Efforts are underway to shield children from online adult content through internet standards, with age-verification and age-assurance tools being proposed as potential solutions. However, the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) has expressed concerns about these tools' impact on privacy and First Amendment rights, as well as their effectiveness.
In a brief to the Supreme Court last year, CDT highlighted these issues but also acknowledged that technical solutions could address valid concerns about adult content. Two policies related to internet standards are currently under consideration.
The first policy involves parents setting children's devices to block adult websites using metadata labeling. Most adult content sites are willing to self-label as adults-only due to legal, regulatory, ethical, and commercial reasons. Strengthening these tools with well-defined standards that are widely adopted by websites and interpreted by web browsers and parental control tools can enhance their effectiveness.
Another approach is configuring devices to request "safe mode" for other sites on the internet. This would alert platforms that a young person or someone avoiding NSFW content is accessing them. Such measures could work on platforms hosting both general audience content and adult-only material.
While there is much work ahead in implementing these tools, proposals for site self-labeling standards and user content preference indications are already in progress.
In the future, age-verification systems might overcome current challenges by linking government-issued IDs with unlinkable digital tokens presented to websites without requiring ID card photos or revealing identifiers. For now, standards-based solutions offer practical opportunities to protect children from adult content while respecting adults' rights and addressing privacy and security concerns.