Requiring age-verification for porn won’t save children from online harm. But it will invade our privacy

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Censorship,People,Canada

ID-authentication for adult-content viewers would simply smuggle restrictive telecommunications precedents from the U.S. into Canada, and push the whole industry underground

Maggie MacDonald is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto specializing in platform policy research, and an advisory board member with Ethical Capital Partners, which manages Pornhub through its parent company Aylo.

While optimistic in tone, these alarmingly vague proposals gloss over the enormous technical and critical privacy concerns they’d provoke if implemented. Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in internet and e-commerce law,that if C-63 was passed, members of the Digital Safety Commission to enforce anti-harm measures would not be “bound by any legal or technical rules of evidence.

Because of the steep privacy and liability concerns, websites can’t collect or manage this sensitive information using their own existing infrastructures, either. Centralized third-party systems run by private companies would need to partner with our government to collect and store IDs, creating further concerns around private enterprise.

There’s a fundamental flaw in the premise of age verification: the notion that pornography is inherently harmful and should be managed through censorship. Not only are Charter-enforced freedoms of expression in direct opposition to this approach, but peer-reviewed research in medicine, sociology and psychology consistently

 

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