Joseph Lorenzo Hall, PhD1d ago
"How not to mandate device-based age assurance" by @ekr https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/device-based-age-assurance/
How not to mandate device-based age assurance

Software design by legal mandate

Show threadKim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷1d ago
@joebeone @ekr
This article makes no mention of the potential for politically-motivated censorship that implementing such technologies introduces. The banning of certain books in some regions should give us pause for thought. Consider that young people may be locked out from reading Nineteen Eighty-four, for example.
All this obsession with age-gating is missing the point (not least that creative youngsters will rapidly disseminate ways round any technological barriers).
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Show threadekr1d ago

@KimSJ The reason it makes no mention of it is that this is not. a post about whether age assurance or age gating are good or bad but about the difficulty of writing legislation that mandates it without creating new unintended consequences (unintended from the perspective of the authors of the legislation).

Plenty of ink has already been spilled on whether age assurance/age-gating is a good or bad policy idea.

Show threadKim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷1d ago
@ekr
I understand that, but shouldn’t political interference be mentioned as one of those possible unintended (or worse, intended) consequences?
And neither of us has mentioned the other elephant in the room; that of data collection in a surveillance economy. The whole subject of age-gating has tentacles stretching in so many directions!
Show threadekr

@KimSJ My colleagues and I wrote over 100 pages about the more general topic of age assurance at: https://kgi.georgetown.edu/research-and-commentary/age-assurance-online/

This post was targeted at a much more narrow set of questions (and it's still over 7000 words!)

Age Assurance Online: A Technical Assessment of Current Systems and their Limitations – Knight-Georgetown Institute

Knight-Georgetown Institute
Mar 31 at 5:51pmWeb
Show threadKim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷8h ago
@ekr
Thank you. An interesting read. As a small addition, you state “ Age estimation systems based on selfies or live video of users may be inaccessible to users without a camera”, but you do not mention that limitations in the technology may also be a factor.
My fluffy white beard appears to render every selfie-based age gate unable even to recognise my image as a face. Since I refuse to give alternative ID to potentially insecure or malicious verification services, I am thus locked out.