It will help the pedophile class and Israeli backed oligarchs mass surveil us more effectively
Wrong. This is to violate everyone’s rights and target children. This is fucking abhorrent and needs to be stopped.
From my understanding this age verification app seems to be based on the age verification blueprint they have been working on for a while now, which is supposed to be part of the European “digital wallet”
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-verification
From my understanding it works as follows:
- There will be a central “authority”, with which you can identify
- This authority will provide you with tokens indicating you are 18+ (or whatever age verfication you may need)
- These tokens are stored locally, and contain no identifying information other than a simple “is this guy 18+?”
- You can use these tokens to verify age with a website that requires age verification
This solution does seemingly address my two greatest concern with online age verficiation:
- You cannot trust the website, so they only get the information they need. They don’t get any identifiable information
- You cannot trust the authority, so they don’t get to know for which websites and for what reason you request 18+ tokens
Assuming that this blueprint is followed, it seems like a decent approach at online age verification.
I get why this sounds better than websites directly collecting IDs, but I think it still understates the problem. Even if the site only sees “18+”, the system still begins with strong identity proofing somewhere upstream. So this is not really anonymous access, it is identity-based access with a privacy layer on top.
The bigger issue is centralization. You still need trusted issuers, approved apps, approved standards, and authorities deciding who can participate. That means users are being asked to trust a centralized framework not to expand, not to abuse its power, and not to fail. History gives us no reason to be relaxed about that.
I am also skeptical of the privacy promises. These systems are always presented in their ideal form, but real-world implementations involve metadata, logging, renewal, compliance rules, vendors, and future policy changes. “The website does not know who you are” is only one small part of the privacy question.
So even in the best-case version, this is still dangerous because it normalizes the idea that access to lawful online content should depend on credentials issued inside a centrally governed identity ecosystem. Today it is age verification. Tomorrow it is broader permissioned access to the internet. That is why I do not see this as a decent compromise, but as infrastructure for future control.
Also once they get their foot in the door, they can remove the privacy next time they want to unmask someone online saying “I support Palestine action”
-“You want to crack down on dissent? We got a token for that.”
Apple or something.
Fucking cunts won’t stop. Next, it’s gonna be chat control 3.0 again.
Who do we need to send to the guillotine?
Liberals. It’s systemic like it has always been. As cathartic as it is to remember the French Revolution, it’s not like it worked and ended stratification and imperialism. Liberalism will always seek as much control as possible, and the internet has proven to be a huge fucking problem exactly because it is so impossible to control.
Exactly. Centrism, and the very idea that there is “moderation” to be sought between progressive ideals and back-assward conservatism, is a fucking plague. We all suffer because people don’t want to seem “extreme” and I’m fucking tired of it. We have to commit to being progressive and admit that all centrism has ever done is seek validation for and to normalize right-wing viewpoints long enough that we stop paying attention.
Only siths deal in absolutes.
Ok?
I’m also not talking about absolutes, unless you’re participating in relativistic politics that only care about ideologies in reference to other ideologies and is a practice used by people too stupid to form their own opinions about platforms they’ve actually looked into.
It was a quote from the star wars prequels
Lies
OK lib.
Found the cave man
The victors of WW2.
https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/2044718576485953536/vid/avc1/996x2160/hyLmEHaGr6DltAA6.mp4
Apparently it’s already exposing sensitive user data and can be bypassed.
This has nothing to do with protecting children
People keep saying that they verify your age at the super market and I keep trying to remember the last time that happened to me and I just cannot. Nor, for that matter, at bars or coffee shops (for after lunch chat chilling before returning for the afternoon stint).
It may just be my corner of the European Union being much more lax than others.
The only time they verify your age at the grocery store in America is if you’re buying alcohol
…and they don’t do it unless you look like you might be underage.
The motives are irrelevant. This will destroy the internet as we know it and disempower citizens. I can’t help but wonder if the empowerment LLMs may have to an individual is terrifying leaders into an authoritarian mindset, finally demanding to be able to know and track what we do online, everywhere we do it. This is about protecting their ability to rule, not children from harm.
Unlike most other age verification system, this doesn’t reveal any other personal information but your age. No credit card number, no personal id.
So I’m curious how you get to your conclusion?
In order to make sure that the age a person provided is real, the system will gather all that information anyway. I don’t know what you mean by “reveal”, but it will gather it. And that’s the main building block of the problem.
That system is basically the government. They already know.
No, that’s an app on your phone. That accumulates a ton of data in a way that didn’t exist before. The government knows I exist. Now it knows every website I’m visiting, and my identity on those sites. Now the new politician in my country decides to be a little bit more corrupt, and asks the app maintainer “hey, can you gather IDs and home addresses of all the people who criticized genocide online last couple of years, I would like to execute them publicly”, and they can do it with basically one sql equerry. The only defense against that will be “but that’s illegal, there are laws against that!”, which is shit defense nowadays.
I’m sorry, but have you read the technical documentation? The design is intentional created this way to avoid tracking.
You are issued a set of ZKP tokens that you hand back to websites. They cannot correlate these tokens back to you, nor can the operator of the system.
Now they could lie, of course, and violate the design (but being open source that’s a little harder), but if the government wanted to secretly track you, much more precise tools exist for this already.
That’s the stupid part, it doesn’t matter what it will look like at the beginning. It might be the best written documentation now, they can even implement the app correctly. The thing is, the jump from “people can use the internet” to “in order to access the internet you need to provide your government ID to your smartphone” is a big jump, one that can cost a politician career. The jump from “you need to use version 1.4.412 of the govenment id checker” to “you need to use version 2.0 of the Government Id Checker Plus” is minuscule. That’s where you introduce a persistent database of the tokens, somewhere on page 5 of the changelog. And only nerds care about that and nobody listens to them.
It’s so fucking easy, Russia did this exact gambit in 2017, Kazakhstan couple of years before.Ok, so it’s the slippery slope fallacy.
But that slippery slope, which it sounds like you believe us to be on, also applies to phone location tracking, credit cards payments, mobile phone train tickets, smart homes, smart cars, home CCTV etc etc.
Do you leave your phone at home, always pay with cash, don’t use any apps? Most people do these things on the basis that the government doesn’t wantonly have access to what we’ve bought online. Why is age gating so different?
It could greatly boost the use of decentralized apps. Which will ultimately give people more power than they have right now. So in the long run, it might have some positive side effects.
Cracking down on decetralized apps will be the next logical step
How would they do such a thing? Require every open port on every internet connected device to be registered? Disallow https and implement full scale layer 7 scanning?
No, they will expand the mandates for providers to filter traffic. Everything ultimately goes through a handful of big ISP companies, so they will just make them comply with the filtration. It will not work great, even simple DPI is resource intensive, but when an ISP is ultimately at fault, they will have to find a way. And ultimately it doesn’t have to work all the time forever, it just need to degrade services enough so most people find it inconvenient to use. As a tool of control, it needs to prevent unwanted communication to be easy, this will ensure only the nerds will do it, and nobody cares about handful of nerds.
They don’t have to invent anything, that’s exactly how it works already in every country that controls their population and the internet in their country. It took Russia 8 years to transition from completely free unobstructed internet to everything being unavailable and everyone being used to it. Europe is way more capable technically, it will take most of the countries less.It is possible but doesn’t sound all that realistic to me. A truly decentralized app cannot be blocked by dns or endpoints. Thus a country would have to DPI the entire internet which is very resource intensive. And even then the data will be encrypted so you would have to resort to fingerprinting and finding patterns. From an age verification app to automatic data blocking based on deep packet inspection with fingerprinting of the entire internet - that seems quite a leap. Personally I don’t think decentralized apps are next in line to be blocked.
You’d be surprised how easy it is to ban specific protocols or apps, if you put your mind to it. DPI is dead easy this days. Again, Russian example is right there, the only thing that managed to resist the block so far was Telegram, because they’re doing some very advanced block avoidance. Russia is poor, and losing brains very quickly, a country with better equipment and people will not have this problem.
Yeah, it’s resource intensive, but that’s ISP’s job, and they have equipment and motivation already. Small ISPs if they still exist will die, but that’s just added bonus. And you don’t even need the complete blockage, you need to make it annoying enough to use so it’s not very popular, so most of the communication will happen on platforms that are under control. You can’t fight all the nerds, and you don’t need to.
It’s not a leap, it’s the only next logical step. A government doesn’t start carding everyone on the internet because they’re bored. They do it because they don’t want uncontrolled communication for some reason or another. “For the children”, of course, why else. That’s why everyone needs to have an ID app on their phone, and all the websites should be tied to it. It’s for the children.
Lotta internet users are going to suddenly be from outside the EU, just like the UK population suddenly all moved to the Netherlands after their own version of this.
What? We got this too? I guess I accidentally dodged it.
Parents should protect children online.
I largely agree with you.
But please can you tell me how you believe this differs from age-gating the purchase of cigarettes, lottery tickets, age restricted cinema tickets, alcohol, firearms and so many other things we already have age-gating on?
Edit: I’d love any one of the downvoters to comment and actually explain what I’ve said that’s so atrocious? We DO age gate many things in society and many, I dare say most, would not want cigarettes to be available to a 13 year old. So what is it about online that makes it so different? If we CAN make age checks online anonymous (and indeed the EU standard downright requires it) why don’t we want this online?
How many of your rights are you willing to give up so little Timmy doesn’t search titties on Google.
I don’t have to give up any rights for age gating to work anonymously and properly. Neither do you.
