Good intentions put privacy at risk

For years — if not decades — law enforcement, privacy experts and politicians have warned people about sharing too much personal information online. Sharing too much about yourself online could make it easier for someone to steal your identity or hack into your accounts, including your bank accounts. It could even put you in physical danger.

Now, however, many politicians insist we share even more about ourselves online — despite the privacy concerns.

With broad bipartisan support, the Alabama Legislature recently passed and last week Gov. Kay Ivey signed the App Store Accountability Act.

Designed to protect children, the law requires that app stores verify a user’s age, and if the user is a minor, their account must be linked to the account of a parent or adult guardian who has given the minor permission to download certain apps.

Other states, including Texas, Utah and Louisiana, have passed similar laws that now face legal challenges. A federal judge temporarily blocked the Texas law on First Amendment grounds.

“The Act is akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door and, for minors, require parental consent before the child or teen could enter and again when they try to purchase a book,” U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman wrote in granting a preliminary injunction against the Texas statute.

Barring a legal challenge, Alabama’s law is scheduled to go into effect Oct. 1. But beyond the First Amendment issues, laws that seek to make people prove their age before they can access certain material online create privacy concerns that have, at best, problematic solutions.

This past week, Discord, a bulletin board platform popular among gamers, said it was postponing the rollout of its age verification system because of a backlash from its users.

Discord’s users have serious privacy concerns. Most companies that require users to verify their identities and ages rely on third parties to collect that information. Those companies are natural targets for hackers.

Discord “announced earlier this month that it would roll out an age verification policy in March that would include face scanning or requests for an ID upload for users it could not determine were adults,” reported The Associated Press. “This drew swift ire from users. Many pointed to a recent security breach of a third-party provider Discord worked with that exposed government ID photos of up to 70,000 Discord users.”

Now the state of Alabama wants all of us to prove our ages to app stores so we can access the programs that make our mobile phones and tablets work. Those stores will have to verify IDs, which will mean users will either have to upload driver’s licenses or other government identification, or they’ll have to submit to a biometric scan — basically letting the app store take a picture and determine the user’s age from it.

Already, the state of Alabama requires websites with adult content to confirm their users in Alabama are adults. That has led some simply to block users from Alabama from using their websites. Of course, computer-savvy users know how to use virtual private network (VPN) software, which allows them to fake their location and access those sites anyway.

We understand parents’ concerns. Protecting children from threats and age-inappropriate content on the internet can be difficult. But there are lots of ways parents can make that easier for themselves — and lots of advice online for how to do it.