EFFecting Digital Freedom

We Must Fight Age Verification to Protect Our Privacy, Anonymity, and Free Speech

by Jason Kelley

We have arrived at a crossroads.

A year ago I wrote for this magazine that we must not give in to the lure of privacy nihilism - the growing feeling and sometimes paralyzing fear that "privacy is dead."  Every year, there are more surveillance devices and more surveillance cameras than there ever were - 70 million, according to one estimate, in the U.S. alone.  There are more online trackers, more satellites, more data breaches, and more ways to spy - more, more, more, more!

The ground that digital privacy stands on has always been thin.  But given the incredible weight of the Internet, how huge it's grown in such a short time - figuratively and literally - the cracks are much smaller than they could be.  Fixing those cracks is our job, and it's also thanks to many of the readers of this magazine.  Our work is to keep them from spreading, to patch them - again, figuratively and literally.  We walk softly, but carry an enormous roll of duct tape.

But there's a fracture forming that threatens to swallow our rights like a sinkhole pulling in a car until it disappears: age verification.

EFF has always been an optimistic organization, because we believe that to build the future you want to see, you must envision it.  Our podcast, How to Fix the Internet, asks guests what the future actually looks like once we fix the parts of the Internet that are broken.  All of this takes imagination - and at the moment, it takes a whole lot of imagination.  Nearly every value EFF cares about - and likely your values, too - is under attack by overreaching governments and tech companies that have grown as powerful as countries.

But one value stands out, to me, as being truly possible to lose forever.  We like to tell people that EFF's job is to make sure that when you go online, your rights go with you.  But at the moment, we are seeing governments across the world partnering with tech companies to strip us of one of those rights: online anonymity.  When we go online, our personal, private identity information should not have to go with us.  And while it might be hard to see this as a big concern when there are hundreds of other massive, vile, and daily attacks on the rights of people offline, ultimately it is all part of the same fight.

Surveillance and censorship are critical tools in the authoritarian playbook.  But governments, no matter how powerful, struggle to build effective mass surveillance and censorship regimes so long as people have access to an open, unrestricted Internet.

Right now, government agencies are buying our data from data brokers.  They are combing through license plates all over the country, looking for needles in haystacks through the troves of data shared with them by surveillance companies whose pitch is that they make us safer.  The politically powerful are working hand-in-hand with the power of giant tech companies to build the panopticon bigger and bigger, until one day, it's part of the fabric of our society - until you look up and it's either all you can see, or you can't see it at all.

But far more often than most realize, the data they truly want is out of reach, or just garbage if they get it thanks to two important protections: encryption and our right to online anonymity.

These walls are what give me hope and keep me from falling into desperation.  Think about it for a moment: There was a time when our private messages, our personal web searches, our entire online lives could be surveilled fairly easily by any bad actor with the right tools because they had no locks on them.  Imagine living through the current historical moment without an encrypted web, without an encrypted phone, without encrypted texts.  Thanks to encryption - that relatively widespread and more-or-less impenetrable technological privacy wall we've now got in place - the goons are doing far, far less damage than they would be otherwise.  This is why governments are constantly hoping to get encryption backdoors passed into laws, and always pushing companies to build them.  It's a very effective barrier to surveillance, as long as governments don't win that fight.

Now imagine the same moment if your identity was tied to your online activity - if we no longer had encryption or a right to be anonymous online.  The loss of either will be devastating.  It will freeze the work of activists and human rights defenders.  It will force every person who lacks power to think twice before visiting websites.  It will force those who want to speak out to edit themselves.

How did we end up on this dangerous path?  The U.S. Supreme Court decision in July, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, knocked a hole so big in the thin ground that privacy's been standing on that duct tape isn't going to make a difference.  In this case, the Court disregarded important digital precedent from 20 years ago and handed a massive win to the powers of surveillance, spying, and censorship.  For the last few years, major adult content sites have geoblocked people in many states in the U.S. due to state laws requiring age verification on sites with 33 percent or more adult content.  The Court essentially approved most of those laws, saying that age verification isn't enough of a burden on adults to stop laws that force it specifically onto sites with adult content.

While we disagree with the decision, because adults have a First Amendment right to access legally protected speech including adult content, our work now is to halt any further damage.  At the same time, new age verification laws in the U.K. and elsewhere have begun to roll out, blacking out major parts of the web for some and forcing others to hand over their IDs to log onto benign parts of Reddit.  The law forced forums focused on parenting, green living, and gaming on Linux to shut down, ceasing operations rather than face massive fines for not following the vague, expensive, and complicated rules and risk assessments required.

The technological wall of encryption won't be nearly as helpful in protecting us from surveillance if you can't go where you want without proving your age.  And this isn't a vague threat - this is spreading.  These laws all take the form of "kid safety" measures - using the full force of the state to decide above parents what their kids are allowed to do online, and in the process, whether anyone of any age can remain anonymous.  Porn was always only step one: other federal laws, like the Kids Online Safety Act, would force age verification onto social media.  Wyoming now requires age verification if a site has just a single piece of "sexual material harmful to minors," an absurd rule that would force every site that allows user-generated content to require age verification.  As of this writing, Bluesky has gone dark in Mississippi, thanks to a law there, and government officials in states across the country are watching jealously.

But this isn't the time for nihilism.  The rights to privacy and free speech must be protected and fought for - they exist because people fought for them.  If free speech is dead, you are unable to speak.  If privacy is dead, you are unable to act.  If both die, you are forced into giving up the fight - or potentially being targeted.

We are gearing up for an even bigger battle now to protect the rest of the web from age verification and we hope you'll join us.  Call or email your representatives to oppose any federal age-checking mandate.  Tell your state lawmakers, wherever you are, to oppose age verification laws.  Make your voice heard online and talk to your friends and family.  Tell them about what's happening to the Internet in the U.K., and make sure they know what we all stand to lose - online privacy, security, anonymity, and expression - if the age-gated Internet becomes a global reality.

You can learn everything you need to know about age verification and how to fight it at EFF.org/AV.  We'll be taking aim at age verification bills in Congress, challenging any broader laws that would restrict our rights even further, and building a coalition to stop this enormous violation of digital rights.  Join us today.