An Irish politician wants Facebook to ID people before they can use it
A member of the Irish parliament has called for Irish people to need ID to create a Facebook account. Hildegarde Naughton made the comments on RTÉ Radio 1 during an interview on 2 April. She was due to meet with the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, in Dublin later that day.
Naughton is also a member of the International Grand Committee on Disinformation and ‘Fake News’. The committee is made up of politicians from nine countries concerned about “fake news”.
Protecting children
During the interview, Naughton said her meeting with Zuckerberg was “timely”. This was because of his recent comments asking for governments to regulate social media. She said she was particularly concerned about “child protection” and “harmful content”. But she then pointed to Facebook’s “lack of age verification”. This, she argued, is:
something that they could act on immediately through for example, a PPS number, an ID card, a passport card.
She then said that this information could be “destroyed once the age has been verified”.
Retina scans
But Naughton went further. She suggested that Facebook could use retina scans to verify people’s age. She noted that she knows of one company:
developing technology in relation to… eye scanning in relation to verifying people’s age.
Read on...
Support us and go ad-free
And Facebook, she said, doesn’t need to wait for “government regulation” to begin confirming people’s age.
Worrying proposals
Speaking to The Canary, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) said it has “serious concerns” about Naughton’s proposal. It remarked:
These corporate platforms are not democratically elected governments – giving them government like functions in this manner subverts the rule of law.
It added that Naughton’s suggestion “ignores” the new General Data Protection Regulation laws.
Freedom of speech and privacy
But the ICCL went further. It declared:
It is absolutely not necessary and also has chilling implications for privacy and freedom of expression.
If the ID requirements go ahead, the ICCL stated that Facebook “would become the largest ID database on the planet.” And this, it observed, “would put all users at immediate risk” given Facebook’s history of data breaches.
The Canary has previously reported how Facebook used a former Irish prime minister to lobby for it in Europe.
Unregulated social media
Last year an Irish government minister stated her concern about social media. Josepha Madigan, a minister in the Fine Gael government, criticised the lack of regulation of social media. She asserted that, left unregulated, it’s a “very real threat to western democracy”.
Featured image via Pixabay – Gerd Altmann
We know everyone is suffering under the Tories - but the Canary is a vital weapon in our fight back, and we need your support
The Canary Workers’ Co-op knows life is hard. The Tories are waging a class war against us we’re all having to fight. But like trade unions and community organising, truly independent working-class media is a vital weapon in our armoury.
The Canary doesn’t have the budget of the corporate media. In fact, our income is over 1,000 times less than the Guardian’s. What we do have is a radical agenda that disrupts power and amplifies marginalised communities. But we can only do this with our readers’ support.
So please, help us continue to spread messages of resistance and hope. Even the smallest donation would mean the world to us.
-
Show Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to leave a comment.Join the conversationPlease read our comment moderation policy here.
Facebook can and do ask for photograhic and/or formal ID, I had 2 accounts closed because I will not do this, one of which was well over a decade old, no big loss to me, I now use Gab, MeWe, Telegram, 3speak and Bitchute plus others.
It will get worse when they hook into the 5G weapon system getting rolled out too