Gus Hurwitz on Social-Media Age Verification and Privacy
WENY News quoted ICLE Director of Law & Economics Programs Gus Hurwitz in an article on age verification for social-media users. The piece examines the accuracy of age-verification tools, concerns about collecting personal data, and the legal questions surrounding protections for minors and adults’ access to online content. Read the full piece here.
“There’s been a lot of research, a lot of work, to take a picture of my face and estimate my age based upon it,” said Gus Hurwitz, a law lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in technology and economic cases. “It’s moderately reliable in some circumstances. They also can be gamed.”
Hurwitz says the technology can have inaccuracies when estimating different races or genders. Anyone (teens included) can also find ways to make themselves appear older. How often the technology is required could reduce manipulations.
“A real-time or periodic update, as opposed to a ‘I just need to upload a photo once and I’m in’ process… that’s really important,” Hurwitz said.
“In technology, we talk about the stack. You’ve got the application, that runs on an operating system, that runs on a computer, that is owned by a person,” Hurwitz said.
Hurwitz described Google’s verification as different tiers of accuracy: self report, parental approval, family accounts, and scans of government ID.
“I think that my Gmail account is old enough to vote now,” Hurwitz joked.
Hurwitz with Villanova points out that private companies have always collected gobs of private information about their clients.
“Banks have a lot of information about us. Phone companies have always had a lot of information about everyone. So these concerns are not completely new,” Hurwitz said.
“The scale… and in the digitalized world, the way that we can access and use this data- is tangibly different in many ways,” Hurwitz said.
Hurwitz observed that people who verbalize concerns about privacy infringement do not always follow through to match their actions with their concerns.
“How much do people actually care? Rightly or wrongly?” Hurwtiz asked. “Now there’s a subset here, which is how much do children really care? And that’s a completely different question.”
Age restriction purposes to keep teens out of adult online spaces; but Hurwitz cautions that company methods also need to avoid false positives.
“How do we make sure that I, older than 18, am allowed to do things on the internet that I should be allowed to do?” Hurwitz said.
Hurwitz says that Meta agreeing to age verification in a settlement avoids First Amendment legal challenges– it is one private company pledging to a policy instead of a government mandating an industry standard.