Legislation currently advancing in the Canadian Parliament threatens to fundamentally alter the anonymous nature of the open internet. If it follows the path of similar laws enacted in the United Kingdom and Australia, Canadians may soon be required to submit to facial recognition scans and present government-issued identification to access a wide range of online content.
The Global Precedent: From Child Protection to Digital Control
Both the U.K. and Australia have implemented online safety acts. These laws began with the noble goal of protecting minors but have resulted in sweeping digital identification mandates. The legislation used intentionally vague terms like "highly effective" and "appropriate" age verification, leaving the specific methods to be determined by regulators.
Despite initial promises of privacy-preserving options, the outcome was centralized biometric control. The U.K. now requires facial scans and government ID matching to access pornography and content related to suicide, self-harm, and eating disorders. Australia expanded this list to include violent content, state-defined social media platforms, and, most alarmingly, access to search engines themselves.
Bill S-209: Canada's Turn on the Same Path
Canada appears to be next in line. Bill S-209, introduced in Parliament, employs the same ambiguous language. It creates an offence for allowing minors to access pornography but provides a legal defence for services that use "prescribed age-verification or age-estimation methods" that are "highly effective" and comply with "best practices." Crucially, the specifics of these methods are to be decided later by regulation, mirroring the process in Britain and Australia.
While shielding children from harmful content is a universally shared objective, the practical implementation of such laws risks far greater consequences. The legislation's ultimate effect could be the end of online anonymity, forcing service providers to demand biometric verification for accessing everything from specific websites to artificial intelligence tools and possibly even core internet services like search.
The Dangers of Centralized Digital Identity
The push for digital IDs, often presented as a convenient solution by governments, creates a single point of failure and control. Access to goods, services, and information would depend on a remote system's approval—a decision that could be made by an automated algorithm or a distant administrator.
This centralization poses severe practical risks beyond philosophical objections. If a password is compromised, it can be changed. A person cannot grow a new face. The security of biometric data is already in question; the messaging platform Discord, for instance, suffered a breach where hackers accessed over 70,000 government IDs and customer facial images.
Third-party verification firms like Persona and Yoti claim to delete raw facial scans and ID photos after verification. However, they retain the machine-readable "embeddings" of your face and the data from your identification documents. This is akin to permanently memorizing someone's likeness and recording their driver's licence details while claiming not to retain personal information.
The rallying cry of "think of the children" is a powerful motivator for accepting significant restrictions on freedom. However, evidence from other democracies shows the end result: a permission-based internet where a digital warden controls access to vast swathes of online life. As Bill S-209 moves forward, Canadians must scrutinize whether the proposed cure for online harms is worse than the disease, potentially trading an open internet for a controlled and monitored digital panopticon.
