Online threats to children are real, but the headlong pursuit of age verification that we’re seeing around the world is unacceptable in its approach and far too broad in scope — and we simply can’t afford to get this wrong.
To be clear, parents’ concerns are valid and sincere. Few people would argue that kids should have unfettered access to adult material, to self-harm how-tos, to social media platforms that manipulate them and expose them to abuse.
But it’s the very depth of those worries that is being cynically exploited. Age verification as is currently being proposed in country after country would mean the death of anonymity online.
And we know exactly who stands to gain: The same tech giants who built the privacy nightmare that the internet is today.
just out of curiosity, what do you consider minimum supervision to be?
The theoretical minimum would be sharing any instant of their lives, during which they could not sustain an unfettered access to anything, not like I would consider it a decent minimum in any case (I was revolving around the “unfettered access” concept of the previous comment), but I cannot imagine how it would exists any threshold of supervision above which you can exclude any unfettered access at any given moment of their existence, risk of harmful exposition never drops to zero, so argue an Orwellian measure for the indiscriminate shake of their safety has no sense to me…