An assault on your freedom to use your computer without having to “verify your age” has migrated from states like California, Colorado, and New York to the United States Congress.
This is the so-called Parents Decide Act, which would “require operating system providers to verify the age of any user of an operating system.”
The honor system, the for-now method of the California law, doesn’t stop ten-year-olds from claiming to be 35. For such laws to “work,” the PC would have to require you to verify your age before you can use it.
That method cannot help but be invasive, like scans of your ID card or your face. Sure, many users of mobile computing devices have private security using their faces or fingerprints, but those users do not intend to share this secret information to third parties — which sure seems like what’s going on here.
PC Gamer observes that, although the method of age verification is crucial “in terms of privacy and data security,” the Energy and Commerce Committee will be deciding such things after passage.
They’d have to pass the bill for us to see what’s in it.
Whatever the method, many users would obey, conscientiously giving the PC — and the PC or OS maker — ID or facial info that might be linked to purchase info in the company’s database.
Could such databases be hacked and provide criminals with new information with which to commit their crimes? Only if the umpteen stories per day on successful hacks of the databases of major companies are any clue.
“Save the children” is the familiar sales pitch, but if government is in charge of saving the children, our children are in trouble.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Nano Banana
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2 replies on “Mandatory Internet IDs”
An interesting battle will unfold in cases where operating systems are provided by developers with no commercial footprints in the jurisdictions of these British-style states. Moreover, code would be distributed to knock-out age-authenticators in FOSS (free and open source) operating systems such as most Linux distributions.
The political left and to some extent the political right have histories of behaving as if the populace has bought-in to some objective if the populace acquiesces to any measure ostensibly to accomplish that goal. This pretense allows left and right to move from measures that come at low cost with little little effect, to ever more transgressive measures, which measures would have been more fiercely resisted or mocked as perverse had they been proposed at the outset.
We may reasonably imagine that some of those who now ask that we at least have an honor system for age verification are quite consciously seeking ultimately to have personal computers engineered to prevent the use of unauthorized operating systems, and to scan biometric information during the boot-up process, before accessing various applications, and quietly as these programs are in use.
You can resist all these measures by avoiding purchase of computers with latent support for such requirements, and by migrating to a FOSS operating system, which will let you do things without proof-of-license. You already had good reason to leave Windows and MacOS behind, and the reason has gotten better. You don’t want to be forced to choose between relearning everything suddenly or surrendering to the state. If you are still dependent upon Windows or upon MacOS, start migrating now, with a dual-boot system.
If you are coming from the world of MacOS (or of iOS), then look into a BSD Unix. If you are coming from the world of Windows, then look into a Linux.
“They’d have to pass the bill for us to see what’s in it.”
Haven’t we heard this before? What could possibly go wrong?