• benjirenji@slrpnk.net
      3 hours

      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.

    • lime!@feddit.nu
      6 hours

      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.

      • OneMeaningManyNames@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1 hour

        They’ve already decided so. It is all in Project 2025: queerness and sex-ed are considered pornographic. And platforms have been preemptively demonetizing and censoring info for similar topics (abortion and sex-workers resources also) for years.

      • SW42@lemmy.world
        6 hours

        That is true. Sadly this is the direction society is going and it’s depressing.

    • andrew0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      7 hours

      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.

      • SW42@lemmy.world
        6 hours

        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.

  • 1dalm@lemmy.today
    9 hours

    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.

    • OneMeaningManyNames@lemmy.mlEnglish
      37 minutes

      Let’s say this is the official narrative. My argument:

      1. Meta stands to consolidate power and revenue from further mapping devices to real people.
      2. Meta was also originally backed by Peter Thiel, who trades in data mining for secret services, now much more energetically. Zuckerberg is a sexist idiot and his app had no more merit than MySpace. Thiel saw the potential of mapping real idenities to online behavior, and it is no accident Palantir was later implicated in Cambridge Analytica.
      3. A redditor came up with concrete data that others have already posted, that show that Meta’s dark money are all over this case. As for the fine you say that completely explains this, is a very modest for Meta, who is used to pay such fines as a cost of doing business.
      4. Amongst the orgs taking Meta’s money to push this are many conservative organizations, like Heritage but also others (anti-sex, anti-abortion, and anti-trans organizations), who know that these laws will effectively suppress speech. Much like the trans moral panics, the laws are not as stupid as they appear, but carefully designed to obliquely achieve their goals (e.g. police bodies with wombs, in line with the same orgs’ anti-abortion positions).
      5. Governments watch closely as the new corporatist technofascism undoes regulations and checks and balances. They stand to gain from the turmoil and increase their surveillance capabilities even more. Alternatively, some EU goverments might be thinking that this is a way to stick it to US tech monopolies that brainwash their constituents, but they are wrong.
      6. In fact, the approach and outcomes hints toward government contractors in cahoots with surveillance agencies, that it would be surprising if there is no adjacency to Analytica personnel and/or the benefits for state actors and spooks are just an unplanned side-effect.

      Conclusion: There is sufficient basis to consider that the official narrative is not the whole story.

      • 1dalm@lemmy.today
        2 minutes

        The biggest problem with conspiracy theories like this is always the number of people involved keeping their mouths shut. Anyone that has ever managed a large project knows how impossible it is to keep a large group of people quiet about something. In real life, there are conspiracies. Often very large ones. But they didn’t stay secret for long.

        What is easier to believe: (1) that all these people involved, across countries with leaders of many different political varieties, all agreed to stick to a single narrative in order to cover up a deep international conspiracy to build a massive international database of people’s ages online, OR (2) Meta and other orgs are doing a normal business thing and trying to reduce their liability costs.

    • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3 hours

      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.

      • 1dalm@lemmy.today
        14 minutes

        “There’s no mechanism that the government currently has that can track you as effectively as these age verification laws can.”

        I honestly can’t tell if you were serious or not.

        The governments just buy your data from Google. Do you have any idea how much information on you Google has?

    • FoundFootFootage78@lemmy.mlEnglish
      8 hours

      Your computer has, on a hardware level, sent unique identifiers to ISPs and websites since Pentium IIIs.

      Source.

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
      8 hours

      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.

      • 1dalm@lemmy.today
        6 hours

        I didn’t know about that. Maybe that’s plays into it too. But I’m generally a “simpler answer is more likely the most correct” type of guy.

        In this case the simple answer is that Meta and others just had their “Tobacco Lawsuits” moment in court and liability floodgates are any to open wide, and they are pushing these laws to divert their liability onto someone else.

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
          4 hours

          “Corporations want a way to verify the humanity of users” is a simple answer.

          “Governments want a way to easily prosecute users” is also a simple answer.

          I don’t see why it can’t be all of these things. There is actually a more complicated answer that I didn’t bring up, which is that smaller websites will have a hard time complying with ID laws, which gives preferential treatment to large websites. That locks out potential competition, hinders smaller projects like lemmy or mastodon, and helps secure the current social media monopolies.

          That one might just be a useful side effect, rather than the intentional outcome.

  • MNByChoice@midwest.social
    8 hours

    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.

  • It_is_gaslighting@discuss.tchncs.de
    9 hours

    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).

    • MasterBlaster@lemmy.world
      9 hours

      It could be FOMO. Personally, I see value in keeping social media from children. The problem is I don’t believe this is all about that. As usual, it’s all about surveillance.

      • Bosht@lemmy.world
        2 hours

        This is my stance as well. There’s data out the ass about how detrimental screen time and social media is for minors. Besides the obvious blame here being on the parents, it’s easy to just have something for verification without holding personal data.

  • Lumidaub@feddit.org
    9 hours

    What about this is particularly “co-ordinated”? I’m not in favour of this at all but conspiratorial thinking is unhelpful.

    • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
      9 hours

      Every single part of this is coordinated. The people do not want this but the governments are pushing it through top down.

      • Bloefz@lemmy.world
        8 hours

        Yeah if the people didn’t want it they simply wouldn’t give their kids smartphones in such large numbers. Or give them unsupervised computer access.

        It’s just the conservatives virtue signalling.

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
      9 hours

      The headline literally says that Macron is pushing for a coordinated approach with the rest of the EU. From the article; “The main goal is to ​act in ​a ⁠coordinated manner and push the European Commission, ​in the positive sense ​of ⁠the term, to move ahead at the same pace ⁠as ​member states.” I’m not particularly sure why you’re dismissing this as conspiratorial. It’s just out in the open.

      • Lumidaub@feddit.org
        9 hours

        Yes, pushing for. That means it’s not yet. The commenter in the OP says it’s “already so coordinated” as if there’s a shadowy force behind it all pulling the strings.

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
          8 hours

          Do you think it doesn’t require coordination to have a meeting? Without coordination, no one shows up.

          The coordination is already happening and after this it will likely increase.

          • Lumidaub@feddit.org
            8 hours

            Sure, if calling for a meeting is “already SO coordinated” as to be worth mentioning, I suppose.

            • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
              8 hours

              It’s absolutely worth mentioning that they are coordinated enough to all meet up to discuss their plans for us. If this was a fringe idea it wouldn’t go anywhere, everyone is ready to consider the idea even if they still need to be convinced to implement it.

    • damnthefilibuster@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8 hours

      What’s coordinated about it is that it can’t possibly be so universal that people believe this is a good thing and it “saves the children”. I do believe this is good and even I can’t see a clear reason for why so many governments would suddenly be supporting it. Australia, who first implemented it at a national scale, has not yet proven the benefits of it.

      But what you best believe is that there are lobbying groups backed by social media giants evil enough <cough>Zuckerberg<cough> that they would be throwing money at politicians across the western world to implement this.

      This is not a “leak user’s ID” thing. That’s a byproduct of implementing this in a terrible way. This is a “social media giants don’t want the responsibility of what they’ve done to the generation of children they have mentally ruined but do want even more data and control” thing.

      Think about this - Facebook has had a policy themselves since the beginning that under-13s are not allowed on their platform. Yet, as recently revealed in court documents from a case in California, Zuck himself pushed his engineering to create the platform to be more aggressively addictive towards under-13s. Why would he do that? Why not use all their AI chops to discover who the under-13s are and kick them off the platform? I imagine it would be fairly easy for them to do so.

      But would it be profitable? No.

      This age-gate is a two pronged approach - Facebook gets to steal even more data about you, and eventually gets to absolve themselves of the responsibility of destroying mental health in teens, because, “hey, it’s age-gated now!”