The New Yorker:

New safety rules require users to verify their identities before gaining access to sites. This spells the end of the relative anonymity that we’ve come to expect online.

By Kyle Chayka

The app Tea is a kind of digital whisper network for women. No men are allowed to join. Those who wish to be members must submit evidence, including selfies, in order to prove that they are women. Once they’ve been admitted, users have access to profiles of men annotated with information such as background checks and dating reviews; men with shady dating histories are rated with red flags. After launching in 2023, the Tea app got little attention for two years. Then, in July, thanks to TikTok and Instagram videos testifying to the app’s effectiveness at sussing out creeps, it reportedly gained more than two million new user requests. This might have been just another triumphant startup story, except that, on July 25th, the app suffered a data breach, and users’ selfies, I.D. photos, posts, and direct messages began appearing on the anonymous message board 4chan. Tea is meant to delete users’ documents after it verifies them, but it clearly had failed to do so. (The company has said that all of the leaked material was years old, which for victims of the breach must be cold comfort.) A Gen Z online-privacy activist named May, who asked that I leave out her last name, watched the leak happen and feared what it meant for the women who’d assumed that they were communicating within a protected space. “People can go and see that you’ve posted something about a guy,” May said. “He can now go after you.” (Tea did not respond to requests for comment.)

The Tea spillage is emblematic of what’s at risk when we attach our real-life identities to our online activities. Yet the tethering of identity to digital access is precisely what is prescribed by a new wave of laws going into effect around the world and in bills under consideration in the U.S. On the same day that the Tea leak was discovered, the Online Safety Act (osa) rolled out in the United Kingdom. The act mandates that online platforms implement age verification in order to block underage users from “harmful and age-inappropriate content,” such as pornography and material that might encourage eating disorders, bullying, hate, or substance abuse. In theory, such laws protect minors, but in practice they affect all users’ experience of the internet. In order to verify who is a child online, after all, sites must also determine who is not. Adults in the U.K. now have to upload photos of their I.D.s showing their dates of birth or submit to other tests—facial-age estimation (from a selfie, say), a bank-account evaluation, a credit-card check—in order to watch certain music videos on Spotify or create unrestricted new social-media accounts. Eric Goldman, an associate dean at Santa Clara University School of Law, who has been studying online age verification, told me that these changes are about to dismantle what remains of the open web, which was predicated on anyone being able to access almost anything. “We’re witnessing the real-time destruction of the internet as we know it,” he said.

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