The Internet Wants to Check Your I.D.

Shoshana Weissmann, the director of digital media at the R Street Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank, told me that these regulations might superficially seem similar to a liquor store or a night club requiring patrons to show I.D.—just another minor annoyance that we accept as routine. A store clerk glancing at an I.D., however, is very different from a website storing personal data or tracking users’ activities. As the Tea leak demonstrated, any age-verification system that stores user data comes with vulnerabilities and risks compromising users’ privacy. In short, the new safety laws eliminate the relative anonymity that we have continued to expect online even as social media has collapsed the boundaries between our physical and digital lives. Some users will surely decide that it’s not worth sacrificing privacy for access to online material, which means that fewer people who may benefit from a putatively sensitive space, such as an online A.A. community, will ultimately access it.