4 hours Ago
Despite being commonly used in households for well over 30 years now, our laws continue to lag the technological developments that came with the creation of the internet, particularly when it comes to protecting our kids. Governments across the world are just now recognizing their failure to protect children in digital spaces. They have finally begun passing laws to address the many harms we now know can come from an unrestricted internet experience at an early age.
The Australian parliament's recent legislation barring children under 16 from social media platforms is perhaps the boldest move yet on this front, ensuring that companies which systematically do not ensure their users are of age will face hefty fines. Similarly, over a dozen U.S.
states have enacted laws requiring age verification for access to pornography by requiring users to provide government ID verification to the content providers. While laws like these are a long time coming, they are fundamentally flawed because they put the onus of age verification on specific individual platforms. In so doing, we are ignoring the reality that we clearly need a universal solution that works across all digital content.
Instead of a piecemeal approach that targets individual platforms or specific content providers, we should instead implement age verification at the device level, making smartphones themselves the guardians of age-appropriate access. Think of it as a digital ID check that, once completed, allows access to age-appropriate content across all apps and websites. This solution offers key advantages over the current approaches being adopted by governments which largely require individual content providers to verify user age.
A device-centric approach eliminates the need for users to verify their age repeatedly across different platforms, reducing privacy risks associated with sharing identification documents multiple times with a litany of companies. Privacy advocates must come to grips with the fact that the question isn't if we will be sharing this information with a third party in the future, it's how many third parties we'll be sharing it with. A device-based approach can reduce that number to one for all age specific digital content, making it a far more palatable option.
Device-level age verification is also superior to a piecemeal approach in that it places responsibility with the manufacturers who create the primary means by which we access digital content. Logically speaking, this approach is little different than how we have justified requiring vehicle manufacturers to install airbags and seatbelts in cars in order to mitigate against the imminently foreseeable harms that come from high-speed travel. Moreover, the technology for a secure and reliable age verification system currently exists, this policy doesn't even require us to invent any new technology.
Most modern smartphones already include what are known as " Secure Enclaves '' to store our most sensitive information such as biometric data. Extending these security features to identification for age verification is both technically feasible and could be implemented en masse without compromising user privacy or device functionality in the slightest. Even better, unlike the current patchwork of platform-specific solutions, a device-level approach would create a unified standard that could be enforced globally.
If the U.S. or EU were to adopt this approach, smartphone manufacturers would need to comply with it to maintain access to our lucrative markets.
This is akin to what happened recently when Apple switched the iPhone from using its proprietary "lighting" port to the USB-C standard after the EU required all smartphones to use a common charging cable. The economic impact of this proposal on smartphone manufacturers would be minimal, particularly when compared to the societal benefits it could bring. For one, the cost of implementing this feature would be negligible in the context of overall device development.
What's more, with just three companies representing 90 percent of all smartphone sales in the United States , this is certainly a cost they can bear given their current oligopolistic dominance of the market. This isn't about creating a digital nanny state, it's about implementing sensible guardrails in an environment that has proven dangerous for the mental health of young users . Just as we as a society don't allow young children to drive cars or purchase alcohol, we need effective mechanisms to enforce age-appropriate access to digital content.
Device-level age verification represents our best chance at creating a safer digital environment for our children while maintaining the privacy and convenience that adult users expect. Nicholas Creel is an associate professor of business law at Georgia College & State University. The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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