None of that matters because the objective is the same. This measure is simply the normalization of government and corporate overreach towards authoritarianism under the flimsy excuse that it’s to protect children.
They know very well that it’s unpopular, and therefore western leaders are coming up with the strategy of implementing this crap all at once and taking a certain care to generate as little further distrust as possible. The enshitification will come later.
The verification making sense and trust in government are 2 separate problems. Not defending here one or the other, just saying that the mixing up doesn’t help.
The verification could make sense with something like a physical gift card.
Go to a store or kiosk, show them your ID card or driver’s license, and they’ll give you a card randomly chosen from the shelf with a code to activate the +18 version of any social network of your choice.
Each code could only be used once. People would have to buy more, at a symbolic cost, for each social network they wished to activate.
I would tend to be against this on principle in the same way, but at least it would be something I could understand where the objective is actually what is being presented (protecting the children), albeit misguided, because to me it is clear that what is currently being promoted and proposed has nothing to do with age verification, but rather with mass surveillance, marketing and censorship. Fascistic authoritarianism.
None of that matters because the objective is the same. This measure is simply the normalization of government and corporate overreach towards authoritarianism under the flimsy excuse that it’s to protect children.
They know very well that it’s unpopular, and therefore western leaders are coming up with the strategy of implementing this crap all at once and taking a certain care to generate as little further distrust as possible. The enshitification will come later.
The verification making sense and trust in government are 2 separate problems. Not defending here one or the other, just saying that the mixing up doesn’t help.
The verification could make sense with something like a physical gift card.
Go to a store or kiosk, show them your ID card or driver’s license, and they’ll give you a card randomly chosen from the shelf with a code to activate the +18 version of any social network of your choice.
Each code could only be used once. People would have to buy more, at a symbolic cost, for each social network they wished to activate.
I would tend to be against this on principle in the same way, but at least it would be something I could understand where the objective is actually what is being presented (protecting the children), albeit misguided, because to me it is clear that what is currently being promoted and proposed has nothing to do with age verification, but rather with mass surveillance, marketing and censorship. Fascistic authoritarianism.
But now you’re giving your id to third parties. Why do you trust them more than your government, which has that data anyway?