Open letter from researches calls age verification 'dangerous and socially unacceptable'

419 researchers have signed an open letter condemning the current implementation of age assurance or age verification. As we all know by now, age verification is becoming increasingly popular on a global scale as a way to protect children from harm. Regulators see this technology as an easy way to remedy dubious negative effects of social media on mental health.

A large part of the population tends to support a minimum age for social media. For example, 84% of people in Austria support a minimum age of 16. Even in a survey in Germany, 82% were in favor of enforcing such an age limit. However, this study asked two far more interesting points that come closer to what the researchers warn against and aren't talked about often when citing such sources.

54% of respondents found enforcing an age limit unfeasible. Furthermore, the participants were asked which measures they would support. In total 44% supported an age check by the social media provider when creating an account (e.g., by providing an ID), but this option is quite vague. It didn't explicitly state that an ID would be required. A more telling picture emerges when you see that only 10% answered that they would support AI-based age estimation. This piece of information allows for a very different conclusion than the fact that 82% support an age restriction for the use of social media.

Their goal is to encourage regulators to pause the further rollout of age verification laws "[...] until the scientific consensus settles on the benefits and harms that age-assurance technologies can bring, and on the technical feasibility of such a deployment". It should first be established that age assurance is effective while studying the potential damage to security and privacy.

The open letter mentions an important point. ID verification has existed for a long time offline. If you just recently reached the legal age to buy alcohol or happen to look younger, you will be asked for some sort of identification that proves your age. Here we can already see a difference in the fact that, if you are of legal age, you most likely will not be asked to verify your age to the cashier. Even if you do, they will only verify that the photo matches, the ID isn't obviously fake, and then look at your birth date. With that a check is complete. The letter addresses this point quite well:

Age-based regulations have existed in the offline world for a long time: to prevent minors from entering casinos, buying alcohol, or accessing adult content. These checks are based on existing ID documents, only require an existing employee checking the document, and rarely leave written records. The current proposals for age assurance online go much further than this limited set of scenarios. More critically, they lack the inherent privacy provided by ID document-based checks offline.

A real risk stems from the amount of identifiable information collected just for creating a social media account with these kinds of systems. It is just a short way from mass surveillance systems, or as the researches say a "[...] large-scale access control mechanism [...]"

[...] while at the same time establishing an infrastructure that could be exploited to ban access to Internet services for reasons unrelated to safety.

I suggest you read the letter yourself. The letter itself without the signatures comes in just under six pages, so it isn't too long. Hopefully this reaches the right people to prevent age verification from reaching every country.