When online ID verification breaches trust and privacy: Ivo Vegter

Key topics:

• Tea app hack exposed private photos and chats of 13,000 women, risking safety.

• Age verification schemes often compromise privacy, risking identity theft.

• Government censorship over “barely legal” adult content threatens freedoms.

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By Ivo Vegter*

As censorial politicians charge down the slippery slope to puritanism, one site demonstrates why requiring online ID verification is dangerous.

The ink had barely dried on my article about the pitfalls of online age verification, when Tea, a service that lets women vet potential dates by performing background checks sharing bad experiences, got hacked, spraying the private verification photos, chat logs and private messages of thousands of its users all over the internet.

Tea’s website says: “Share experiences and seek advice within a secure, anonymous platform. Tea is built on trust; screenshots are blocked and all members are verified as women🤫”

Except that it clearly isn’t secure, at least 13,000 women are no longer anonymous, and Tea cannot be trusted, because all members are verified to be women, using photographs and government-issued identification.

Now, not only are their identities and faces out there, but the men they thought they were discussing privately can see exactly what was said about them. Not all of those men will be nice people who take criticism behind their backs with quiet dignity.

In short, the compromise of their private information puts some victims in real physical danger.

Safe as houses

One assumes that governments that require (or will soon require) proof of age for access to adult content or even just social media, like Australia, the UK and many US states, will require highly regulated third-party specialists to provide that service, in the belief that this will protect the privacy of individuals and prevent having their true identities linked to online activities that they’d rather not publicise.

Note that the desire for privacy not only applies to people looking at dirty pictures. Not that this would be an illegitimate reason, but there are a great many other legitimate reasons to want privacy and/or anonymity online.

Discussions in mental health support groups, hiding from abusive exes, role-playing multiple conflicting characters in games, or having fiery debates in political forums are just a few of the online interactions you might want to keep from your employers, your community, or your children.

Using secure third-party services for age verification means people won’t have to send their photos and government IDs to social media platforms who will instantly sell it to advertisers, or other websites that will do who knows what with the information. Only the third party service will know that some dodgy site like Facebook pinged them to request age verification for a particular individual.

Safe as houses, right? Or safe as banks, at least?

Safe as banks, then?

The thing is, banks aren’t safe. One notorious bank heist took place over two years, with hackers freely waltzing about the secure networks of over 100 banks in 30 countries. It took a private cybersecurity company to blow the whistle before the banks realised they and their customers were being robbed blind.

Banks have leaked identifying information and confidential data of billions people and companies online. It happens all the time, with even the most secure networks, across all sorts of companies.

There is no chance whatsoever that age or identity verification schemes to access online content – which are a gross violation of privacy and freedom of speech in the first place – will not expose the personal information of vast numbers of people, including enough information to feed organised criminal extortion networks.

If you don’t control your own identity online, then you’re not safe online. Surrendering information to governments or private institutions cannot ever make you safer than you were before.

Slippery slope

We saw in a previous column that a lot of the growing online censorship movement isn’t really motivated by concern about unlawful content, or concern about children.

Much of it is driven by private lobby groups that have ulterior motives and object to a wide range of perfectly legal content and activities because it offends their own moral sensibilities.

That’s not to say governments cannot be overly censorial. In the UK, the Conservative government in 2014 banned a wide range of non-vanilla activities in adult films, notoriously including female, but not male, ejaculation. Spanking and various other fetishes were also too much for the nannies in government.

It took a court case to overturn that law five years later. The ruling rightly said that films could depict anything in which the participants fully and freely consent, that does not cause serious harm to participants, is not inextricably linked with other criminality, and is not likely to be viewed by anyone under the age of 18.

Bonnie Blue

They’re at it again, however. This time, the prissy ninnies were awfully offended when Channel 4 showed a documentary about a rather excessive stunt performed by a 26-year-old star who goes by Bonnie Blue. Her exact claim to fame doesn’t really matter, but advertisers including payment processor Visa and liquor maker Diageo, turned tail and ran.

In June, an Independent Pornography Review convened for the first time in the UK, led by a peer of the realm, Gabby Bertin, who had been commissioned by former Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak to look into online adult entertainment.

At this meeting, the British Board of Film Classification proposed to extend its mandate to regulate “harmful content on the internet”.

Bertin stressed that this was “not remotely a moral crusade”.

Read more:

Yet barely a month later, this “taskforce”, which comprises unnamed “politicians, police and charities” declared that they wanted to ban “a type of ‘barely legal’ content produced by the porn star Bonnie Blue”.

They were upset with the documentary for “glamorising and normalising” what they called “extreme pornography”. They also didn’t like that some of the featured star’s work involves adults who dress up in school uniforms – even though this particular trope is as English as tea and crumpets.

Wagging fingers

The Guardian added that the documentary had been “widely criticised for promoting [Ms. Blue’s] brand and for failing to challenge adequately her assertion that her activity is harmless”.

As if wagging fingers at porn stars engaged in perfectly legal activity is the responsibility of a television programme. As if viewers couldn’t reach the conclusion that Ms. Blue had done something not altogether wholesome all by themselves.

Bertin – sorry, Lady Bertin – had this to say: “This content is pushing at the boundaries. We will be trying to address the ‘barely legal’ aspect legislatively.”

It will come as a surprise to her to learn that “barely legal” is “legal”. There’s an age at which adults become free to act in racy films, and doing so is legal even on the day that they turn that age. As it happens, many people reach that age while they are still at school, which means that depicting legal adults in school clothes might raise eyebrows, but is perfectly legal.

“Barely legal”

Railing against “barely legal” content is absurd. That’s like a traffic cop stopping you for doing 60 in a 60 zone.

“But officer, I was doing 60. That’s legal.”

“Barely legal!”

“Yeah, but legal.”

“I’m going to ticket you just to be sure. We wouldn’t want people to get the idea that they can cross that line willy-nilly, now would we?

What Bertin – sorry, Lady Bertin – doesn’t understand is that there will always be something that’s “barely legal”. If you raise the age at which it becomes legal to act in dodgy films, there will still be “barely legal” content, featuring “barely legal” actors. You’re just shifting the goalposts.

Keep doing that, and soon all we’ll have left is gramps and granny doing missionary, in soft focus, in the dark. Which will then be “barely legal” and “pushing boundaries”.

Make your own choices

In free societies, people ought to be free to make their own choices. Censorship and age restrictions are blunt tools that often cause more harm than good, and rarely achieve their stated objectives.

I would have never learnt about Ms. Blue’s derring-do had it not been for the outcry from politicians announcing what we already knew: that’s not suitable for sensitive viewers.

I’ve argued before that parents are best positioned to supervise and if necessary restrict, the online activities of their children.

Adults should make their own decisions about what entertainment they enjoy. Government has no right to make such rules, and certainly has no right to crack down on legal material on the grounds that it is “barely legal”.

If content is actually unlawful, instead of nearly unlawful, then act against the producers.

History is replete with moral panics. We can’t sacrifice the rights to privacy and free speech merely to appease moral busybodies, and placing all of society at risk of identity theft, fraud and extortion in a futile attempt to protect children is a dangerous encroachment upon individual safety, rights and freedoms.

*Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist, columnist and speaker who loves debunking myths and misconceptions, and addresses topics from the perspective of individual liberty and free markets.

This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission