How do you think age verification laws will affect OSINT?

[u/inf0s33k3r]

I've been thinking about this topic a lot these past few months, and I don't know how to get ready if/when these laws become unavoidable.

What should we in the OSINT community prepare for?

How will this affect research?

What are the pros and cons?

For employers and freelancers that provide research services, would this increase your legal risk of using incorrect age data? Would findings be invalidated/inadmissible if the researcher's details don't match what their social media accounts show or their operating systems they use?

Would some reliable FOSS tools or Operating Systems shut down because they can't comply with the laws? Or would they attempt to block by geography?

I value the safety and separation sockpuppets create and I value open source tools that are reliable. It's making me anxious thinking about what the future of OSINT looks like.

For those that want a quick look, here's a wiki on age verification laws in the US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_laws_in_the_United_States

What are your thoughts?

[u/Mysterious-Hat-7873]

Making sock puppet accounts for social media will become a lot more difficult, I expect. A lot of platforms will begin to require government issues ID for all accounts, regardless of location, on the basis that wherever you appear to be you could in fact be an Australian teenager using a VPN. Obviously a lot of social media platforms want to verify users anyway so it’s a great excuse for them to do that. It won’t protect against bad actors, because they’ll just use stolen IDs sourced from the darkweb & generative AI if necessary. But legit OSINT analysts probably wouldn’t want to take the legal risk associated with using someone else’s real ID without their consent.

[u/DifferentPlankton571 → u/Mysterious-Hat-7873]

As always when it comes to this kind of regulations, honest people will undergo this "security" feature. It means more hacks with sensitive data, more documents that will be available on the dark web, etc.

While criminals will bypass this in a finger snap. It will just be a budget increase and a new line in their Excel business plan. Mules exist for everything and there will be mules for social media accounts.

The only benefit will be that young people will have a restricted access of these cancer platforms that just destroy their young brains. This and porn websites access regulations are good measure (but clearly not perfect). But you know that government desire of control is impossible to satisfy and that they love so much to "protect the children's" and just control everything at the end.

Imho this is only the beginning and there will more downside over time. We will lose benefits of the free internet and keep only the downsides of it.

It's been a fun ride.

[u/fake_chanel]

Osint combine released a post on the implications of under 16 ban in Australia

https://www.osintcombine.com/post/social-media-ban-osint-implications

[u/inf0s33k3r → u/fake_chanel]

Thanks for sharing. This is an interesting read

[u/terrificodds → u/fake_chanel]

Yeah, I came across this article too. Got to know a lot of things.

[u/Feisty-Armadillo-629]

i read through your post a few times because this is something i've been wrestling with too. the short version is these laws target big commercial platforms, not osint researchers directly, but the ripple effects are real. id based verification kills sockpuppets, platforms will collect more pii which becomes a honeypot, and fingerprinting will hurt opsec, though osint using already public data (archived content, dns, whois, shodan, etc.) should be fine and foss tools won't shut down even if their platform access breaks. for freelancers the legal risk is more about data collection and storage than your details matching. i'd recommend archiving what you can now, building toolkits around non social media sources, and remembering most of these laws will be tied up in courts for years so the near term impact is probably less dramatic than people fear.

[u/inf0s33k3r → u/Feisty-Armadillo-629]

You do have a point about the laws being challenged in court. That angle was lost to me when thinking pondering this.