Reminder: The reason that this seems coordinated is because it is.
Meta has spent over $2 BILLION dollars to push this everywhere.
Being able to link accounts to actual people is incredibly valuable for Meta and all of the other companies who sell your privacy for cash.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_billion_in_nonprofit_grants_and_45/
Every day closer to a totalitarian world nanny state that only protects the elite.
It was just announced that the targeted solution is a Zero Knowledge approach, where the website just receives a simple “not underage” without any additional information from a mini-wallet. This would be a solution that I could stand behind as it doesn’t use any 3rd party services for age verification. It’s akin to the COVID certificate.
Edit: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/age-verification-european-union-mini-id-wallet
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.
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.
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.
That is true. Sadly this is the direction society is going and it’s depressing.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
Source: trust me bro
Your computer has, on a hardware level, sent unique identifiers to ISPs and websites since Pentium IIIs.
Source.
Google “Protected Processor Identification Number (PPIN)” to learn more.
When is this being sent
to ISPs and websites
as claimed?
Source.
I’m not the person who made the claim but Device Fingerprinting has been around for decades and Hardware ID is certainly part of that.
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.
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.
What about this is particularly “co-ordinated”? I’m not in favour of this at all but conspiratorial thinking is unhelpful.
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!”
Every single part of this is coordinated. The people do not want this but the governments are pushing it through top down.
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.
That’s not what coordinated means.
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.
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.
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.
Sure, if calling for a meeting is “already SO coordinated” as to be worth mentioning, I suppose.
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.
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).
Nanny state surveillance.
Canada already banned it.
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.
Education itself would resolve so much more…
