The dangerous Bill S-210 age verification legislation is getting close to final passage. Open Media has a petition urging lawmakers to put a stop to it.
Canada’s dangerous age verification bill (known as Bill S-210) is inching closer to the finish line. If you look at the official page, right now, it is at the committee stage at the House of Commons. Since this is a Senate bill and not a House of Commons bill, that actually means that it is very close to completion. All that’s left after committee is a vote in the House of Commons. Once that vote is complete, then it gets into the process of royal assent where very little can stop this monstrosity from becoming the law of the land.
Like multiple other countries, Canada’s age verification bill was brought about because right leaning politician’s want an easy way to suppress LGBT+ content. Obviously, that raises a whole pile of constitutional questions since such a huge quantity of such content is perfectly legal speech. So, rather than say this quiet part out loud, politician’s generally want a convincing cover story. In this case, that cover story was that online porn is highly prevalent on the internet and it is destroying the minds of minors and all this legislation is is an effort to “save the children”. Insert Jedi reference how everything that was said was wrong with that sentence here.
First of all, porn isn’t actually as highly prevalent on the internet as the stereotypes would suggest. The reason for this has many factors. First of all, many prominent hosting actually forbid pornographic material from being hosted on their services. If you start a website, there’s not a lot of reliable hosting providers out there that will permit such material in the first place. Next, even when you do find a suitable hosting provider, search engines like Google generally suppress such results in the first place, so you are working with barriers from an Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective. Additionally, many ad providers don’t allow explicitly pornographic websites to show their advertising on them. Do porn sites still exist? Yes, obviously, but it’s not as though there is 1,000 NSFW website for every one clean site out there.
Second of all, the idea that there is such thing as “porn addiction” is generally a myth. As TechDirt noted last year, the science has generally held that “porn addiction” isn’t actually real. There is no scientific backing of such a thing. Additionally, even if you subscribe to the notion that certain kinds of content is “addicting” and that such content is destroying the brains of the youth, the science supporting such a notion is equally dubious.
Finally, even if we were to get to the conclusion that online porn is actively harming children, the proposed solution of censoring such content online is technologically unfeasible in the first place. Even basic cursory knowledge would conclude that thanks to the existence of VPN services, TOR, proxies, and other anonymous tools, a simply IP address based geo block is trivial to circumvent. Supporters of the legislation has only ever had one counterpoint to it, and that’s that kids are too stupid to understand technology, therefore, this issue can be safely ignored. Yeah, we’re talking about whole generations of people who literally grew up with the technology their entire lives and are able to understand all the intricacies inside and out. You’re going to try and tell me that technology is too difficult for young people to understand? It’s comments like this that make it hard to treat these politician’s seriously, but it does beautifully highlight just how out of touch these politician’s truly are in the first place.
While it’s entirely possible that some of these politician’s still have a VCR flashing “12:00” in their living rooms, the problem is that the implications of this law are very serious.
One of the major concerns is the huge privacy implications of all of this. As things stand today, it’s already highly problematic how much personal information of everyone there is out there floating around in the ether. Whether that is content willingly published by people in general, content given out by people who knowingly consented, content that was unknowingly consented by the user, or information that was the result of a hack or other forms of theft, there is far too much personal information floating around today. Basic logic would conclude that laws be passed to either reduce that amount of information or to better and more safely secure that information. This law goes in the exact opposite direction of this.
Instead, in order to enjoy the free and open internet out there, people are being asked to submit facial recognition scans, biometric information, drivers licenses, and other forms of personal information onto the open web. In short, we are being asked to put even more personal information out there just so that the wide open web doesn’t get fully locked down all of a sudden. Supporters of this legislation love to falsely claim that the information is securely stored and used in the most appropriate manner possible, but the legislation does no such thing. There are no fines associated with misappropriating people’s personal information in this manner and if that information gets hacked, there are no penalties for the companies who didn’t handle that information properly either.
While supporters love to talk about “industry standards”, those same “industry standards” saw the data breach in Australia where 1 million people had their personal information compromised. If that were to happen here in Canada, all you’ll see is the company in question going “oopsie!” and a strongly worded letter from the privacy commissioner of Canada (and provincial commissioners if they are so inclined). There are no penalties or holding companies accountable when they are negligent or corrupt. Don’t you feel that much safer already?
The irony in all of this is that the websites that draw the ire of those pushing this legislation are going to be the ones to be entrusted with handling this personal information in the first place. I mean, would you trust a website with all this highly sensitive personal information that your representative is calling a “crime scene“? Probably not, yet that is precisely the ask that politicians are making even though some deny that.
What’s worse is that this legislation arguably puts children in even more danger. Let’s assume that children don’t use the anonymous tools to circumvent these age gates. What do you think they are going to do? Obviously, they are going to be going to websites that don’t have that age gate in place. So, in all likelihood, websites that are much less on board hosting this content in the first place. Kids are going to be curious sooner or later and you can thank hormones for that.
Compounding this is the fact that Aylo, parent company of Pornhub, has already openly contemplated blocking Canada should this disastrous legislation become law. The reason? The legislation jeopardizes the safety of people online thanks to the personal information that is being required to be carried. If that doesn’t tell you just how dangerous this law is, I don’t honestly know what will. For those who think that this is all a “bluff” (cue memories of how the brilliant minds in the media thought that Meta blocking news links was a “bluff”), Aylo blocking IP addresses in jurisdictions that implemented similar laws is nothing new with Florida potentially being the next one after places like Texas and Indiana shared a similar fate. For users who are into this kind of content, that means everyone will have to go elsewhere for such content in the first place. Websites that have less oversight and are less regulated (frequently pirate sites).
In addition to all of this is the fact that this whole legislation is a considerable slippery slope in a number of ways. Further down the road, more personal information might be requirements added into this. Additionally, other forms of content can very easily be censored. Australia, for instance, is looking at expanding their age verification laws to censor video games and other forms of content. This isn’t even getting into how LGBT+ content could have their material censored for being “sexual” content in the first place.
Finally, an age verification envisioned by this legislation that both protects people’s personal information, and accurately keeps minors out of accessing such content doesn’t exist. The legislation literally invents a kind of technology and hopes that tech geeks will just “nerd harder” to come up with a solution within the legal framework. just because you write that into law doesn’t mean that the technology will magically poof its way into existence. As we earlier noted, French privacy regulator, CNIL, examined existing age verification technologies and concluded that all of them failed to reach a satisfactory standard needed to carry out an age verification system. Supporters regularly push back and try to use some other, much lower, standard to claim that the technology exists, but it ultimately doesn’t exist in the real world.
The reaction from other experts in this debate is generally quite uniform. If you want a third party opinion on the matter, you can read the response by David Fraser or Emily Laidlaw or even Open Media. Everyone who understands the internet is calling this a bad bill for similar, if not, identical reasons. It’s not just me.
That’s why it’s important to point out that Open Media currently has a petition to call on MPs to put a stop to this awful legislation. If you care about freedom of expression and your right to privacy, I think this is an important petition to sign – even if you cynically believe that such a petition isn’t going to change anything. It’s still better than doing nothing at all simply letting this Orwellian legislation pass without any resistance. Part of the information they provide in that petition contains the following:
What’s wrong with S-210? It locks up most of the Internet, and forces adults to sign away their privacy to turn the key. Bill S-210 is supposed to be about keeping young people from seeing adult content – but it doesn’t say anything about how much of that content needs to be accessed through a service for it to be included, or even whether the platform has to know the content is there. Any commercial organization that’s used to access explicit content is included–which would mean age and ID gating the services you use every day like Reddit, Instagram, and even Google search.2
And here’s the thing: even if you’re an adult who is able and willing to tick the box and use the gate, you’re still at huge risk. There’s no guidance in Bill S-210 about what kind of age verification is ok and what’s off limits, meaning that you could be forced by some services to upload your photo ID, scan your face, or even grant access to your social media accounts. That’s creating highly sensitive records of your activities all over the Internet linked directly to your real identity, and S-210’s only protection for you is asking thousands of websites nicely to try and delete those records when they’re done. Nobody in Canada should have to live with this, and the risks for all of us, including disproportionate risks for LGBTQ+ Canadians, are obvious.3,4🚩
There’s no penalties for companies that leak our sensitive data, but a sledgehammer for companies that reject the age gate. To enforce compliance, Bill S-210 proposes mass website blocking for sites and services that don’t comply. That’s a crude tool, and likely to censor far more content than just adult material – and Bill S-210 acknowledges that, saying (in Section 9.5) that’s perfectly ok!
So if you’re an Internet company, you either accept you’re going to have to age gate your service, or start to massively over-moderate, using automated tools to remove everything from LGBTQ+ educational material to Michelangelo and the Venus de Milo – content Bill S-210 says should be left alone, but AI tools will likely block.
So, especially now that we are nearing the final stages of this legislative journey, it is important to have your voice heard on this matter. After all, there’s a heck of a lot at stake here.
