So, OS-level age-gating is going federal, which will effectively kill your rights to device ownership and what’s left of free speech and expression.
Enjoy your free speech while you still have it because this is a clear attempt to erase that right.
SOPA never died, it just went into hiding until time to reemerge, and now’s that time, this is basically SOPA in a save the kids trenchcoat.
If they wanna start a hot revolution it is coming.
Goodbye device ownership, and the last vestiges of free speech will die with this bill as well.
The last vestiges of free speech always have and always will be offline.
That bill had just been introduced. It is a loooooong way from passing. No need to panic. This is not our doom yet.
Now is the time to give those representatives a call, mention the bill number, and tell them in a few logical and polite sentenses why this bill is a terrible idea.
Fuck this bill. And it’s not going to be too late to use the less polite methods later. We lose nothing by trying to be polite first.
Motherfuckers want this so they can more easily find kiddies to groom and rape.
Start selling the narrative folks, this is not gonna be a clean war
Fair.
Parents ALREADY decided. They decided they didn’t give enough of a shit to use the parental controls already available to them. No legitimate reason to push this shit on everyone else.
These companies made parental controls abysmal to use, so they can count children’s traffic as adult viewers for ad revenue(on both sides of the bill).
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This bill is being pushed by Meta and they are NOT going to stop with age verification. It is not about “protecting children” and it never has been. It’s always been about surveillance and control. Meta wants to know who you are, where you are, what you buy, what you download, who you associate with and what your politics are.
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If Meta succeeds in putting all this on your computer at the operating system level, then what is the point of even having a VPN anymore? Also Meta will sell this information to anyone who asks for it.
If Meta succeeds in putting all this on your computer at the operating system level, then what is the point of even having a VPN anymore? Also Meta will sell this information to anyone who asks for it.
I think this is not an accident.
Meta is pushing this because their platforms are overrun by bots. Ironically because partly of the AI tools they have created. And advertisers have caught up and aren’t willing to pay top dollars anymore on Meta’s platforms. Hence why Meta desperately wants a way to proof that their traffic comes from real people.
Meta management are evil but kind of clueless. I would guess the usual suspects including Palantir are whispering in their ears.
They also benefit from it as it impacts OS providers like Apple and Google. These companies need to contend with privacy flaws and supporting them on their devices, spending resources on that, while Meta just uses the OS API to “verify” user age pretending they care about children. Profit.
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Disgusting. This is my representative, I unfortunately voted him in.
Our president is a pedophile and we still get the “for the children” bullshit. How about making a law requiring tracking the data on the Epstein class phones instead?
I sent a letter to him, hopefully enough people do.
Lately, it seems like bottles of incendiary liquid are the vogue medium of communication, rather than sternly-worded letters. I think it’s like toggling that “flag as urgent” setting on an email.
If this thread is any indication, we’re cooked. If this many people are willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt, after what we’re dealing with…
This will not be benign, it will seem innocent at first, but we’ll have given up yet another seemingly simple thing that will eventually be used against us.
evidently Palantir wasn’t able to use all available data and a few glaciers to find out who was saying mean things about Important People With Money. This oughta fill in those gaps.
Using parental control is too hard so leave it to the government huh
what a fucking joke
Kids are always the excuse for draconian surveillance/stripping away your freedoms. This has nothing to do with parental controls at all
more laws from people who have no idea about anything. let’s say for a sec this isn’t even for mass surveillance (which it is) does verifying your age prevent you from actually being addicted to social medias? it’s the same experience no matter what…this whole thing just shifts onus of social media addiction from big tech companies to us. i implore everyone reading who’s in america to please contact your local representatives.
http://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
This is how the democrats lose the next election.
GJ snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Again
Unfortunately, nobody really cares about this shit either way. No chance this costs dems an election, especially considering support for age verification laws have generally been bipartisan.
this is one of the examples of how electoralism can only ever give us some breathing room, but never our full liberation. even a “good” politician is still a politician. they may have entered government to reshape government, but eventually working in government will reshape them.
i encourage others to work to get the best possible politicians into positions of power, but to also work on coagulating people power in order to topple those same positions of power. here are some things you can do:
- organize a union
- learn first aid
- participate in mutual aid projects
- become acquainted with self defense and community defense mechanisms
- learn about reducing your digital footprint at protests
Liberation comes at the end of a gun.
maybe for you…but not for me.
I’ll switch back to a dumb phone and run a Linux distro so obscure nobody’s seen it for 25 years.
fuck em. I’ll never comply with this shit.
Step 1: make some kind of surveillance & control system that is voluntary
Step 2: make life for those who dont want it less convenient (you are here)
Step 3: make non-participation in the system be in itself suspicious and a cause for further investigation
this is insane, but i don’t quite understand how will it be pushed on independent linux distros.
even if it’ll be magically pushed into linux kernel, mfs will just create a fork without that shit… no?
They’ll probably just ban Linux and BSD on the desktop and force Windows and macOS. If NK can force Red Star, then the Fourth Reich can force their approved OS.
Yeah, just make it a felony to use a non-standard OS.
“You installed Linux? What kind of criminal weirdo are you? What are you hiding? You must be a pedo!”
Because we care so much about those…
This might be the most anemic open ended bill I have ever read. On its face, it has no teeth. The most well defined portions of the bill are to make sure that applications have access to age data. Making this look more like a way for corporations to gather data and verify real people as opposed to online personas.
There is zero regulation actually defined and instead they have a 180 day period to define the regulation and a year for it to be contacted and implemented. The bill could pass tomorrow and we still wouldn’t know what age verification looks like.
As scary as these efforts are, they are also a bit humorous to me. By and large software exists independently of its creator, especially in the FOSS space. There would be no way to require an individual to install an OS that supported this or even use an updated browser that supported it.
Ultimately, the only way to really enforce any sort of age verification system is to force all content providers to have an age verification step. This presents as OS level, but you have to give people a reason to upgrade in order to implement. If Wikipedia suddenly required some sort of OS based age verification protocol to access its content, it would become a lot harder to avoid.
They are putting this at the OS level, but I think this is a way to back into removing anonymous access to the Internet.
Without an age code you won’t be able to access restricted sites. They don’t care about offline use.
they have a 180 day period to define the regulation and a year for it to be contacted and implemented.
This has a familiar smell. The 3d printer “gun printing prevention” bill(s) that are floating around have the same “we’ll figure out the actual law after the bill is approved.” And here I thought that punting congressional authority to executive agencies was bad. Now they’re not writing laws, but instead, blank checks for vague things within even more vague legal outlines.
In a more general sense, it also resembles the work being done to level this requirement at online services as well.
Ultimately, the only way to really enforce any sort of age verification system is to force all content providers to have an age verification step.
My biggest fear here is that this will have teeth, and will be crafted so that the only feasible way to make it work is to be 100% cloud connected behind federally approved vendors (e.g. Apple and Microsoft).
still have no idea how they will implement this, with phones that can be rooted or running something like lineageOS or others.
But in any case, I am glad I am not from the US.
The EU is pushing very similar things…
Literally Meta has been caught paying people through shell orgs all around the world to pass this kind of legislation.
