‘But Third-Party Verification Services Are Secure,’ They Said.
One of the latest companies to suffer a cyber incident is AU10TIX, an identity-verification service used by many of the major tech platforms, such as Uber, TikTok, X, and LinkedIn. Administrative credentials were left exposed for a year, giving bad actors access to users’ most sensitive data.
“Whoever accessed the platform could peruse information about…people, including name, date of birth, nationality, identification number, and the type of uploaded document such as a drivers’ license, linking to an image of the identity document itself,” Malwarebytes.com explained.
The incident comes as proponents of age and identify verification mandates for social media do their utmost to convince lawmakers that such policies don’t threaten users’ privacy and data security. They often argue that technological progression and third-party verification services have nullified any legitimate concerns that may once have arisen.
The AU10TIX breach – as well as the recent hack of an identity verification service popular in Australia – demonstrate that such arguments are deeply flawed. Like any other organization, third-party verifiers are prone to hacks and leaks. That is simply the state of cybersecurity in 2024. The fact that hacks are ubiquitous makes it all the more important that lawmakers decline to enact any anti-security laws.
Also, as many have pointed out, age verification technology has yet to mature. Services continue to perform inconsistently, and their restrictions can be dodged easily. Age verification mandates, moreover, quite obviously violate the First Amendment’s speech protections in multiple ways. Nonetheless, many states – not to mention members of Congress – have proceeded to introduce, and in some cases enact, such mandates. This has come at considerable cost to taxpayers, who must pay for the inevitably doomed defenses of unconstitutional laws.
Lawmakers should stop ignoring the many reasons to oppose age verification mandates. There are many lawmakers who are well-intentioned and nobly aspire to protect children online, but they must consider the disastrous real-world implications of requiring age verification. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” doesn’t apply to the world of public policy.
Published on July 12, 2024