Pennsylvania's Senate Judiciary Committee has advanced a bill that seeks to enforce age verification on commercial sites that contain more than a third harmful material.
Now the bill, SB 603, goes to the full Senate for debate and a vote, and then to the House if it passes there.
The verification, according to the bill, can be done by an "independent, third-party age verification service," using databases that are "commercially available" and "regularly used by government agencies and businesses for the purpose of age and identity verification," or "any commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data to verify the age of the person attempting to access the material."
The bill would come into force 90 days after it is enacted.
In addition to the type of data that can be used for verification, the bill also specifies that this information cannot be retained after the verification process has been completed.
And while it would require that the verification data is not retained after it has been used for its purpose, it does not address the issue of how the third-parties used for verification will handle this data. But even if it were, the fact that a user's identity is verified before they are allowed to access a site means that their activity can be tracked and profiled, and this information can be shared or sold to data brokers.
Exemptions are envisaged for bona fide news, public interest content, and internet service providers.
The bill was amended last week so that it would track the Miller test, a legal standard used to determine whether content is obscene, as upheld in FSC v. Paxton.
In the case of the Pennsylvania bill, it's reported that the "commercially reasonable method" of verification through "transactional data" means that the age check could be done by tapping into mortgage, education, and employment records. And while the bill is designed to keep minors from accessing certain material, it does not provide for the state attorney general to enforce it - instead, private citizens would be able to sue for damages, court costs, and attorney fees.
Reclaim The Net has been tracking the progress of this bill, as well as others like it in states such as Ohio, Arizona, Indiana, and North Dakota.
We previously reported that the state of Pennsylvania is suing Snapchat for not implementing age verification, while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has proposed using verification as a way to balance the need to keep children safe with the right to privacy. However, his solution would end up removing the possibility of anonymous access to the internet for everyone.
