Canada’s proposed legislation, Bill S-210 (first introduced in late 2011 as the “Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act”) has cleared the Senate. It is currently close to ending its “journey” through the House of Commons before getting adopted.
And adopted it easily be very soon – even if the process in the committee currently looking into it did not include any critics and their testimonies.
The issue with this, as with so many other bills in different jurisdictions around the world, particularly in some US states, is that a very serious and sensitive subject such as fostering the well-being of young people does not seem to be approached in the serious and responsible way it deserves to be.
Instead, it looks like yet another roundabout way to usher in age verification, which, it bears repeating, would impact the privacy and security of all internet users.
As Bill S-210 critics point out, the text speaks about sexually explicit material as its target (in terms of preventing those too young from accessing it) – but without clearly and precisely defining what that content is.
The overbroad definition that’s there meanwhile serves as the “gateway” to age verification, which platforms are expected to (try) to do in order to protect their business from fines, ranging from 250,000 to half a million Canadian dollars.
One thing leads to another, so to speak, and from there, criticism of Bill S-210 is that because it doesn’t afford procedural rights to content creators it could result in what are known as “preemptive takedowns.”
And, no great surprise there – the bill’s proposals are dismissed as “almost certainly technologically unfeasible.”
The S-210 rules would apply to “any organization” making what’s broadly defined as sexually explicit online content, for commercial purposes, subject to the new rules.
The rules state that a platform must implement an age verification method (rather than “believe” that someone is of a certain age). The bill’s text makes a fairly astonishing claim that “online age-verification technology is increasingly sophisticated.”
How would the bill’s authors have arrived at such a conclusion?
Reports out of Canada say that Senator Julie Miville-Dechene “appears to have worked with the age verification industry when drafting the legislation.”
And what that means is that the senator “took its (the industry’s) assurances around things like age-estimation AI as being workable without privacy infringement.”
