What Can Mexico Learn from Global Approaches to Online Age Verification?

In their piece for nexos, OTI senior policy analyst Sarah Forland, OTI director Prem Trivedi, and VP of Technology and Democracy at New America Lilian Coral provide recommendations as Mexico considers measures to address challenges with youth online safety.

First, Mexican policymakers should avoid trying to legislate broad solutions to kids’ safety challenges and instead narrowly define the problems they wish to address. Second, they should consider social and socio-technical solutions, not just technical “quick-fixes” that often-put data security, privacy, and human rights at risk. Many “tech” problems require a mix of solutions, including non-technological ones. For example, federal and local law enforcement in the United States lack adequate resources to investigate tips about child sexual abuse material online. Investing in these agencies’ ability to improve the report-to-prosecution pipeline is not a tech solution, but it would urgently help to address a societal problem exacerbated by technology.

Third, as countries around the world experiment with age verification, Mexican federal and state governments should remember that blanket online age verification laws are a recipe for unchecked surveillance and cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Instead, Mexico should take a narrowly tailored approach to age verification in which strict age verification with government identifiers or biometrics is only applied to already legally age-restricted sales and activities. Examples include online gambling, buying alcohol, or accessing pornography. In these cases, requiring the use of privacy-protective techniques like encryption and zero-knowledge proof can limit the risks of data breaches, identity theft, and the potential misuse of sensitive data by governments.