Imagine your favorite team just scored an incredible, last-second goal at the World Cup. So you log online to celebrate with other fans. But, using data it’s already collected on you, the social media platform you like to post on wrongly guesses that you’re under 16 so it forces you to go to a third-party verification app and provide images of your face or your government-issued ID. You don’t really know much about the verification app, what country it’s based out of, what happens with your information, and whether you’re protected from hackers or data breaches. You’re not happy about it, but you hand over a photo of your passport and hope it doesn’t come back to haunt you.
Now imagine that instead of posting about sports, you’re criticizing a powerful politician, or talking about your experiences with abuse or addiction, or discussing embarrassing medical issues you’re facing. Suddenly this “papers, please” approach to the internet sounds even more invasive, right? Unfortunately, that’s the direction we’re all headed — even here in the United States — and we have good reason to be wary of the global rush to sacrifice user privacy on the altar of age verification.
↫ Sarah McLaughlin at Expression
The insane push for age verification on the internet is the biggest threat to whatever’s left of the free internet. I have two young children – 3 and 5, currently – and I’m diametrically opposed to any kind of creepy verification processes that they claim are designed to keep kids like mine “safe”. Not only is their safety not predicated on giving up their privacy, my children are also not my or anyone else’s property; they have rights, and the right to privacy is one of them.
Nobody mentioned in the Epstein files has been charged, by the way.
I guess it is easier to deny and track in the name of the children, than it is to do proper parenting and have oversight & mediation.
It’s pretty clear anyone in favour of this assumes parents to be incompetent. But what if the ploy here were even simpler? If only parents would be free of those annoying essential educational tasks then they could work more, or spend more, both essential to the economy. So let’s stop pretending: bottom line productivity is what matters and let’s take away privacy as well while we’re at it
/rantmode off
Sadly, kids spend way more time with their phones than with their parents, and in most cases is not their fault.
As I mentioned the other day, my 18 years old cousin throws a tantrum when he clicks “play” on steam and the game doesn’t load while I played games without sound for 2 years until I figured out the command “mwgames on” – yes I had the sucky mwave card.
Get a kid to figure out the difference between “mouse.com” and “lh mouse.com” in a computer without internet connection and with all the printed manuals in a foreign language and they will burn phosphate for hours for the sweet reward of being able to run their favorite game.
An acquaintance of mine is giving his kids the same experience he had growing up, just in a compressed time frame, so his kids are now enjoying Windows 3.1, DOS 6.22 and a PS1. They are VERY good at computers already and one of them was doing the infinite money hack using the dos debugger in SC2K. =)
We have been trying to raise this issue, but have been relegated to alarmists.
Nope, this is a real concern. UK already banned civilian encryption, even though they have not started implementing it fully. Entire EU is about to pass “Chat Control”, and no “they have postponed it” does not cut
I’m obviously not a EU citizen, but here in the US, I can pledge to not vote for any person who is going to push this agenda.
Wish more people cared about it, since this is the only language politicians understand.
You know that politicians can go against their “agenda” once elected, right ? After all they can do whatever they want as they are legitimated by the citizens’ vote, right ?
Democracy and transparency is so overrated these days.
We’re in the consulting groups and “experts” era, aka “you know nothing John Doe, stfu and let us choose for you instead, for the greater good…”
/rantmode off
Kochise,
I am well aware of the shortcomings.
However democracy is not just voting every 4 years to one of the two candidates that are the two faces of the same coin.
Ghislane is in prison and Mendhelson is fired from his position as ambassador to tje US, the wheels move slowly, but moves none the less
Another good article: https://nonogra.ph/age-verification-is-just-a-precursor-to-attribution-of-speech-06-29-2026
The “papers, please” era is especially scary if you live in a country without free speech, which is pretty much every country except for the US. Outside the US you won’t just lose your job for voicing the wrong opinion, you will get fined or jailed.
Here’s an East German joke:
Two policemen are chatting. ‘What do you think about Chairman Honecker?’ – ‘Uh… same as you.’ – ‘I’m sorry but in this case I have to arrest you.’
Seems like the Internet will soon be just like that.
Are you joking? This week a texas man has “won” 30 years in jail for carrying fanzines. In Europe you can say what you think, and the police wont kill you and then deport your family to an unknown country.
> even here in the United States
Isn’t the United States pretty big on surveillance? Why would one expect them to hold out on something like this? I guess it depends on what country you try to compare it with. It seems like nowadays USA citizens know of 2 countries instead of just 1: USA and China.
Decoupling identification from verification have been a solved problem since the oauth protocol and it doesn’t have to be repeated on every single site (it’s pretty much another form of SSO).
So you need to trust a single institution with your papers. If people can’t trust one, a verification service provider could be selectable among the few. What stops any publicly trusted entity (I dunno, Red Cross or UN) from creating a non-profit org to provide such a service, one ran on 100% OSS software and opened for regular 3rd party audits?
This exactly. I was precisely thinking that at least some of the solutions proposed are actually good for privacy. In Spain there was an age verification system that consisted on the citizen downloading a series of criptographically signed tokens from a government website that don’t identify the person, they are just signed and declare “the owner of this token is more than 18 years old”. This is better than uploading your national ID which can be stolen by hackers. The same way there could actually be a system where the government issues a token that says: this is the name, national id of this person, with this random id passed as input (a csrf of sorts provided by the website that wants to get proof of id), and this expiration date. If a hacker grabs a hold of this token, it is useless. If on every hotel I have to register I need to send my ID, nowadays, I’M FUCKED. A hacker grabs it and gets a loan on my name. So I think there are 2 separate issues here: of course, people don’t want to prove their age/id for stuff that they didn’t before. Second, we have a SUPER lousy way of proving age or id for stuff that is needed nowadays. Like these videos of your face for registering with a bank. Please, let’s not critizise actually good approaches like the one that the government of Spain tried to approve (which I think was a pilot of the EU proposal anyways).
As an American, let me say, that our country’s elites have lost their ever loving minds, and you Europeans are living in denial if you think it’s going back to the way it was. The old order is over.
CaptainN-,
I’m not sure we’d be apologizing for America. After all, unlike Europe which has actually enacted these laws, and started putting people in jail for “wrongspeeak” on social media… we are still actively fighting against it
Not everything is great of course. A few states like California have “social media / app age verification”. But California always tries to sneak in unconstitutional garbage. It only takes a while to take it down.
(Just this week US supreme court found “geofence warrants” violating the 4th Amendment, striking a huge blow to illegal government surveillance, while countries like UK practically banning civilian encryption which bothers their police forces)