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Opinion: Protect kids’ privacy, yes, but do the same for adults

Protecting kids from pornography shouldn't require giving governments control of everyone else's internet access and use

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Earlier this month Bill S-209 passed the Senate’s Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee’s clause-by-clause reading. The bill is intended to limit children’s access to pornography online by gating whole categories of online content behind mandatory biometric age verification. According to Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, the bill’s sponsor, “the government will decide on the scope, so the government could decide to include social media like X in its choices.” If next year you have to hand over a digitized face-print to look at Elon Musk’s platform but not a social media platform friendly to the ruling party, at least you’ll know why.

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One witness before the committee was Philippe Dufresne, the privacy commissioner, whose office presumably exists for exactly these situations. When state and corporate power violates our right to privacy, the privacy commissioner is there to stand up for us and defend our ancient rights. But Dufresne made no such defence. He did not register his opposition to the bill or ask for its scope to be reduced. He did not recommend an amendment to require the methods used to verify age be privacy-preserving. (He did take credit for tweaking a previous version of the bill to require that service providers collect your data only when “strictly necessary,” but that does nothing to change the core problems with S-209.)

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On-device, zero-knowledge proofs are the only truly privacy-preserving form of age estimation and identity verification. Such systems scan your face, process the result entirely on-device, and then simply report that you passed or failed the adulthood verification. It’s not perfect, and the companies that provide the service still spy on our devices to a limited degree, though not more than your average browser already does. But the alternatives all involve handing your data over to third parties, which carries obvious privacy risks.

Instead of doing any of that, however, Dufresne endorsed the bill though it will effectively end privacy online. He did say that “championing children’s privacy rights is one of my strategic priorities” and that all concerned should “work together to prioritize the best interests of young persons, which includes their fundamental right to privacy” but none of this amounted to anything of substance, because in his own words “I support this Bill.”

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Which raises questions about what the actual, rather than stated role, of the privacy commissioner is. Acquiescence by the office is not new.

In 2008 the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA) introduced airport body scanners as a pilot project, and in 2009 the privacy commissioner authorized their use in airports across the country. The machines provided full 3D scans of passengers’ bodies. Machine operators worked in remote booths so you didn’t have to look them in the eye while they studied your fat rolls and private areas. As part of their regular duties, operators violated the privacy rights of everyone who went through a machine in the most intimate way possible, and yet the privacy commissioner approved.

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In 2010, CATSA decided 12-17 year olds were capable of consenting to have their bodies imaged and viewed by strangers. And so, even if their parents objected, tweens and teens were violated in the same intimate way as adult passengers. The privacy commissioner was silent. Had anyone other than a CATSA employee been caught with such images, they would have served a long sentence and would still be on the sex offender registry today. Are we confident that any amount of screening for pedophiles would keep that booth free of such predators?

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end with a heroic regulator riding to the rescue. In 2012, following years of grassroots protests and co-ordinated legal pressure from rights organizations, the Americans mandated that “automated target recognition” (ATR) modes be used on their airport scanners. They obscure the nude images of travellers and instead display a stick man with highlighted body parts indicating where something suspicious might be hiding on the subject’s person. Canada has no such mandate. CATSA did begin adopting ATR technology around the same time but these are software settings that can be turned off. We have no rule requiring them to remain on.

The privacy commissioner’s purpose presumably is to look out for Canadians’ privacy rights, not facilitate their violation at the hands of state and corporate actors. The privacy commissioner should have asked for privacy-enhancing changes to Bill S-209, not supported it as written.

Shawn Gordon lives in Ottawa and works in medical test manufacturing.

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