The Social Media Trials

If you’ve been reading the news surrounding social media, then you might have heard about several ongoing lawsuits involving major social media platforms— Meta, Google, TikTok, Snapchat. These lawsuits mainly address issues with addiction and the harm that social media has caused to some children, who are now young adults. Meta is under heavy criticism for brushing off these claims and continuing to push their products on children. Many of these lawsuits are happening at the state level in the U.S. including Big Tech’s home state of California. So far only monetary damages have been paid to plaintiffs, but regulation is yet to be seen. Although, it is on the horizon.

Several countries are discussing or beginning to implement age limits for social media. The U.K. was one of the first to do so, and the results are yet to be seen. Issues with the implementation are currently making headlines. Mostly because it has been extremely messy and largely ineffective. Methods include scanning faces and biometric data and scanning government issued ID cards. Now, I agree that we should have some regulations regarding social media use in children, but the biggest concern I have is the privacy angle.

The data from these scans goes through third-parties, which are loosely regulated at best. Which means if you scan your ID when you login to Facebook, it goes through a different service. This might seem innocuous, but let me explain with an example. Imagine you’re at the store buying alcohol and cigarettes. You present your ID, like usual. But this time the cashier takes a photo of your ID and uploads it to the computer. That would be weird right? Why do they need to know where I live, how tall I am, and see all the other information that’s on my ID? Well, this is the issue with these digital ID laws — these third-party companies want to store the data that they collect and use it in other ways, which are largely unknown. And on top of that, this data could be exposed in a data breach, which could easily happen.

The issue here is privacy. Instead, we could implement this differently and use on-device verification methods. Digital ID verification methods like this are already used in some countries, like Sweden. Sweden uses BankID and Freja to verify someone’s identity in digital spaces. A system like this could also share specific user data — like a person’s date of birth to verify age, or an address and name for a package delivery. It’s also important to note that no digital system is immune from hacks, but the difference here is storing and verifying data locally, instead of handing it off to a third-party.