like, let's not forget, you know, the First Amendment applies to kids too, right? They have a right to speech. They have a right to read books and newspapers and websites. Once you start establishing this checkpoint system where you have to prove your ability to be able to see these things, that really changes the calculus of the internet in a way that I think a lot of people are not comfortable with. Yeah. I mean, I think it also strips away the option for anonymity. You know, if I have to scan my face or ID to set up an Instagram account, I mean, I think it's concerning, right? You're suddenly sort of tying this facial and government identity to certain accounts that might engage in speech that, you know, the government doesn't like, as you mentioned. The reality of these things in practice is that when people now want to go onto a porn site, they have to give their ID to a porn company, which is like, you know, like I'm not going to be approved here, but that is, I think, a big change for people that makes people really uncomfortable. And it's not just porn, right, but it's social media too. You know, we talk about in states where that have passed these laws saying, like, we don't want, you know, 14-year-olds to be able to go on Facebook and create an account. That's all well and good. But, you know, everybody, now has to, if you're going to create an account in that state, prove your adultness to be able

to access that. So it's not just that kids are having to share their ID or their data or their face, but everybody is. And so I think that that's where, yeah, like you said, anonymity. I mean, that's been such a core value of the internet for better and for worse, right? But when that gets stripped away because of these new laws and because of this new technology that we, that is still very experimental and gets it wrong, I think that's where the big scare factor comes in. I think that point that you made is so important to drive home because I think a lot of people, when I've talked to them about this, parents are like, yeah, let the kids scan their faces. You know, they need to prove themselves. These types of restrictions, like these force the companies, as you mentioned, to scan everyone's face. You can't determine who's a kid without taking everyone's data. And not everyone has a government ID, right? Or not everyone wants to scan their face. They might be a dissident. They might be outspoken. I mean, you can see how badly this could be applied for people that challenge the government. or from challenge power. These are not just edge cases, right?

There are a lot of people in this country that don't have a government ID, that don't have a webcam, right? That don't have a phone. These are not small amounts of people, and they will be potentially shut out from, again, big parts of the internet. I mean, porn and social media,

those are big parts of what a lot of Americans spend their time online doing, again, rightly or wrongly. So, yeah, I mean, that is concerning. And, you know, there are a lot of people who don't want their kids' faces to be scanned and to have the images go to a company that, and this is,

not just like me making this up. I mean, when the federal trade commission reviewed this proposal about age verification last year, they had all the hundreds of comments of people writing in and saying, like, you're asking me to trust this company, I don't know, do this dystopian thing that I'm not comfortable with to access a website I've always been able to use from the cover of my home without share it. So it's unnerving to a lot of people to have to deal with this. It also strikes me as a little hypocritical of these lawmakers, because at the same time, these lawmakers have complained for years about how these big tech companies are too irresponsible with our data. Now they're kind of asking them to collect even more data and highly sensitive

data. It seems like this would be a privacy nightmare and also just make a lot more people susceptible to hacking and identity theft. Yeah. And that's where you get these conflicting concerns from lawmakers who, yeah, they want Facebook to have a lot less from us. And yet they're asking the youngest among us to share their face with this random company. Some of these companies have said, like, okay, when you give your photo to us, we'll delete it immediately or we'll delete it when we don't need it. We have all these retention policies. But, you know, these companies are basically unknown to a lot of people. And so that demand of trust is really, you know, alarming to people. How's it here are these third-party companies and are they subject to data leaks?

At the same time, they're saying TikTok is so dangerous because it collects data and could give it to China, but now we have companies collecting even more data just to ensure someone gets a TikTok account. That data leak problem is real. Like, there have been identity verification, age verification companies that have exposed people's data, have exposed really sensitive stuff about people. And these companies, like, they say they're secure. They do the things that you would expect of a company that gets a lot of facial personal information data. But you have to imagine, if I'm a hacker, and I want to target a company that potentially has a lot of like juicy stuff on people, a lot of like facial images, a lot of like IDs, you're going to target one of these companies. And so there's just this big, basically honeypot, like treasure trove of information right there for the taking.

And lawmakers are basically shunting people to these companies by creating these regulations to begin with. So yeah, it's just it's just a little alarming. I mean, and it comes from, you know, the basic point of lawmakers are where you're, about social media. They're worried about kids and worried about the effects on our society. And that's driving them to a place where they never would have been to begin with, where, you know, these were people who were concerned about data privacy to begin with, but they feel like the problem of children's safety online or social media or whatever is so big that they're so desperate for a solution. This goes into this broader, you know, freak out and this moral panic around

technology. I mean, we've seen where these freakouts have led to before. You know, the censorship of comic books, for instance, in the 50s, when there was that panic about comic books destroying kids' minds or legislation around other things. How valid is age-gating some of this technology? Lawmakers want to roll out this really dystopian, problematic technology based on these vague concerns about child safety, when there's no real data to back up any of those child safety concerns. And a lot of this, as you mentioned, depends on parenting, right? Some parents are totally fine with their 13-year-old being on Instagram. some of them want them to wait until they're 17 or 18, right?

This seems like it would just remove parental choice. Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. All of these laws are different, right? They're crafted by different people. But there's no one law that says, like, we just want to target this specific problem. You know, we just want to keep 12-year-olds from porn. Like, that is the main crux of our law. They're written in sort of a general way where it's targeted toward, like, you know,

information that could potentially be unseemly. And so there's some squishiness there. And then there's kind of squishiness on the other side of, like, who we're targeting. Like, is it just 12-year-olds or is it anybody up to the age of 18? So on both sides, you're kind of creating a recipe for the state lawmakers to start making these decisions, like you said, that have always been kind of in the realm of the parents and the families. And you're basically subjecting everybody to the same family policy when, like you said, there are a lot of parents who think differently.

And, you know, a lot of this technology has been under kind of the guise of, of porn and people treat porn differently in this in this country and there's obviously reasons why you don't want kids looking at porn. But the fact that it's gotten into like social media, I think should be alarming to people because yes, there's bad stuff on social media, but there's a lot of great stuff on social media too, including for teenagers. And social media is like the, the place for young people in this country, not just young people, but everybody in this country. that is their world. And so when you're shutting that down, setting up an age gate for that thing, that this venue for just like, just be, you know, like you said, political organizing,

learning about the world, sharing with your friends, like, and working through just the perils of being a kid. All of this stuff is happening on social media. So gating that behind this law that's set by some people in the capital of your state, I think that's where it starts to get a little creepy. Yeah, a bunch of people that don't seem to understand that there's any benefit for young people to be online, you know, especially the fact that these laws are being passed first in states like Utah and Florida, where already LGBTQ youth are suffering and it's hard for them. And social media is just this crucial lifeline for LGBTQ youth and young women. After the break, we'll talk about why AI age verification technology is taking over the internet.

Another big issue here is what is social media and what is accessing the internet, right? Is the platform like Discord account as social media? Like a lot, increasingly these social platforms are kind of just utilities. You know, Facebook is often the gateway to the web for a lot of people now. Same with Instagram. And also people are accessing the internet through wearable technology, right? Through their refrigerator, through their Apple HomePod. So like where can these restrictions be rolled out?

All of this laws sound very like smartphone. 2015 version of social media almost. Yeah, and that's where it starts to get really kind of absurd when you're looking at these laws, because they're having to craft like, what exact websites are we targeting? And a lot of the laws say, like, these age restrictions, age verification restrictions apply to just websites that have, like, more than 33.3% of adult content or explicit content, basically. This both is under-inclusive of stuff. that it should apply to and over inclusive.

As some judges have brought up, like, a kid can go on Google and search for porn and look at a bunch of the search results. And that's okay because Google is not more than 33% adult content or whatever. But they may not be able to go to a website that's about like sex ed for high school students because that would be wrapped into it. And then you get into, yeah, like you said, I mean, this kind of gray zone of like Reddit. Like Reddit is for a lot of people social media, for a lot of people, it's just a discussion board, Reddit would not be sort of folded into under this thing, even though there's a lot

of porn on Reddit. With some of these policies, you see how unfamiliar the regulators really are with how complicated the internet can really be and how, you know, how interesting and how problematic it can be, just a lot of different shades. And so when you see the lawmakers starting with this, I think, fairly sensible idea, we want to keep kids away from bad stuff. But the execution of that and the technologies they have to roll out to make that happen and the websites they have to basically, you know, smother for that law to work, that's where it starts to become problematic. And it doesn't even keep kids from allegedly bad stuff. And no one can agree, like, there will never be a common agreement of like what bad stuff is, I feel. I mean, obviously there's

explicit gore and stuff, which, by the way, you can find so easily on the open web. But, I mean, the sex ed question, I think is really key. And I think anything that targets porn almost is guarantee to restrict sex education material or reproductive rights information online. Like, it's really hard to kind of make those distinctions. When Pornhub did institute this age gating, what effects did they see? I mean, I feel like they're the most notable platform that's kind of had this issue tested. Did it result in fewer kids consuming porn? Yeah, so I talked to the Pornhub people, and they're an interesting case because when Louisiana passed their first law, of this in 2022, basically saying if you're in Louisiana and you want to go onto a porn site,

one of these sites, more than 33% adult content, you have to do an age check. So Porn Hub in Louisiana said, okay, we're going to follow the law. We're going to implement this age check. They implemented this age check. And what they saw in the next couple months in the next couple years was traffic in Louisiana to Pornhub basically plunged because a lot of people weren't wanting to go through that age check. Maybe they were creeped out. Maybe they were creeped out. Maybe they just didn't want to do it. But the other sites that were not following this law, they were choosing not to comply. Either they were, you know, they were outside of the U.S. so they felt like they didn't have to comply or, you know, they just were not following the law. Traffic to those

sites actually climbed. And so, you know, I think the obvious takeaway from that is that people are hitting the wall and they're just choosing to go to a different porn site that is choosing not to follow the law. And so you're kind of sending them down this road of, you know, sort of deeper into other sites that may end up being more problematic. And so with Pornhub, what they ended up doing in a lot of the states, as more states passed age verification laws, was they basically said, we're not going to serve the people in those states. And so in big states, even like Virginia, if you try to go to Pornhub just on a normal computer, instead you get this video of this performer who's basically saying, we're not in this state,

We think age verification is creepy. We don't want to contribute to it. It's kind of what the government and so many people in media constantly accused China of doing and these more authoritarian regimes, right? They're sort of saying like, look, these big, scary China, Internet, where they control what you can see and do. And those are the laws that they're trying to pass here. There's definitely some similarities.

And I think that's really unnerving because this was talked about with the TikTok ban, right? where there was this push even, you know, even among the right who has traditionally been very free enterprise that, you know, the government has to step in here because we can't trust kids and parents to make their decisions. We can't trust companies. We need to instill this very, in some ways, patronizing view of the world and view of what we think people should be able to see. And, you know, in China, their defense of the great firewall and all this domestic surveillance and censorship is that, you know, we just want society to be happier. We want to protect them from the bad things in life, the scary things from our history,

the things that make the government look bad. And these state laws are a little different than that, but they are getting to that point where it's the government deciding what you can and can't see, depending on your age or depending on where you're logging in from. And that's just such a difference, a big difference from the original dream of the Internet in the U.S., which was this free interconnected place. where you could do anything, talk to anybody. And so as the internet grows up a little bit, they are starting to pass some laws. I don't think every law is a bad thing. But when it's crafted

like this, when we talk about what's explicit to me or you is maybe going to be different to a state lawmaker. And our agreement on what's obscene or what's, you know, what's adult might change from person to person. What's so terrifying to me, too, is the bipartisan support for this stuff. are supporting these types of laws to seem tough on big tech. Conservatives are passing them to try to restrict speech and curb some of that, you know, undesirable content in their eyes on the internet, things like this. Who is standing up for civil liberties anymore? I mean, it sounds a little hyperbolic, but, I mean, are there any groups fighting back against this type of age verification wave and this new technology? Yeah, politics of this are all over the map. In the same way,

they have been over the map for the TikTok law. You know, and I was following a lot of different state houses as they were pursuing their own laws. And in a lot of cases, they were basically unanimous, right? Like, everybody on both sides of the aisle was agreeing. But in a lot of different instances, you would have, like, a lone Republican or a lone Democrat saying, like, well, whoa, this is way too far. We haven't thought through the implications of this or the side effects, or I'm not comfortable with this. But they've been really, really in a minority. I mean, I mean, in terms of, like, advocacy groups, you've seen privacy, sort of civil liberties, groups, the ones you would expect, like the ACLU, but also, like, you know, fight for the future and some of these sort of EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, they've been kind of outspoken about not just these as kind of legally problematic, but also just technically problematic. So they've been out there talking about this.

And also, I have to say, the porn industry hates these, right? There's a group called the Free Speech Coalition who has often sort of fought lawsuits over First Amendment issues. They've been one of the main groups kind of challenging these in state courts. But the other part of this is that age verification as a technology also is not, you know, even the websites don't really like these systems, right? Because one part of this is that age verification, because it relies on this third-party vendor, it costs money. And when you're having, you know, millions of people visit a website,

at every one of those checks costs like a penny or up to, you know, 10 cents. That really adds up very quickly. And so it makes it hard for a smaller website. to survive. And it gets really costly for even a bigger website and makes them more likely to not want to proceed with that. So some of these websites, they've been saying, I mean, I run a porn site. I don't want to be keeping a bunch of people's driver's license and face scans. So in this place, you have Corn Hub and Facebook basically agreeing and saying, we want these checks if they're going to be done to be done by an Apple or a Google or a Microsoft who like runs your device or runs your computer where, you know, if you go into an Apple store, and buy an iPad for your 12-year-old, you need to hand over a birth certificate or prove their age there. God, that's so dystopian.

Their age gets logged into the device. That's the more popular theory at this point, but Apple and Google and Microsoft don't really want that responsibility either because nobody wants to be asking for a birth certificate when you're selling an iPod, right? Or an iPhone. And so everybody kind of wants to solve this problem,

but when you get into the actual reality of addressing it, everybody kind of sees the issues within, and doesn't want to be the one holding the baton. Yeah, it seems like just a disaster for civil liberties and undocumented people, marginalized people. So crazy. Well, Drew, thank you so much for joining me today. This was a terrifying and interesting discussion.

Yeah, thanks, Taylor. Nice to talk with you. All right, that's the show. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Power User is produced by Travis Larcich and Jelani Carter. our video producer is Brandon Kiefer. Our executive producer is Zach Mack. Power user is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you like the show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We'll be back next week. See you then.