Online age assurance imposes no burden beyond in-person ID checks, AVPA argues

Age assurance methods like biometric facial age estimation do not place a burden beyond that of physical ID checks, or on those without official IDs, the Age Verification Provider’s Association (AVPA) argues.

The AVPA offered its perspective on why age assurance technologies do not place a disproportionate burden on adult users of pornographic services in a filing with the U.S. Supreme Court as it heard Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton.

The lawsuit is intended to block Texas’ HB 1181, which would require online platforms offering age-restricted content to check the age of their users.

The technology has been tested in regulated environments all over the United States and other countries, to enforce age restrictions for pornography and a range of other products and services, the brief points out.

The burden placed on adults by online age checks is sufficiently limited to be justified by the policy objective they are intended to meet, the AVPA argues in the amicus brief. It is not more of a burden, from a privacy perspective, than an in-person ID check, and in many cases is less-so.

“Even if a data breach revealed who had used an AVPA-member system — despite the layers of security preventing such a breach — it would reveal only that the user verified his or her age, not the purpose for the age check, which can be used for many activities other than accessing pornography,” the AVPA writes.

Further, many age verification systems do not require the user to possess government identification, contrary to claims from the plaintiffs that they “will be functionally prohibited from visiting sites’ subject to the law.”

The AVPA takes on misconceptions presented by several previous amicus briefs. Tech lobby groups have offered up several dubious arguments for why age verification doesn’t work, and why it shouldn’t be allowed even if it does.

The proportionality of the burden placed on adults by age assurance processes such as biometric age estimation (taking a selfie) is central to the question of whether they violate the Constitution, which is the question before the Supreme Court.

Article Topics

age estimation  |  age verification  |  AVPA  |  biometric testing  |  biometrics  |  face biometrics  |  facial analysis  |  Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton  |  user experience