Statement: The GUARD Act is a poorly disguised universal online ID check mandate
Fight for the Future has been campaigning for years against online ID checks. They lead a coalition of over 90 human rights, reproductive justice, and LGBTQ organizations that are opposed to these surveillance and censorship laws. Online ID check mandates consist of two equally dangerous components: 1) the government making decisions about what is age appropriate, and 2) the death of online anonymity.
A Trojan Horse for Universal ID Checks
Tomorrow Senate Judiciary will markup the GUARD Act, which would impose highly invasive online ID checks on anyone who has an account on a platform with any sort of AI chatbot. This bill is the latest in a series of hastily drafted Congressional bills that claim to protect kids, but would actually mandate surveillance and censorship.
At its core, the bill would force an online ID check, through government ID or biometric scan, on anyone trying to access an AI chatbot and prohibit people under the age of 18 from using “AI companions” altogether. This would include every social media platform and the website of any company operating AI customer service chatbots1. But it doesn’t end there: any person who “makes available an artificial intelligence chatbot” is covered by the law. This would require everyone from internet service providers to anyone who runs a blog with a comment section to administer online ID checks. While apparently narrow, this bill is in fact an online ID check mandate unmatched in scope and highly invasive in methods.
Universal online ID checks would kill internet anonymity, supercharging online surveillance and censorship. If every page view and comment is directly associated with someone’s government ID, it will at best encourage self censorship. At worst, it would provide unprecedented tools for the state to monitor individuals, curate what they can see, and retaliate against them for dissent.
For better and for worse, AI chatbots are threatening to overtake search engines as the primary way people find information online. This means that the millions of people who use these tools for everyday tasks will now be providing sensitive and private information to a sketchy, insecure age verification service, which have already resulted in thousands of people’s private information being leaked. Government censorship is not confined to outright prohibition of speech: burdens like this are a legally dubious limit on free expression.
“The GUARD Act is a Trojan horse for universal online ID checks,” said Jibran Ludwig, Policy Strategist at Fight for the Future. “Whether malicious or careless, this bill embodies everything wrong with lawmakers rushing to pass ID check laws in the name of keeping children safe online. The death of online privacy would expose everyone, regardless of age, to censorship and surveillance. Instead of passing strong privacy protections for everyone, the Senate is considering a bill that would require every single person to give even more of our private information to companies that routinely abuse it. I don’t want to hand over my ID to every website I visit, and neither should you!”
1The bill appears to be meant to exclude customer service chatbots, but the text as written would not actually do that.