Canada

The imbalance becomes even more pronounced when weighing the law’s benefits against its harms. The harms are certain, immediate, and irreversible, as the verification infrastructure exposes millions of identity documents to providers largely beyond the reach of Canadian privacy law, a risk demonstrated by the Discord breach that leaked roughly 70,000 government-issued IDs last fall. Privacy alone may not decide the case, but the verification mandate is not only a privacy cost. A law that conditions access to social media for online expression by requiring proof of identity limits expression itself for Canadians of all ages. The benefits, by contrast, are speculative at best, given mounting data from Australia that suggests a ban is ineffective.