Backbytes: If social media firms can see inside black holes they can create cast-iron age verification, claims Children's Commissioner Anne Longfield

Who on Earth would drive a Facebook driverless car?

Children's Commissioner Anne Longfield has scoffed at social media sites for claiming that it is "impossible" to reliably lock-out under-aged children from their network while they "can create driverless cars [and] see inside black holes".

Furthermore, she added, "I've been reassured that it is all very possible". By the Chinese government, perhaps?

Longfield made her claims in an article over the weekend on the Telegraph website, pushing the Information Commissioner's Age Appropriate Design Code, invoking GDPR and the threat of stonking, big fines to back-up her argument. "The draft code is clear: if a platform cannot guarantee that its age verification methods are robust, they must apply the age appropriate design standards to all users," she writes.

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In other words, age verification for all, and for pretty much all sites.

"Tech companies have some of the cleverest people in the world working for them. Can it really be the case that they can create driverless cars, see inside black holes and programme computers to beat the best human players of complex games like Go," she asks rhetorically, "but not find ways of making digital platforms fit for purpose for children? Of course not.

"And for the record, I've been reassured that it is all very possible."

She doesn't, however, go into detail about this supposedly ground-breaking technology - perhaps an extension of the porn age-verification laws? But that doesn't stop her. Instead, social media platforms (and, presumably, everyone else) are urged not to "consider the implications of the draft code [from the ICO]" and "get ahead of the curve".
Who needs knowledge when one has cliches, eh?

Commenters, naturally, were unimpressed with Longfield's arguments.

"How dim can you be?" writes one going by the name of Andrew Martin. He adds: "If this article is a call for a national ID scheme - to include the youngest children as well as adults, with biometric verification every time you go to a website - it should say so. Instead the author darkly says ‘it can be done' without any clue about how. Put simply, I don't believe her."

Longfield's record, meanwhile is what can only be described as mixed. Before her appointment as Children's Commissioner she was CEO of the charity 4Children. Under her leadership, it expanded fast - and collapsed the year after she left.

Shortly after her appointment in 2015, Longfield removed her deputy, but not before providing her with an ‘enhanced severance package' - and immediately re-hired her as a consultant. This, though, was done without the required approval of government ministers and the cushy arrangement was cancelled and the organisation ordered to pay back £10,000 to the Treasury.

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