The UK government required age verification for pornographic website to protect children. Australia was the first country in the world to ban children from social media. Children, of course, circumvented all such restrictions immediately. And now the UK government and others around the world are thinking “This plays well with the public” and is trying to follow suit, in spite of the fact the teenagers are laughing at the restrictions.
Rather than getting an informed opinion on the practicality of such measures from technology experts, the politicians, as usual, get their technical understanding from some random teenagers on social media.
This lack of tech savvy would be hilarious if it wasn’t such a serious matter. It’s nothing new. And these proposed technological solutions to problems in society are doing nothing to fix the very real issues they’re trying to address. You cannot fix social problems using technology. Leave a comment if you can think of any example where this has been the case.
Next Monday there’s a vote in the commons on just this, and I fear grandstanding arts-graduate politicians will let it through, regardless of the technical impossibility of complying. And there’s no end to this nonsense.
There’s crazy, then there’s California
And just when you think it can’t get any worse, the Californians have taken it to the next level with a new bill called Age Verification signals: software applications and online services.
Here’s an extract:
1798.501. (a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following:
(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
(2) Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user:
(A) Under 13 years of age.
(B) At least 13 years of age and under 16 years of age.
(C) At least 16 years of age and under 18 years of age.
(D) At least 18 years of age.
Having an handy OS function to determine the age of the user seems like a good idea, doesn’t it? Naughty software can refuse to run if the user is under-age. But it’s technical nonsense; not thought through at all. For example, it’s referring to a “real-time application programming interface” – so this only applies to a RTOS? Obviously they saw the phrase, thought it sounded good and included it.
But the concept has some merit – rather than everything doing age verification, why not dump the problem on Microsoft, Apple and Google? They’ve got the resources, and with their penchant for knowing everything about their customers, their OS could easily provide age verification information along with their shoe size and taste in pot plants.
Except… you need to consider the chilling effect this will have on anything called an Operating System. The lawmakers probably wouldn’t recognise an OS if it jumped out at them waving a flag, but this is important here. For starters, every embedded system has software that fits the definition of Operating System. Do they have to provide age verification?
And what about, say, servers? They don’t have a user as such, but they have people using them (administrators). How can you tell the age of the administrator at any given time? The account may well be shared by a number of people.
But the most damage from this nonsense will be to FOSS operating systems like Linux. They don’t have a KYC culture like Microsoft/Apple/Google to make it easy and don’t have the time, money or resources to solve the problem. An open source operating system is community owned, and the community has no incentive to track the personal details of who might be using it.
Although Linux is free, it’s still licensed using the GPL and has a vendor – even if no money changes hands. If this bill ever passes, the State of California may well go after the vendor for non-compliance and try to force them into it by fines and suchlike.
The logical solution to the problem for Linux distributions (and FreeBSD and whatever) is to change the terms of their license saying “You may not download or use this software in the State of California”. Microsoft, Apple and Google will love that.