Age Verification Raises Privacy Concerns, Says Cato Institute Fellow
The age-verification technology at issue in a pending U.S. Supreme Court case raises major privacy concerns, said Jennifer Huddleston, senior fellow in technology policy at the Cato Institute. Huddleston discussed with Free State Foundation adjunct senior fellow Mike O'Rielly the justices' argument earlier this month on a Texas age-verification law (see 2501130012 and 2501150073).
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton (case Case 23-50627) deals with Texas HB-1181 and its requirement that commercial pornographic websites must verify visitors' ages. “It's important to stop and think what age verification actually means,” Huddleston said. “This doesn't just mean putting in your birthday or quickly showing a store clerk your driver's license. It's going to mean uploading some sort of government document, usually, to a website in order to access information that an adult has the right to access under the First Amendment.”
Whatever is uploaded to verify a user’s age would be stored by the age-verification company for some period of time to comply with the law, and that's a security risk, she said. “Everyone knows breaches happen ... This is potentially content about someone's sexual preferences or sexual history, that you are requiring someone to create a record of their accessing it. That could create greater vulnerabilities, and potentially could even in some cases be accessed by a state if they have concerns about that.”
Some age-verification providers tout the idea of age assurance instead of age verification, where the company only has to determine whether you’re above 18 to access the site, instead of checking your exact age, such as through facial recognition technology, Huddleston said. “But in order to do that on a website, you're going to have to have a couple of more sensitive pieces of information. So that may mean looking at someone's credit card transactions, for example, to determine [if they are] behaving the way an adult behaves, looking at their online history… scanning biometrics, which has its own privacy concerns.”