New plans to verify people’s ages online with a Government ID is a “disproportionate response” to the issue of child safety, according to civil liberty and digital privacy campaigners.
Both the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) and Digital Rights Ireland (DRI) have questioned the legal basis of plans to create a new digital wallet for online age verification, which would be connected with the existing MyGovID online identification system.
Minister for Media Patrick O’Donovan is expected to bring a proposal to Cabinet on Tuesday on the new digital wallet. It is proposed to link a child’s age with their online MyGovID account as part of a plan to increase protection for children online.
It is understood that the Government believes that new age limits for social media should be set at an EU level, and Ministers are planning to make online child safety a key theme of its upcoming presidency of the council of the EU next year.
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While ICCL and DRI said they “welcome the Government’s concern about the effect of social media platforms on our society”, they said the plans for a new digital wallet raise concerns about issues of “privacy, online anonymity and security.”
“These reports suggest the Minister wants every adult and child in Ireland over the age of 15 to present a MyGovID whenever they want to post on social media,” Joe O’Brien, executive director of ICCL, said.
“On what legal basis? These digital IDs require a Public Services Card, and child safety cannot be successfully secured through the use of a database that has been found to be illegal. This kind of disproportionate response to a very real issue veers into the realm of authoritarianism. We need a much broader public discussion.”
Dr TJ McIntyre, chair of Digital Rights Ireland, claimed that the proposal to verify the ages of social media users with an app linked to MyGovID would give social media platforms “even more information about individuals than they have already”.
“It would also mean, in effect, that users could no longer browse the internet with any degree of anonymity. Most websites are connected to social media/advertising companies through use of cookies and hidden image files. Connecting the social media and advertising companies’ databases to MyGovID would mean that every web page access could be traced back to a specific Irish holder of a Public Services Card,” Dr McIntyre said.
The Government is already anticipating a debate about privacy rights ahead of its plans to introduce a method of age-verification for social media.
Speaking about the proposals in the Dáil last month, Mr O’Donovan said “it’s going to be a very difficult question, and a very salient question, for this House: what is more important? Privacy, or the protection of children online?”
He alluded to a previous controversy, where concerns about data protection hampered Government efforts to compel people to use a Public Services Card for certain state services. Mr O’Donovan said the law “floundered because some interest groups outside of the House, interested more in privacy than other issues, got their way”.
