Canada is about to start grappling with yet another piece of divisive and controversial proposed legislation, this one coming from the opposition Conservatives, and heavily touching on online age verification.
The bill that is set to be presented when the parliament resumes work this month, according to its proponents, deals with protecting Canadians on the internet while also managing to protect their civil liberties.
However, despite what those promoting the bill are saying, the situation is not as clear-cut as all that: the consequences of the plan could also see some online anonymity tools swept away.
The idea revolves around giving online harassment victims a chance to go to a judge and ask that the person behind the bullying be unmasked. Furthermore, the bill’s ambition is to bring clarity to various scenarios and criminal thresholds for these events – specifically, those under which “online operators (like social media platforms) must disclose the identity of an alleged abuser.”
Still under the real or hyped-up notion of “clarity” that the opposition says the present government has been unable to provide with its legislation, is the idea to make repeated criminally harassing material sent anonymously “an aggravating factor.”
This last bit refers to the so-called burner accounts, and here, although the bill does not clarify (pun intended) the real-world person behind such an account must be identified. Meanwhile, the only way to know if the same perpetrator had sent material from multiple anonymous accounts would be to identify them.
The implication is clearly there when the draft mentions that online operators “must disclose the identity of an alleged abuser.”
All this brings up the question – identify them how? And that road inevitably leads to a method involving age verification. Despite the authors of the bill taking pains to assure both the parliament and the public that this will be done with proper privacy-preserving measures in place, the concept of online age verification remains one inherently restrictive and exclusionary.
But the bill’s authors seem keen to cover all the talking points: at once promising “privacy-preserving trustworthy age verification,” legal protection for online harassment victims, and, separately, inevitably, they’re also “thinking of the children” (“the new Conservative legislation will provide mechanisms specifically designed to protect minors who are online,” as one commentator said), plus – platforms who don’t comply will face “penalties and consequences.”
The upcoming bill is being pitted against the government’s much-criticized Bill C-63, and the hope is to place this new legislative effort in a positive light in comparison.
