Russian lawmakers call for protecting minors online by verifying age, identity

Russian lawmakers are proposing the introduction of mandatory identification for accessing adult content online, with some calling for the use of the country’s e-government services system ESIA, connected to the federal biometric identification platform. The initiative has sparked fears that Russian users could lose their anonymity on the internet.

A significant number of Russian teenagers have unfettered access to adult content, including videos with foul language, violence and “propaganda of antisocial behavior,” according to Yevgeny Masharov, a member of the Russian Civic Chamber. The solution is identifying Russian users through a “passport, driver’s license and bank information,” he adds.

Adult content is not the only one under scrutiny. The sooner measures are taken, the fewer minors will be exposed to hostile intelligence agencies, scammers, online casinos, and those who can cause harm, “both moral and physical,” Masharov told news agency RIA Novosti last week.

The proposal has received support from other lawmakers, including State Duma deputy and former member of the Federal Security Service (FSB) Anton Nemkin.

“A digital identification infrastructure is already being developed in our country – the Gosuslugi portal, the Unified System of Identification and Authentication (ESIA), and solutions from major banks,” says Nemkin. “These tools could be used to verify age without directly transmitting passport data to third-party platforms.

ESIA is connected to the Unified Biometrics System, which is used to identify and authorize users while accessing the government services platform Gosuslugi. One of the goals of the services is to create a digital ID that can be used in the financial industry for remote client verification.

State Duma member Andrei Svintsov went even further, saying that all online activity by Russians will be de-anonymized over the next three years. His main argument for the effort is the vast amount of bots and generated content that should be cleaned up through user identification.

“A huge number of platform lobbyists are holding back any changes to bring order to the internet,” says Svintsov. “But in a certain timeframe – three, five years at most – everything we do online will be deanonymized. That is, every internet user will register with some specialized identifier that will verify their age and other necessary access rights.”

Nemkin says that the primary goal of introducing identification for adult content is not to restrict user freedom, but to protect children. The argument, however, has not convinced many of Russia’s activists and legal experts.

Sarkis Darbinyan, lawyer and managing partner of the Digital Rights Center in Kazakhstan, points out that Russia has long used the argument of protecting children as a pretext for implementing more control over the internet.

“The internet censorship in Russia started in 2012 with the first law on protecting children from harmful information,” Darbinyan told TechRadar. “This essentially opened a Pandora’s box, ultimately leading to an incredible expansion of the list of grounds for blocking internet sites and the establishment of total state online censorship.”

Over the past years, the country has intensified its crackdown on online speech, including censoring news and restricting access to foreign platforms. According to President Vladimir Putin’s Strategy for the Development of an Information Society for 2017–2030, concrete protective measures should be introduced to deal with “issues of anonymity” and “impunity” among online users.

Article Topics

age verification  |  biometrics  |  children  |  data privacy  |  digital ID  |  identity verification  |  Russia  |  Unified Biometrics System