Canada’s dangerous age verification legislation is close to becoming law, and experts are, again, warning of the consequences.
Last month, I wrote about how Canada’s age verification bill, Bill S-210, is potentially close to becoming law. It’s a bill that even supporters admit solves nothing. What’s more, the bill causes heaps of problems ranging from severe censorship to privacy risks. To be clear, there are no consequences for misusing the data gathered to carry out whatever half-baked age verification scheme is dreamt up. Just a simple “pretty please” along with strongly worded letters from privacy commissioners who use Canada’s existing horrendously outdated privacy laws.
Compounding the threats are the fact that many of the risks associated with an age verification scheme baked into law are by no means confined to the realms of the theoretical, either. For instance, gun manufacturers took personal information they collected over the years from their customers and, without authorization, used that information for political purposes. This raises the prospect of an adult site taking advantage of the laws to harvest this highly sensitive personal information for personal or business gain.
Conversely, it has long been shown that age verification systems are not secure. A fantastic example of this occurred earlier this year when an Australian age verification system was breached by hackers, compromising 1 million patrons in the process. So, even when porn sites don’t try to misuse that personal information, this example raises the prospect of hackers breaking in to steal such massive caches of personal information.
What’s more, supporters of this legislation have fully admitted that this law is merely a stepping stone towards a full ban on pornography in general. A particularly juicy target for supporters have long been to suppress LGBTQ+ content and this is merely a tool to get there for them.
Compounding this point is the fact that such censorship laws are also seen as a stepping stone for government censorship of other things they happen to not like. Earlier this year, Australia openly contemplated expanding age verification laws to include video games. What’s more, Australia is even trying to expand age verification laws to include social media in general on top of it all. This puts the idea that censorship creep is part and parcel of these efforts vividly into the picture. It’s not the subject of idle worry, but rather, a general reality of the nature of age verification as the government tries to exert even more censorship powers over the internet.
While we don’t know for sure when the final passage of Canada’s age verification is going to hit, the speculation is that we are close enough to start thinking that this passage could happen any day now. So, experts, who were denies even speaking to lawmakers during the bills study period, are issuing another round of warnings to the general public about this legislation. From National Magazine:
Civil society and legal groups have warned that Bill S-210 is overbroad, and almost certainly technologically unfeasible to implement. Furthermore, it was the victim filibuster tactics during committee study where no critics of the bill were made available as witnesses.
“It’s appalling that such a potential consequential and poorly thought-through bill got such brief study—almost nothing substantive at all,” says Aislin Jackson, policy staff counsel at the BC Civil Liberties Association.
She says it’s ironic that the Conservatives have been alive to the privacy concerns around Bill C-27 but were hostile to studying similar concerns in this bill.
Jackson says Sen. Julie Miville-Dechêne, who introduced the bill, appears to have worked with the age verification industry when drafting the legislation and took its assurances around things like age-estimation AI as being workable without privacy infringement.
Collecting the biometric information needed for this kind of age verification is inherently an invasion of privacy.
“It’s not going to be perfect—it’s just age estimation, so there needs to be some sort of appeal process where you can actually check somebody’s age to ensure that people who are adults are not being cut off for perfectly legal material just because they have a baby-face or the AI hasn’t been adequately trained on images from their ethnic group.”
That would mean they’d need to show their identification to see not only pornographic content but “any material that could be used to groom a child to be more vulnerable” because it draws on a section of the Criminal Code that provides the broadest possible definition of explicit material.
Matt Hatfield, executive director of OpenMedia in Vancouver, says that these definitions are not fit for service in this legislation.
“They’re Criminal Code definitions that apply within a different context within the Code,” he says.
Jackson notes materials that would not be harmful if a child encountered it under their own self-guided exploration could be harmful in the context of an adult trying to normalize discussing these matters with children inappropriately.
This could wind up including a great deal of content that is not necessarily explicit or adult. Jackson notes that the BCCLA’s experience with the Little Sisters case has shown that in a customs enforcement environment, innocuous LGBTQ+ materials were deemed to be “obscene” materials to be seized. She says it’s a real concern that any minoritized sexual expression will be seen as more explicit and concerning than it actually is. It would have a differential application in this age verification context as well.
“(The legislation is) either going to age-gate large slates of the internet for everyone, or there’s going to be a double standard where the content that relates to certain minoritized sexual identities is going to be age-gated in a way that any normative, heterosexual content is not,” Jackson says.
“That creates an equality issue, and that’s because the definition is so broad.”
Pam Hrick, executive director of the Women’s Legal and Education Action Fund (LEAF), worries that in addition to silencing already marginalized voices through over-moderation, the bill could have unintended consequences for victims whose intimate images are being circulated online.
“The bill’s proposed measures would bar many victims from confirming if their image is posted, gathering evidence for legal recourse, and obtaining the URLs to make takedown requests,” she says.
Raphael Vagliano, a legal officer at the Centre for Law and Democracy, says there are concerns about how unclear the bill is regarding which organizations will be scoped into the law—a concern nearly all critics of the bill share.
“It refers to organizations which make this content available, and it’s not exactly clear in terms of who that would apply to,” he says.
“There need to be safeguards because otherwise you are scoping in things like search engines and internet service providers, which would be quite problematic. The end result would be a requirement to verify age for all of these services, which would be a disproportionate infringement on freedom of expression and access to information.”
The article is long and has many more voices speaking out against the age verification legislation, so I highly recommend giving it a read.
At any rate, this echoes pretty much every one of the concerns I have highlighted over the years with respect to the bill – and even offers a few other concerns that I didn’t quite cover.
The unfortunate thing in all of this is the Conservative’s approach to this whole thing – which closely mirrors the Liberal’s approach to the Online Streaming Act, Online News Act, and the Digital Services Tax. That is to ignore all expert opinion, discredit very public concerns from actual experts as “disinformation”, and ram this bill through parliament. The Conservative party, however, took things a step further and blocked experts from testifying at all (the Liberals simply let a few people speak about these issues, packed the hearings with lobbyists, and ignored the expert testimony after before moving ahead with their legislative effort anyway. The Conservatives, for their part, pretty much dropped all pretense and chose to not hear from experts at all.
We’ll continue to monitor the situation for updates, but one this is clear, worries about this legislation are coming from all sides and the alarm bells are ringing.
