EFF to New York: Age Verification Threatens Everyone's Speech and Privacy

Young people have a right to speak and access information online. Legislatures should remember that protecting kids' online safety shouldn't require sweeping online surveillance and censorship.

EFF reminded the New York Attorney General of this important fact in comments responding to the state's recently passed Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act—which requires platforms to verify the ages of people who visit them. After New York's legislature passed the bill, it is now up to the state attorney general's office to write rules to implement it.

We urge the attorney general's office to recognize that age verification requirements are incompatible with privacy and free expression rights for everyone. As we say in our comments:

[O]nline age-verification mandates like that imposed by the New York SAFE For Kids Act are unconstitutional because they block adults from content they have a First Amendment right to access, burden their First Amendment right to browse the internet anonymously, and chill data security- and privacy-minded individuals who are justifiably leery of disclosing intensely personal information to online services. Further, these mandates carry with them broad, inherent burdens on adults’ rights to access lawful speech online. These burdens will not and cannot be remedied by new developments in age-verification technology.

We also noted that none of the methods of age verification listed in the attorney general's call for comments is both privacy-protective and entirely accurate. They each have their own flaws that threaten everyone's privacy and speech rights. "These methods don’t each fit somewhere on a spectrum of 'more safe' and 'less safe,' or 'more accurate' and 'less accurate.' Rather, they each fall on a spectrum of 'dangerous in one way' to 'dangerous in a different way'," we wrote in the comments.

Read the full comments here: https://www.eff.org/document/eff-comments-ny-ag-safe-kids-sept-2024