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Can we have online safety without total surveillance? Yes. Here's how.
Digital age verification is a hot topic right now, with lawmakers pushing for legislation that would ban users from accessing their favorite apps, webpages, and even their devices without showing an ID. As I previously covered, these bills are largely a government power grab disguised as child protection. What if there was a better solution — a way to give lawmakers the verification they crave without sacrificing the privacy and security of American citizens? Here’s what it would take to get the best of both worlds.Efforts to sign age verification into lawThe age verification bills permeating the House and Senate right now are a double-edged sword. On one hand, they protect underage users from online adult content that they shouldn’t see on various platforms and apps. On the other hand, these bills give Big Tech and the government a pathway to capture, digitize, and store users’ real government-issued IDs — the makings of a digital ID database that links online activity to user identities.The war on age verification has even become a bipartisan effort, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle pushing for federal legislation. Most notably, you have Democrat Rep. Josh Gottheimer (N.J.) proposing the Parents Decide Act, which would require operating system developers, like Apple, Google, and Microsoft, to verify the ages of their users any time someone sets up a new device. On the right, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) champions the GUARD Act, which would require users to show an ID to access AI chatbots, possibly leading to broader restrictions on the internet at large as AI expands into every corner of the web.Both bills aim for age verification to protect children, and both would restrict Americans’ rights to freely access their devices, the internet, and online information without an ID.Apple and Google actually built a way to handle the most personal and private information.Make no mistake. If these bills pass, the government will limit or even revoke your access to your favorite apps, services, and devices unless someone finds a better solution — one that still enables age verification without actually giving your ID to tech companies and federal agencies. Luckily, there is a possible solution, if Big Tech chooses to build it.Security in the enclaveWhether you trust Big Tech with your data or you lock your phone in a Faraday cage at night, Apple and Google actually built a way to handle the most personal and private information about its users years ago. The key is found in a tiny locked vault stored in the processing chip in your phone. It’s disconnected from the internet, it’s never backed up in iCloud or Google Drive (you have to set it back up every time you wipe and restore your phone), and it’s encrypted.Apple calls it the Secure Enclave. Google named it the Trusted Execution Environment. Together, they’re both “dedicated secure subsystems” that do the same thing: store your biometric data.If you’ve ever unlocked your phone with your face or your fingerprint, you’ve used this subsystem (which we’ll refer to as “vaults” for the sake of simplicity). The best part about it is that it’s fast, efficient, and completely private. Through these vaults, Apple and Google can save your biometric data, but they can’t see it or access it themselves, and neither can third-party apps. The only thing the system can reveal is whether the face or fingerprint of the person holding the device matches the version saved privately in the system. That’s it.We need a similar solution for age verification.RELATED: Hackers easily fool Instagram's new AI identity verification, humiliating Meta once again Fotkam/Getty Images The age verification solution we needInstead of giving Big Tech a plain copy of your ID, what if there was a way to save it in the vault? Just like setting up FaceID on iPhone or your fingerprint on Android, your phone could prompt you to take a photo of your ID and store it inside the vault as part of your biometric data. To make sure the ID is real and that it belongs to an adult, the vault could include on-device authentication software that checks for the user’s birth date, the official Real ID star, barcode on the back, and any other unique state identifiers.Once saved, ID-backed age verification would work in the same manner that facial and fingerprint authentication works today. When you log into an app, service, or device that requires ID, the system would prompt the vault to verify the information stored inside. If the system agrees that you’re an adult, it will let you through. If the ID belongs to a minor or is missing entirely, the system could then place restrictions on the user as mandated by law. In this way, the vault serves as a bridge between the user’s ID and websites, services, and apps, providing only authentication while keeping the user’s actual identification private.The future of age verificationTo make this work, of course, both Apple and Google need to adopt this technology and integrate it directly into their operating systems. Then the government would have to accept this technology as a valid form of verification that satisfies the new laws. Lastly, major tech companies would have to accept this form of verification, which they ultimately would, as long as they know Apple’s and Google’s solutions are legitimate, just like they do with face and fingerprint password protection today.If we must turn over our photo IDs, locking them inside the secure subsystem is the only solution that makes sense. It would give politicians the government control over device access that they so desperately desire while enabling citizens to maintain their anonymity and privacy.Or — and I might be asking a lot here — the politicians could just stop trying to hamper our rights and leave our devices alone. I like that one better.
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