If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The final rules for New York’s SAFE for Kids Act require users to verify their age (which means a form of digital ID) before an algorithm can curate their feed or a platform can send notifications after midnight. Attorney General Letitia James released the rules on July 28 alongside Governor Kathy Hochul. They take effect January 25, 2027. The law is written for under-18s but, as always has to be the case, the age-checking reaches everyone. To keep an algorithmic feed or overnight notifications, a user above 17 has to prove to the platform that they are an adult. Confirming who counts as an adult means collecting government IDs, face scans, phone numbers and email addresses from people who until now typed a birth date and moved on. James rejected the privacy objection to all this. The rules are “not a question of privacy,” she said. Platforms can accept a government-issued ID upload and the rules force them to offer at least one other option. James’s office also lists a selfie image or video, or an email address or phone number cross-checked against other data that is held on a person. Any of those hands a company something it can tie to a real identity. It’s clear that the law isn’t shying away from allowing platforms to collect sensitive user data, including biometrics, and allowing cross-referencing against other data. For minors, the default changes. Instead of a personalized feed, users under 18 see posts from accounts they follow in a set sequence such as chronological order, unless a parent consents to the algorithm version. Notifications between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m. also stop without parental consent, and it’s not clear how that works with travel or time zones. A minor can ask a parent to switch either feature back on, but the request only goes through if the minor agrees to let the parent be notified of it. A parent who wants to grant consent goes through digital ID checks too. A minor who lacks consent keeps access to the rest of the app, including search. An “acceptable” check has to meet an accuracy standard. It can wrongly pass a minor off as an adult only so often and the tolerance widens as children get older and harder to tell from adults. The rate has to stay at or below 0.1 percent for children up to age 7, 1 percent for ages 8 to 13, 2 percent for 14 and 15, 8 percent at 16, and 15 percent at 17. Those ceilings leave out users who refuse to hand over data or whose result comes back inconclusive. The check must also block at least 98 percent of attempts to get around it. Companies run annual testing, which means a lot of data collection, and keep the results for at least 10 years. Information collected to check age or obtain parental consent cannot be used for anything else, and platforms must delete or “de-identify” it immediately after use and collect only the minimum needed. We all know the de-identifying data does very little, especially in the AI era where people can be profiled in unlimited new ways and people’s identities can be detected from their usage patterns. And we also know that platforms say they delete user data after use and then don’t. That promise holds only as long as the company holding the data honors it or a hack, breach, or bug gets in the way. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, X and YouTube were the platforms officials named at the announcement but the rules reach any service whose users spend at least 20 percent of their time on addictive feeds. Websites are exempt if they have fewer than 5 million monthly users or fewer than 20,000 monthly users who are minors. Breaking the law can cost a company up to $5,000 per violation. Hochul had little patience for any objections to the law. “Social media companies tell me, ‘We have no way of knowing whether someone’s under 18 or not.’ I said, ‘You’re smart people. Use AI to figure it out,'” she said. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post New York Will Require Digital ID Checks for Social Feeds appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.