I have no problem with bans on minors on social media, I will not be taking part in any ID verification that is not zero knowledge and not run by a for profit third party.
Zero knowledge state owned and operated with no data harvesting or sharing.
Reminder: The reason that this seems coordinated is because it is.
Meta has spent over $2 BILLION dollars to push this everywhere.
Being able to link accounts to actual people is incredibly valuable for Meta and all of the other companies who sell your privacy for cash.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_billion_in_nonprofit_grants_and_45/
I’ve been spamming this lately but it feels warranted:
Please reach out to your family and urge them to stop using Facebook (or worse, any form of reels) if they still do. The onus is on the informed now. It’s not enough to just ask the tech barons to stop, we also need to divert their support.
It was just announced that the targeted solution is a Zero Knowledge approach, where the website just receives a simple “not underage” without any additional information from a mini-wallet. This would be a solution that I could stand behind as it doesn’t use any 3rd party services for age verification. It’s akin to the COVID certificate.
Edit: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/age-verification-european-union-mini-id-wallet
the main probrem isn't really what data is used for verification, but what data is made unavailable without it. if some conservative asshole decides that resources on sexual health (or alternate sexualities) are pornographic, then that information is effectively gone for everyone under 18 or without an account.
That is true. Sadly this is the direction society is going and it’s depressing.
Even with the Zero Knowledge approach, you will still run an app on a phone (what if I don't have one) that will make some call to the government's servers, which will most likely know what website you're trying to access. We're moving the data mining from some third party to the government, which can be wrongly used later if some idiot comes into power. If it's not making a call to a government's servers, I would be surprised, since you could imagine someone just bypassing this to always return "Over 18".
Even funnier (read "sad"), this initiative will probably rely on Google and Apple to keep it robust, and will likely have no availability on rooted phones or non-Google Play Services ones. It's premature at best to deploy this in a meaningfully safe way.
What I understood is that the code of the app would be open so it can be Independently checked. It sucks that it comes to this and there will be a choice between plague and cholera, but I would rather have this approach than use 3rd party age verification services.
I don't stand behind any of it. We shouldn't even give them an inch IMO.
The only system I'll accept. Not necessarily for pornography and a lot of "save the children" claims are just pretext for privacy violations, but there are services that legitimately need to check some info and a zero knowledge approach is the most privacy preserving way to do that.
It's so funny to me how badly people want this to be some nefarious governmental conspiracy. Listen, the government already has much better tools to track you online. Your computer has, on a hardware level, sent unique identifiers to ISPs and websites since Pentium IIIs. This age requirement thing isn't a government conspiracy to track you, they already track you.
It is a *corporate *conspiracy. It's Meta and other major websites, games, and applications companies that want to off load their liability. Meta and Alphabet just lost major lawsuits for their negligence in protecting kids on their own websites. There is a liability dam about to break for these companies and schools and other advocacy groups start their own lawsuits. That's what this is about. That's the real conspiracy.
Your computer has, on a hardware level, sent unique identifiers to ISPs and websites since Pentium IIIs.
Source?
Source.
I'm not the person who made the claim but Device Fingerprinting has been around for decades and Hardware ID is certainly part of that.
They also want a reliable way to differentiate between chatbots and real users, because advertising isn't very effective on chatbots.
But also, one benefit of ID laws for the government is that it makes court proceedings much faster and cheaper. Sure, they're tracking everyone online, but a lot of that information is locked behind procedure. By just requiring ID to log in they can sidestep the procedures, because they can just ask corporations nicely for ID information and they'll eagerly comply.
Let's say this is the official narrative. My argument:
Conclusion: There is sufficient basis to consider that the official narrative is not the whole story.
It is in fact a government conspiracy to track you. Not necessarily to gather data on you, which can be purchased from brokers, but so that they can also control what you can access.
There’s no mechanism that the government currently has that can track you as effectively as these age verification laws can.
I'm starting to think the tinfoil hat people were onto something
We were always onto something!
Every day closer to a totalitarian world nanny state that only protects the elite.
Nanny state surveillance.
Welp, this was bound to happen, wasn't it? I'm pretty sure they're referring to this application, which I stumbled upon a while back. If I remember correctly, the app "allows" (or implicitly forces) the user to store a government issued identity: able to attest to an age-restricted website, whether or not the user is of age.
It does this, supposedly by "just" sharing an age-bracket with the website; but here's the kicker: the Union, in its generosity, has granted their citizens an in-app option, to withdraw this signal from the websites it has been provided to. What this means in practice, is the app storing one's government-issued identify, also ties back to every account requiring "age-verification"...
So now, every device containing the app, has the owner's government-issued identify on it, together with connections to every age-restricted service. And considering the apps are maintained by the Union, or member states (through their own implementations), creating a backdoor to the application's contents... I mean to "observe app usage", would be absolutely trivial.
Again, I've read it a while back, so some things might've changed, and my memory might be spotty; but I'm quite sure it's along the lines I've described.
Kill your fucking owners or you cannot have nice things.
We have too much tech. Capitalism and authoritarianism are no longer compatible with progress or survival.
I'm genuinely curious as to what the fuck identifying on the OS level has to do with social media, and then what the fuck that has to do with protecting kids. If you're a parent who engages with your child, and... hear me out here... take care of your child, restricting access is done the same way they they don't get access to detergents, and similar.
In the consumption of media, have tools that let parents manage and control the type of content they can access. Similar to how you can child proof cabinets.
And, back to my original question. What the fuck does this have to do with identifying on the fucking operating system level?
I'm genuinely curious if anyone pushing this has been asked to justify this? Surely, you'd expect some aspect of reasoning to be behind this, no?
Edit: not to mention. Corporations have shown to reliably and consistently be bereft of any and all ethics and morals. One can more easily argue that identifying children is likely going to be harmful, as they'll be tracked and targeted in any way that can be argued to private equity groups (or similarly condensed evils), to generate "value". "Want to do behavioral experiment on kids? We can now do this insanely cheap, as we track the effect on a per child basis"
The Epstein class never hesitates to fuck over the unwashed.
Didn't the tech companies threaten to leave if they were taxed? Seems easier to tax the tech companies than force people to identify themselves.
Fuck it, I'll just host my own Lemmy instance.
Unless it becomes bigger, after that they'll come for you.
just ban this bigtech "social" media for everyone and push people to fediverse then.
It shall be banned for kids/teenagers. The problem is the prehistoric usage of ID. It is possible to have IDs which just disclose the answer to 'are you above legal age?' with a boolean and not the age. The question is, do they want to push for global surveillance, because they know we don't have ZK-featured IDs in most countries? (Based on zero knowledge proofs).
It's not "coordinated" any more than every action in service of capital is. These policies and values coincide because all of these liberal states share common imperatives. The internet is a problem for liberals; it is impossible to fully control without diminishing its use for industry, anti-capitalism has flourished online even with the overwhelming corporate promotion of fascism and liberalism, and the international nature of the medium has made imperialism more visible to the metropole than ever.
They correctly identify that the internet is a threat to their security, and they are moving to secure it and punish as many people as they can to discourage its use for disruptive purposes.
I agree with the logic you present for why the capitalist class wants policies like this, but the specific timing does come from coordinated efforts here. It’s class warfare and they have intense organization amongst themselves. The charge is being led by big tech firms and their lobbying groups making a unified push right now to consolidate their control over online speech, communication, and surveillance. But the reasoning you present is absolutely sound
These people do not care about protecting kids. Most kids are molested or abused by their loved ones. These "leaders" have their friends and family raping kids bffr.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
