California’s attempt to force “age verification” on us all is having legal problems.
“Based on the materials before the Court, the CAADCA’s age estimation provision appears not only unlikely to materially alleviate the harm of insufficient data and privacy protections for children, but actually likely to exacerbate the problem by inducing covered businesses to require consumers, including children, to divulge additional personal information.”
Has anybody done an analysis of this with regard to the smolweb (i.e., those of us old-fashioned enough to have websites and not just lists of links to socnet profiles)?
If your web site is part of Vox Media or Condé Nast then you might want to consult your lawyers, but as I understand it this particular law would not apply to those which don’t have either $millions in revenue or a habit of sharing information about their users. Any danger posed by it to the more smol parts of the web would be would be more indirect, depending on the long-term social consequences of normalizing the idea of age verification.
That is reassuring. Thank you.