When No ID Means No Internet: Age Verification and the Right to Access Information

Age verification proposals are often presented as a simple tradeoff: sacrifice a little privacy to better safeguard children online. But that framing overlooks a more fundamental question. What happens to people who cannot verify their age at all? This is particularly a problem when users are required to prove their age with identity documents.

What our glorious ill informed leaders do not seem to have realised as yet is that it will apply to them too. So everything they look at online will be linked to their actual identity and is thereby more easily discerned, to be spewed all over the internet when the time is right. Or maybe that is the point, delivery of prosecution or blackmail in neater and more convenient packages.