I know most of this affects only the US, but I'm wondering where this will go in the EU if the Age Verification Tech goes ahead in America. There's been lots of efforts to increase surveillance disguised as protection for kids in the EU and UK.
The Swiss implementation of eID may be hint that governments may/will take the responsibility to implement and maintain the tech, but the multiple intrusions and lobbying by Palantir and friends in the EU gives me the ick.
The Swiss eID is open source[1] and it's usage will be limited. Any type of age verification for online service would need go to a vote and would probably loose. "Eigenverantwortung", it is the parents job to look after the kids, not the state.
You can't just push responsibility for the kids to the parents, where is the world going? This is madness.
The next thing you are going to claim kids from young age shouldn't have fully unlocked smart phones, shouldn't install any app and so on. Where is the end of this? Are you telling me parents should spend more time with kids, heck even be their role models although it is much harder compared to just giving up on them and let the glorious internet and various fashionate toxic tribes raise them? Blasphemy!!!
Look, I have a two-year old. But I think it’s possible to do what you want without compromising the privacy of the user. I also don’t think it’s right to require every device to share information that makes my child a target for predators like Meta.
The EU, unfortunately, has shown to be very susceptible to this kind of lobbying in the past. We regularly see legislation that is being rammed and rushed through in spite of vocal opposition. I would be very, very worried. (EU citizen)
The EU puts a nice shine on things, but there are systemic and fundamental characteristics of the EU that not only make it more susceptible to "lobbying" and ignoring the electorate; which are also far more difficult to change by that electorate than in the USA where we still have direct elections of individuals not party lists (in most cases) that cause total loyalty to the party, not the constituency.
But the EU also doesn't have the same level of power as the US federal government. It's a loosely federated coalition of seperate nations, not one entity.
The fact that it has to be repeatedly fended off and that the EU regime still tries to push it is a prime example of lobbying^H corruption. They won't give up until they pass. What more do you need?
They're proposals by a minority. I'd like to see it go to see chat control go to grave permanently, but I'd also rather not that the democratic system allows for the permanent barring an impossible to define class of proposals from even being proposed. Or do you have other solutions?
I'm definitely for creating EU directives that enhances digital privacy rights and sovereignty to block whole classes of privacy-endangering surveillance proposals in the future. That seems like the best solution to me. It's much better than allowing those proposals to be made again and again until they are passed in some shady package deal. Even if such a proposal is struck down by local laws, constitutions, or the ECHR, once they have the foot in the door, they will only be modified minimally to comply with the constitution.
GDPR is entirely unenforced, it's not worth the paper it's written on, and this is due to lobbying. The situation continues to this day. The DPAs simply throw reports of violations into the trash bin.
It's hilariously transparent - Ireland recently (less than 6 months ago) added a former _Meta lobbyist_ to their DPA board [0].
US Big Tech is now spending a record €151 million per year on lobbying the EU [1], and it's completely implausible to believe they're doing that with 0 RoI. "The number of digital lobbyists has risen from 699 to 890 full-time equivalents (FTEs), surpassing the 720 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). A total of 437 lobbyists now have continuous access to the European Parliament.
Three meetings per day: Big Tech held an average of three lobbying meetings a day in the first half of 2025, which speaks volumes about their level of access to EU policymakers." It's impossible that this doesn't influence things.
> We regularly see legislation that is being rammed and rushed through in spite of vocal opposition.
This implies that regulation is codified. The clear pattern of EU digital regulation doomerism is generally pointing at shitty proposals which aren't approved and codified in law.
Digital omnibus is another proposal.
If "rammed and rushed laws" is legitimately a widespread issue, you should be able to find a good example of something codified which is not just a proposal?
I'm not saying we don't have to fight. But vocal opposition to proposals which ultimately don't make it into law is the system working exactly as intended.
> The clearest example of lobbying (chat control) has repeatedly been struck down.
They can try as often as they want and they only have to win once. We - as in those who don't want this Orwellian monster to be written into law - have to win all the time.
Right but thats just the system working as intended? Gay marriage would still be illegal if unpopular ideas couldn't be reraised. Democracy is a balance, unfortunately you have to put up with fighting against the shit ideas as well as for the good ones.
> Right but thats just the system working as intended?
No, it is a one way street and thus creates an imbalance. EU regimes never push new legislation that gives more rights to their citizens, only try to limit them again and again.
> Gay marriage would still be illegal if unpopular ideas couldn't be reraised.
Gay marriage is a good example. It got passed despite being unpopular. In many countries where it was pushed by force from above, from the EU to the national level, it is still unpopular.
> Democracy is a balance, unfortunately you have to put up with fighting against the shit ideas as well as for the good ones.
The issue with democracy as we have it in the EU is the imbalance of power and responsibility. Given the EU regime's decisions in the last few decades, I consider it just a shell to push unpopular and undemocratic decisions to their member states, so lobbyists don't have to bribe everyone, just the EU regime.
Yep. Sadly the EU is more or less lost, and freedom online will be squashed. I would not be surprised if age verification will tie in with the EU digital wallet, and with the EU democracy shield surveillance project, so that any opposition to Brussels ideological stance will get you disconnected from your bank, money, purchases, and your ability to ID yourself.
Basically, the chinese, through WTO, managed to utilize corona to show politicians, regardless of color, the enormous power of complete digital control of the population.
Our spineless and incompetent EU politicians thought it very erotic, and are now ramming it down our throats.
I don't really see a way to stop this apart from moving to south america or africa, to a small country with a weak government.
Is it stupid or intentional? I believe the latter. There are many layers that these kinds of things go through before they are pushed in that manner and not in a "smart" manner that respects rights of the majority of the population. They are chasing this path for deliberate reasons, regardless of what they may be, or whether you like it or not. Ironically, they can only engage in these "stupid" things because people don't force them to not engage in "stupid things". Silence in consent in these kinds of cases.
I keep emailing my (Labour) MP about this, I suggest you do the same! I get the standard "protecting the children" response. I am not voting Labour again if this madness is still in place (or worse!) at the next GE.
MPs are pretty bad at dealing with anything that doesn't come from the party or the newspapers. I'm donating to the Open Rights Group to care about this on my behalf.
(my MP is SNP, so I benefit from not being in the two party trap)
I think age verification laws are good in principle - there's a lot of stuff on the internet that people should be protected from. But it's the manner of age verification that is the issue.
The EU has zero knowledge proof age verification systems, e.g. through your bank, which are secure and don't involve sending a copy of your ID and / or face scan to a dodgy US based 3rd party.
I disagree. What if, hear me out, parents actually parent, instead of relegating the parenting to companies, and ruining the internet for the rest of us?
I'm concerned about these laws and their implications for privacy, but as a parent, I'm not sure what you mean to say parents should parent. How? What should the parent do? How would you recommend a parent protect a 13 year old who spends their time in their room and out with their friends on their phones?
My main issue with this argument is that we never applied it to any other age gate created in the past. Why? Maybe part of it was control, but also because we know parents will fail their kids, and there were cases bad enough in the past that society decided to step in and protect kids even when parents fail.
If we really embraced this logic, then should we look at returning to the laws from before the 'protect the children' push of the 20th century. Compare this to some countries where kids can go buy beer. I've read stories from people in less regulated countries who use to buy beer for their parents when they were underage, and nothing was stopping them from buying it from themselves if their parents allowed it (or failed to stop it). Even a concept like child labor, why should we regulate that out to companies to control instead of depending upon parents to parent? When you consider web access as a person having some sort of transaction with a company, it generalizes to a very similar position of if a parent or the government should monitor that relationship for harm.
agree, also they should take into account that their children will be eventually an adult and will be living in such system. Goverments should only focus on educating parents (available tools, recommendations) and maybe provide some open source tooling for parents.
This is a common argument, but the problem is the kids who have deadbeat parents
Or even kids whose parents don't have the technical knowledge needed
Yes I do agree the responsibility is with the parents, but it's these kids who are majoritarily affected by (bad internet actors) AND (bad offline actors)
Anyone should be allowed to buy/do anything at any age, why have any restrictions that's a parent's responsibility! /s
A proper society raises their new generations.
Yes, rights and responsibilities fall mostly to parents, but I see no reason to make licentious activities difficult for parents to inhibit.
What is it you want to do on the internet?
We can have systems that allow anonymity (between client and server), but still put hardcore porn, gore, financial frauds and such out of reach of those without proof they're over 18.
Now, don't get me wrong, Palantir and it's ilk are a danger to society. But just because the military-industrial complex wants to use any excuse to control people, doesn't mean all of those excuses are wrong.
Zero knowledge is not true. All chains rely, ultimately, on a place where ID:s are stored, and from there, they will leak. That place can also be engineered to undo the zero knowledge design. Couple that with the already in place, surveillance by ISP:s within the EU, and it becomes obvious that zero knowledge is a scam, and only valid under unreal conditions that will never apply in the EU, and only in isolation, and not looking at the entire system.
I think these laws are a poor second-best substitute for proper moderation on the big content platforms.
As it stands one should be happy if Meta catches most calls for the extermination of an ethnicity on its platform, that they would provide capabilities that allows a kid to protect themselves from bullying or grooming is just unimaginable.
I expect the internet to be overrun with noise due to bots. So I have a feeling that eIDs are inevitable as a solution in the long run. If that is the case shouldn't we push for zero knowledge solutions?
Apparently most of the “original” report was done by Claude (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366804). And now paraphrased on various ad-space (and in this case affiliate link) sellers, probably also by Claude. Claude is the only real journalist here.
Personally I’d rather not see reposts of posts this recent, especially LLM posts.
Why can't we handle this the same way we handle knives, guns and chainsaws: require adults to secure the device before letting minors near them? All the devices need is the ability to create limited access profiles. A human adult performs age verification by only providing the minor with creditals to a limited profile. Trying to perform that verification so far away from the minor, after they have got to the last gate, seems like the worst way to do it.
I want my kids to grow up in a world where they can install linux themselves. I don't want them to grow up in a world where they can't walk to a neighborhood park without me.
Not sure I see the crossover between activities performed at home and problems of car centric street design and the resulting poor pedestrian traffic safety?
If I have to watch my kids 100% of the time they can't walk to the park.
Nothing to do with street design - most suburbs have a park a safe walk near any house. That kids are not walking there is nothing to do with street design.
I'm pretty sure most kids older than 12 do have access to kitchen knives. And actively use them too.
I generally agree with your point. But at the same time access to the internet resouces and to gun or a chaisaw is not the same.
I have no problem securing a few items if my home, but I have no control over whatever is available on the net.
Sure, I can write some firewall rules or create "kid's account" on a streaming platform, but I can do this for every single known service, chat, IM group etc.
Even if you did, you just lower the chances. I've created Netflix kids account specifically for mine. On its own it suggests also various documentaries on top of cartoons. We took the first one it suggested, and IIRC in second episode there was a very gruesome and detailed part with polar bear eating baby seals, one chew at a time.
One way to traumatize 4-year old, I'd say an effective one.
I don't know why you think this will stop page verification requirements. For almost all items where a parent/guardian is responsible for a child's access to the item, third parties are also required to not sell or transfer the item to a child. That gets us right back needing to age verify people.
That is kinda the idea behind the california law that was on the front page a few weeks ago. The parent set up a local account with a age bracket, and the OS verifies that in the app store and maybe webpages if they fit the age bracket.
Not really. It's the difference between a mandatory field and an optional field. And in practice, and its effects on the internet, that difference is huge.
> Why can't we handle this the same way we handle knives, guns and chainsaws: require adults to secure the device before letting minors near them?
Is this a thing?
My 10yo has used all three of those things. If there were some legislation requiring they be "secured" before my son could be in my presence, obviously I'd oppose it, along with every other reasonable parent.
I am curious how this will play out for Linux. I won't accept any code that spies on my owned computer devices. No criminal goverment can force be to surrender my rights here. But it is interesting to see how easy it is to purchase legislation in the USA - well done, Facebook! I predict more people will abandon it though, now that they see that Meta is trying to push out global spying on regular people.
So meta acts as a government spy actor. Interesting.
When a company such as meta pursues mass-sniffing, is it still a company or is it just a spy-agency? Meta isn't even hiding this anymore. I am glad to finally understand why these "age verification" is pushed globally. Meta pays well.
"But there is an obvious solution: mandate the operating systems (iOS and Android) to share device users' ages when they download apps from the app stores – data the operating systems get as part of the hardware acquisition already. This would be a simple one-step way for parents to control all the different apps that their kids use (in the US, the average teen uses forty different apps per month) and would remedy the fractured app-by-app approach we have today. We should make a societal judgement about whether to set these age limits for smartphones or social media
use at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen or sixteen, then write it into law." in How to Save the Internet by Nick Clegg
The way the law is written is so utterly shit that I don't think it does what it's meant to do at all.
Microsoft has a trillion dollars in liability now because every historical OS is illegal, and every adult user of that historical OS (that you don't ask for their age) is a monetary fine.
$2500 fine for Microsoft for letting me continue use Windows 10 in Colorado, cause they never asked my age.
Also hilariously the law openly FORBIDS checking the user's identity to verify age. It says you MUST NOT collect any more information than is necessary to comply with the law. And complying with the law only requires that you ASK the user to TELL YOU their age, so my non-lawyer take is that if you do anything else like checking ID you can and probably will be prosecuted
The environmental movement and labor movement are two examples where citizens organize to go up against corporate interests and win pretty regularly and durably.
Most of those folks would not call it lobbying because of the negative associations of the word. “We have activists, our opponents have lobbyists.” But it works the same way.
It is specifically protected in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
You might want to look into the industry funding of environmental organizations and the decline of union membership before you decide with your whole heart.
Lobbying is literally half of what representative democracy is. First, you elect representatives to office. Then, you try to get them to do what you want. The latter is lobbying.
Of course, when money becomes a significant portion of how the second one happens, things can get complicated.
Everything is complicated by money. I wish we were better about shielding politics from money. So much about society in general is about money, it ain’t easy.
Because freedom, and surveillance capitalism, have different effects depending on which side of the PR apparatus you find yourself on, and the laws that get passed are written by and for the industries and not crabs in the barrel voters who rely on them for income.
The Reddit post mentions that DCA does not exist in any official record. It seems to be a ghost organization for the purpose of controlling perceptions.
I think it exists, as an umbrella group. It might only be 3 weeks old. But it seems preoccupied with minors accessing online pharmacies. Very preoccupied with that.
Even steelmaning the case for age verification, does anyone really think the state is going to re-institute the innocence of childhood by filtering content and services? Of course not. There is no steelman. If you can do age, you can do identity, and the purpose of identity is recourse for authorities against truth and humor.
Doing ID or this fake age verification with anything other than a physical secure element is a dumb regulation that going to create its own regulatory arbitrages and spawn very powerful and profitable black and grey markets. Poor laws create criminal economic opportunity, and digital id is just creating a massive one.
Between Meta being behind a digital id initiative under the pretext of alleged "age verification" and the Debian project leads pivoting to political objectives, it appears gen Z now has a cause to build tech against and fight for. These are dying organizations that cannot innovate and they've attracted a pestilence that is pivoting them to the easier problem of political maneuvering. as it's easier to militate for what nobody wants than to make something anyone actually wants.
The upside is that people get to be hackers again. Tools to cleanse our networks and systems of Meta and other surveillance companies and the influence of these compromised organizations are an OS install and a vibecoding weekend away.
It's an important story, and I'm glad it's getting exposure, but this "article" is some really blatant AI slop. Go and read the original Reddit thread by the human being who did the work instead of this lazy regurgitated shit.
It appears that the original "research" was also pure AI slop--someone just asking Claude and quickly slapping together whatever it said. It's very low quality and should not be getting this much attention.
What makes you think it's "blatant AI slop"? I mean I agree with reading the source over something that went through a journalistic filter but you didn't even link it.
age verification is always a backdoor for some nefarious constitutional rights-infringing policy because every child has their parents legally responsible for their well being and all the legal aspects as well. in other words, parents have the responsibility, and authority, to enforce what devices and what websites their kids are allowed to visit, and no silicon valley epstein pedos run by mosad should have any involvement in any of this whatsoever.
The article makes one mistake: praising Europe for having a better approach. Governments here are pushing hard to force ID requirements. Sure, they start by pretending it's "for the children" and they "only want age verification". They also claim that e-IDs will be voluntary. Camel. Nose. Tent.
These are the same governments that file criminal charges when you compare lying leader to Pinocchio (Germany). The UK records something like 30 arrests per day for social media posts. Just imagine how much better they could do, if you were not pseudo-anonymous in the Internet!
I quite like the EU approach. It's a decent spec. Most countries already have digital apps to verify identity, like Denmark's MitID (https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/get-started-with-mitid/). These could be expanded to fully EUDI compliant wallets and deliver encrypted proof-of-age without exposing any other identity.
For example a gambling site could require MitID auth, but only request proof-of-age and nothing else. You can see in the app which information is being requested, like with OAuth.
If there's no information provided beyond proof-of-age, what's stopping my friend's 18 year old brother from lending his ID to every 14 year old at school? IRL that's negated by the liquor store clerk looking at the kid who is obviously underage and seeing that his face doesn't match the borrowed card he just nervously presented.
> what's stopping my friend's 18 year old brother from lending his ID to every 14 year old at school?
MitID is 2fa. You log in with username, then you have to open the app, enter password or scan biometric, then scan the QR code of the screen* and you are logged in.
He would need to be next to you every time you log in. I think that is too high friction to make it feasible on large scale.
* Assuming you open the website on the Desktop, and MitID on phone. If both on phone, skip this step.
Gambling sites already have payment information, which should include real names! (no, you should not be allowed to do non-KYC gambling, that's just money laundering)
I think it's more that proof of identity from the union of {payment information, KYC} also includes both of age verification and name, not that name leads to age.
I don’t mean to be as aggressive as this sounds but the frogs probably liked the increasingly warm water too until it started boiling. How many steps between MitID and a fork that is used to enforce extreme censorship?
MitID is run by the government. How would anyone fork it? Any service implementing MitID auth can verify through signatures that they're connecting to the official service.
I don't want my kids to have access to gambling websites like Stake, but I also want to keep my digital identity anonymous. The eIDAS is a solution that achieves both of these goals.
If you can choose between the discord shitshow with a face scan, or a digital encrypted proof-of-age in a 2FA app you already use, issues and verified only by the government of your country (who have all your personal details anyway), what would you choose?
> During the 19th century, several experiments were performed to observe the reaction of frogs to slowly heated water. In 1869, while doing experiments searching for the location of the soul, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but an intact frog attempted to escape the water when it reached 25 °C.
Regarding the Pinocchio thing: Local police said „that‘s probably insult“ and sent it to public prosecutors. Public prosecutors investigated and said „nope, free speech“.
Sure, but the fact remains that it was referred for criminal prosecution. They didn't follow through, this time, but the victim still had his "lesson" about insulting his betters.
And Germany really did sentence people for calling Mr. Habeck "Schwachkopf", which is about as mild an insult as you can find.
If you can disturb enough people that think differently, independent of the final result, you can end up silencing them. Is the same that happens with bogus DCMA claims in Youtube channels, when they negative reviews of products. For a normal guy, having the police showing up, going to court, lawyer, etc, can be a significant burden. I DO see a problem.
Indeed, police misusing their authority is a problem, and they require constant oversight. But this is true completely independently from if you need to provide an age to order drugs online.
>"Here’s where the lobbying gets surgical. The proposed laws hammer Apple’s App Store and Google Play with compliance requirements but reportedly spare social media platforms—Meta’s core busines
Because social media already has the age info exactly?
I think an OS and a web platform with accounts are different product categories. Not even sure what an interpretation of the bill that would affect meta would be.
This is how bad journalism results in conspiracy theories.
I looked at the original analysis and it was fraught with language that leads to specific conclusions. It was most certainly LLM aided, if not generated.
I am not ascribing malice, but the author seems inexperienced with the repercussions of making assertions out of partial knowledge.
Also: Good grief, this article is also written via LLM! Human+machine comes up with theory that goes viral, and then Humans+machines amplify it? Is this the brilliant future we have to look forward to?
I know most of this affects only the US, but I'm wondering where this will go in the EU if the Age Verification Tech goes ahead in America. There's been lots of efforts to increase surveillance disguised as protection for kids in the EU and UK.
The Swiss implementation of eID may be hint that governments may/will take the responsibility to implement and maintain the tech, but the multiple intrusions and lobbying by Palantir and friends in the EU gives me the ick.
The Swiss eID is open source[1] and it's usage will be limited. Any type of age verification for online service would need go to a vote and would probably loose. "Eigenverantwortung", it is the parents job to look after the kids, not the state.
[1] https://github.com/swiyu-admin-ch
You can't just push responsibility for the kids to the parents, where is the world going? This is madness.
The next thing you are going to claim kids from young age shouldn't have fully unlocked smart phones, shouldn't install any app and so on. Where is the end of this? Are you telling me parents should spend more time with kids, heck even be their role models although it is much harder compared to just giving up on them and let the glorious internet and various fashionate toxic tribes raise them? Blasphemy!!!
Look, I have a two-year old. But I think it’s possible to do what you want without compromising the privacy of the user. I also don’t think it’s right to require every device to share information that makes my child a target for predators like Meta.
I totally agree with that sentiment but we can and should both have good parents and safe devices.
The EU, unfortunately, has shown to be very susceptible to this kind of lobbying in the past. We regularly see legislation that is being rammed and rushed through in spite of vocal opposition. I would be very, very worried. (EU citizen)
The EU puts a nice shine on things, but there are systemic and fundamental characteristics of the EU that not only make it more susceptible to "lobbying" and ignoring the electorate; which are also far more difficult to change by that electorate than in the USA where we still have direct elections of individuals not party lists (in most cases) that cause total loyalty to the party, not the constituency.
But the EU also doesn't have the same level of power as the US federal government. It's a loosely federated coalition of seperate nations, not one entity.
What examples of this do you have in recent years (post 2016)? The clearest example of lobbying (chat control) has repeatedly been struck down.
The fact that it has to be repeatedly fended off and that the EU regime still tries to push it is a prime example of lobbying^H corruption. They won't give up until they pass. What more do you need?
"repeatedly struck down" means somebody keeps bringing it back
They're proposals by a minority. I'd like to see it go to see chat control go to grave permanently, but I'd also rather not that the democratic system allows for the permanent barring an impossible to define class of proposals from even being proposed. Or do you have other solutions?
I'm definitely for creating EU directives that enhances digital privacy rights and sovereignty to block whole classes of privacy-endangering surveillance proposals in the future. That seems like the best solution to me. It's much better than allowing those proposals to be made again and again until they are passed in some shady package deal. Even if such a proposal is struck down by local laws, constitutions, or the ECHR, once they have the foot in the door, they will only be modified minimally to comply with the constitution.
https://noyb.eu/en/project/dpa/dpc-ireland
GDPR is entirely unenforced, it's not worth the paper it's written on, and this is due to lobbying. The situation continues to this day. The DPAs simply throw reports of violations into the trash bin.
It's hilariously transparent - Ireland recently (less than 6 months ago) added a former _Meta lobbyist_ to their DPA board [0].
US Big Tech is now spending a record €151 million per year on lobbying the EU [1], and it's completely implausible to believe they're doing that with 0 RoI. "The number of digital lobbyists has risen from 699 to 890 full-time equivalents (FTEs), surpassing the 720 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). A total of 437 lobbyists now have continuous access to the European Parliament. Three meetings per day: Big Tech held an average of three lobbying meetings a day in the first half of 2025, which speaks volumes about their level of access to EU policymakers." It's impossible that this doesn't influence things.
[0] https://noyb.eu/en/former-meta-lobbyist-named-dpc-commission...
[1] https://corporateeurope.org/en/2025/10/revealed-tech-industr...
> The clearest example of lobbying (chat control) has repeatedly been struck down.
So far. But they’ll keep lobbying and we’ll need to keep fighting.
> What examples of this do you have in recent years (post 2016)?
Digital Omnibus is another.
https://noyb.eu/en/gdpr-omnibus-eu-simplification-far-remove...
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/eu-digit...
> We regularly see legislation that is being rammed and rushed through in spite of vocal opposition.
This implies that regulation is codified. The clear pattern of EU digital regulation doomerism is generally pointing at shitty proposals which aren't approved and codified in law.
Digital omnibus is another proposal.
If "rammed and rushed laws" is legitimately a widespread issue, you should be able to find a good example of something codified which is not just a proposal?
I'm not saying we don't have to fight. But vocal opposition to proposals which ultimately don't make it into law is the system working exactly as intended.
> The clearest example of lobbying (chat control) has repeatedly been struck down.
They can try as often as they want and they only have to win once. We - as in those who don't want this Orwellian monster to be written into law - have to win all the time.
Right but thats just the system working as intended? Gay marriage would still be illegal if unpopular ideas couldn't be reraised. Democracy is a balance, unfortunately you have to put up with fighting against the shit ideas as well as for the good ones.
> Right but thats just the system working as intended?
No, it is a one way street and thus creates an imbalance. EU regimes never push new legislation that gives more rights to their citizens, only try to limit them again and again.
> Gay marriage would still be illegal if unpopular ideas couldn't be reraised.
Gay marriage is a good example. It got passed despite being unpopular. In many countries where it was pushed by force from above, from the EU to the national level, it is still unpopular.
> Democracy is a balance, unfortunately you have to put up with fighting against the shit ideas as well as for the good ones.
The issue with democracy as we have it in the EU is the imbalance of power and responsibility. Given the EU regime's decisions in the last few decades, I consider it just a shell to push unpopular and undemocratic decisions to their member states, so lobbyists don't have to bribe everyone, just the EU regime.
Yep. Sadly the EU is more or less lost, and freedom online will be squashed. I would not be surprised if age verification will tie in with the EU digital wallet, and with the EU democracy shield surveillance project, so that any opposition to Brussels ideological stance will get you disconnected from your bank, money, purchases, and your ability to ID yourself.
Basically, the chinese, through WTO, managed to utilize corona to show politicians, regardless of color, the enormous power of complete digital control of the population.
Our spineless and incompetent EU politicians thought it very erotic, and are now ramming it down our throats.
I don't really see a way to stop this apart from moving to south america or africa, to a small country with a weak government.
The UK is absolutely picking the most stupid option (delegate it to US companies doing face recognition)
Is it stupid or intentional? I believe the latter. There are many layers that these kinds of things go through before they are pushed in that manner and not in a "smart" manner that respects rights of the majority of the population. They are chasing this path for deliberate reasons, regardless of what they may be, or whether you like it or not. Ironically, they can only engage in these "stupid" things because people don't force them to not engage in "stupid things". Silence in consent in these kinds of cases.
I keep emailing my (Labour) MP about this, I suggest you do the same! I get the standard "protecting the children" response. I am not voting Labour again if this madness is still in place (or worse!) at the next GE.
MPs are pretty bad at dealing with anything that doesn't come from the party or the newspapers. I'm donating to the Open Rights Group to care about this on my behalf.
(my MP is SNP, so I benefit from not being in the two party trap)
Right, if these countries want these laws at least ensure the verification is all done within the country in question and the data never leaves.
Of course, that defeats the entire point of the exercise.
This does not only affect the US. They're ramming this kind of bullshit into law in Australia too. As rapidly as they can.
As mentioned in the article, the EU already has a different plan
I think age verification laws are good in principle - there's a lot of stuff on the internet that people should be protected from. But it's the manner of age verification that is the issue.
The EU has zero knowledge proof age verification systems, e.g. through your bank, which are secure and don't involve sending a copy of your ID and / or face scan to a dodgy US based 3rd party.
I disagree. What if, hear me out, parents actually parent, instead of relegating the parenting to companies, and ruining the internet for the rest of us?
I'm concerned about these laws and their implications for privacy, but as a parent, I'm not sure what you mean to say parents should parent. How? What should the parent do? How would you recommend a parent protect a 13 year old who spends their time in their room and out with their friends on their phones?
Monitor computer activity, don't give them a smart phone at 13
You should censor the Internet of your child, instead of having the government censor the Internet of everybody.
Translation: you can't parent your own child so you want the government to do it, as if they'll do it properly.
My main issue with this argument is that we never applied it to any other age gate created in the past. Why? Maybe part of it was control, but also because we know parents will fail their kids, and there were cases bad enough in the past that society decided to step in and protect kids even when parents fail.
If we really embraced this logic, then should we look at returning to the laws from before the 'protect the children' push of the 20th century. Compare this to some countries where kids can go buy beer. I've read stories from people in less regulated countries who use to buy beer for their parents when they were underage, and nothing was stopping them from buying it from themselves if their parents allowed it (or failed to stop it). Even a concept like child labor, why should we regulate that out to companies to control instead of depending upon parents to parent? When you consider web access as a person having some sort of transaction with a company, it generalizes to a very similar position of if a parent or the government should monitor that relationship for harm.
agree, also they should take into account that their children will be eventually an adult and will be living in such system. Goverments should only focus on educating parents (available tools, recommendations) and maybe provide some open source tooling for parents.
This is a common argument, but the problem is the kids who have deadbeat parents
Or even kids whose parents don't have the technical knowledge needed
Yes I do agree the responsibility is with the parents, but it's these kids who are majoritarily affected by (bad internet actors) AND (bad offline actors)
Anyone should be allowed to buy/do anything at any age, why have any restrictions that's a parent's responsibility! /s
A proper society raises their new generations.
Yes, rights and responsibilities fall mostly to parents, but I see no reason to make licentious activities difficult for parents to inhibit.
What is it you want to do on the internet?
We can have systems that allow anonymity (between client and server), but still put hardcore porn, gore, financial frauds and such out of reach of those without proof they're over 18.
Now, don't get me wrong, Palantir and it's ilk are a danger to society. But just because the military-industrial complex wants to use any excuse to control people, doesn't mean all of those excuses are wrong.
Zero knowledge is not true. All chains rely, ultimately, on a place where ID:s are stored, and from there, they will leak. That place can also be engineered to undo the zero knowledge design. Couple that with the already in place, surveillance by ISP:s within the EU, and it becomes obvious that zero knowledge is a scam, and only valid under unreal conditions that will never apply in the EU, and only in isolation, and not looking at the entire system.
I think these laws are a poor second-best substitute for proper moderation on the big content platforms.
As it stands one should be happy if Meta catches most calls for the extermination of an ethnicity on its platform, that they would provide capabilities that allows a kid to protect themselves from bullying or grooming is just unimaginable.
I expect the internet to be overrun with noise due to bots. So I have a feeling that eIDs are inevitable as a solution in the long run. If that is the case shouldn't we push for zero knowledge solutions?
> The EU has zero knowledge proof age verification systems
No, they don't. And they can't.
Discussed a few days ago, 554 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362528
(But it's a big enough story that I'm glad to see it on front page again.)
Apparently most of the “original” report was done by Claude (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366804). And now paraphrased on various ad-space (and in this case affiliate link) sellers, probably also by Claude. Claude is the only real journalist here.
Personally I’d rather not see reposts of posts this recent, especially LLM posts.
Agreed. IMO your comment should be at the top. (Would it make sense to post it at the top level, so that it can be voted up independently?)
It was even published by Yahoo lol [0].
0: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh...
why do moderators go round looking to police the tone of conversation but allow duplicates and spam and decades old news?
Because https://xkcd.com/1053/ applies to dupes and "old news", but not being a dick.
What's the origin of that comic site? I like it.
Well son, sometimes when a man and a pencil love each other very much,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xkcd
Wow,a whole site that just lists information about things. What's that all about?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
is HN reddit or is a news site?
Why can't we handle this the same way we handle knives, guns and chainsaws: require adults to secure the device before letting minors near them? All the devices need is the ability to create limited access profiles. A human adult performs age verification by only providing the minor with creditals to a limited profile. Trying to perform that verification so far away from the minor, after they have got to the last gate, seems like the worst way to do it.
I want my kids to grow up in a world where they can install linux themselves. I don't want them to grow up in a world where they can't walk to a neighborhood park without me.
Not sure I see the crossover between activities performed at home and problems of car centric street design and the resulting poor pedestrian traffic safety?
If I have to watch my kids 100% of the time they can't walk to the park.
Nothing to do with street design - most suburbs have a park a safe walk near any house. That kids are not walking there is nothing to do with street design.
https://www.businessinsider.com/mom-arrested-after-tween-wal...
there's a general issue with rise in protectionism
>same way we handle knives
I'm pretty sure most kids older than 12 do have access to kitchen knives. And actively use them too.
I generally agree with your point. But at the same time access to the internet resouces and to gun or a chaisaw is not the same.
I have no problem securing a few items if my home, but I have no control over whatever is available on the net.
Sure, I can write some firewall rules or create "kid's account" on a streaming platform, but I can do this for every single known service, chat, IM group etc.
Even if you did, you just lower the chances. I've created Netflix kids account specifically for mine. On its own it suggests also various documentaries on top of cartoons. We took the first one it suggested, and IIRC in second episode there was a very gruesome and detailed part with polar bear eating baby seals, one chew at a time.
One way to traumatize 4-year old, I'd say an effective one.
I don't know why you think this will stop page verification requirements. For almost all items where a parent/guardian is responsible for a child's access to the item, third parties are also required to not sell or transfer the item to a child. That gets us right back needing to age verify people.
That is kinda the idea behind the california law that was on the front page a few weeks ago. The parent set up a local account with a age bracket, and the OS verifies that in the app store and maybe webpages if they fit the age bracket.
This is essentially what the California law is mandating
Not really. It's the difference between a mandatory field and an optional field. And in practice, and its effects on the internet, that difference is huge.
> Why can't we handle this the same way we handle knives, guns and chainsaws: require adults to secure the device before letting minors near them?
Is this a thing?
My 10yo has used all three of those things. If there were some legislation requiring they be "secured" before my son could be in my presence, obviously I'd oppose it, along with every other reasonable parent.
This is an underhand way of mandating digital id at the point of operating system boot or login
I am curious how this will play out for Linux. I won't accept any code that spies on my owned computer devices. No criminal goverment can force be to surrender my rights here. But it is interesting to see how easy it is to purchase legislation in the USA - well done, Facebook! I predict more people will abandon it though, now that they see that Meta is trying to push out global spying on regular people.
has any of upvoters at least opened the article? there's no proof or event screen/link to reddit discussion. It's just comparison to EU's law.
Didn't read yet, but "Reddit researcher" struck me. :-)
So meta acts as a government spy actor. Interesting.
When a company such as meta pursues mass-sniffing, is it still a company or is it just a spy-agency? Meta isn't even hiding this anymore. I am glad to finally understand why these "age verification" is pushed globally. Meta pays well.
Follow what Nick Clegg has been saying post-Meta. He might give a big clue.
.. do you think you could quote it here to save time please?
"But there is an obvious solution: mandate the operating systems (iOS and Android) to share device users' ages when they download apps from the app stores – data the operating systems get as part of the hardware acquisition already. This would be a simple one-step way for parents to control all the different apps that their kids use (in the US, the average teen uses forty different apps per month) and would remedy the fractured app-by-app approach we have today. We should make a societal judgement about whether to set these age limits for smartphones or social media use at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen or sixteen, then write it into law." in How to Save the Internet by Nick Clegg
Luckily Facebook has a web site, so it can be used without downloading an app.
Obviously, the device will share the age with the browser app.
https://archive.ph/6kiqr
The way the law is written is so utterly shit that I don't think it does what it's meant to do at all.
Microsoft has a trillion dollars in liability now because every historical OS is illegal, and every adult user of that historical OS (that you don't ask for their age) is a monetary fine.
$2500 fine for Microsoft for letting me continue use Windows 10 in Colorado, cause they never asked my age.
Also hilariously the law openly FORBIDS checking the user's identity to verify age. It says you MUST NOT collect any more information than is necessary to comply with the law. And complying with the law only requires that you ASK the user to TELL YOU their age, so my non-lawyer take is that if you do anything else like checking ID you can and probably will be prosecuted
Why "lobbying" is not treated as corruption? This kind of corporate influence should be illegal.
Technically because citizens are also allowed to lobby, but in practice only corporations get to play, so it becomes "legal bribing".
The environmental movement and labor movement are two examples where citizens organize to go up against corporate interests and win pretty regularly and durably.
Most of those folks would not call it lobbying because of the negative associations of the word. “We have activists, our opponents have lobbyists.” But it works the same way.
It is specifically protected in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Emphasis mine.
You might want to look into the industry funding of environmental organizations and the decline of union membership before you decide with your whole heart.
Everybody lobbies for their own interests.
The issue that should rather worry you is that people
- don't delete their Meta/Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram/Threads/... account because of this proposal,
- don't strongly urge friends and colleagues to do the same.
Lobbying is literally half of what representative democracy is. First, you elect representatives to office. Then, you try to get them to do what you want. The latter is lobbying.
Of course, when money becomes a significant portion of how the second one happens, things can get complicated.
Eventually it is the fault of voters to keep voting for the same people.
I’m not so sure. First the representatives are selected to be elected.
A significant portion of both of your suggested halves are “complicated” by money.
You could break it down further if you like, yes.
Everything is complicated by money. I wish we were better about shielding politics from money. So much about society in general is about money, it ain’t easy.
No, not “if I like”, everything touches money, and “it ain’t easy”.
Your breakdown was so simple, it was simply wrong.
It's not democracy if one with the most money gets their way.
Because if someone tries to outlaw it, the lobbies will lobby very hard against it.
Because freedom, and surveillance capitalism, have different effects depending on which side of the PR apparatus you find yourself on, and the laws that get passed are written by and for the industries and not crabs in the barrel voters who rely on them for income.
Power corrupts.
This is probably protected free speech
You have the right to remain silent, but you must assert it verbally.
Dude, do you not know who's president in the US right now? Getting paid is easily the biggest* reason he ran!
Are you sure it was to get paid, not to avoid prosecution? It could be both among other reasons.
If this lobbying forces Microsoft to finally add local child accounts to Windows, I'll consider Meta's money well-spent.
> organizations like the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA)
The Reddit post mentions that DCA does not exist in any official record. It seems to be a ghost organization for the purpose of controlling perceptions.
I think it exists, as an umbrella group. It might only be 3 weeks old. But it seems preoccupied with minors accessing online pharmacies. Very preoccupied with that.
Even steelmaning the case for age verification, does anyone really think the state is going to re-institute the innocence of childhood by filtering content and services? Of course not. There is no steelman. If you can do age, you can do identity, and the purpose of identity is recourse for authorities against truth and humor.
Doing ID or this fake age verification with anything other than a physical secure element is a dumb regulation that going to create its own regulatory arbitrages and spawn very powerful and profitable black and grey markets. Poor laws create criminal economic opportunity, and digital id is just creating a massive one.
Between Meta being behind a digital id initiative under the pretext of alleged "age verification" and the Debian project leads pivoting to political objectives, it appears gen Z now has a cause to build tech against and fight for. These are dying organizations that cannot innovate and they've attracted a pestilence that is pivoting them to the easier problem of political maneuvering. as it's easier to militate for what nobody wants than to make something anyone actually wants.
The upside is that people get to be hackers again. Tools to cleanse our networks and systems of Meta and other surveillance companies and the influence of these compromised organizations are an OS install and a vibecoding weekend away.
Your premise is flawed, you can do age without doing identity. Not that I'm a fan of either, I just wanted to point out the flaw.
> Debian project leads pivoting to political objectives
What does this mean? Free software was always a politics of itself.
What makes you think Debian leads have taken a stand?
It's an important story, and I'm glad it's getting exposure, but this "article" is some really blatant AI slop. Go and read the original Reddit thread by the human being who did the work instead of this lazy regurgitated shit.
The original reddit post was also written by AI
in this thread: people hating an ai company from an ai written article about an ai written reddit thread
It appears that the original "research" was also pure AI slop--someone just asking Claude and quickly slapping together whatever it said. It's very low quality and should not be getting this much attention.
What makes you think it's "blatant AI slop"? I mean I agree with reading the source over something that went through a journalistic filter but you didn't even link it.
age verification is always a backdoor for some nefarious constitutional rights-infringing policy because every child has their parents legally responsible for their well being and all the legal aspects as well. in other words, parents have the responsibility, and authority, to enforce what devices and what websites their kids are allowed to visit, and no silicon valley epstein pedos run by mosad should have any involvement in any of this whatsoever.
The article makes one mistake: praising Europe for having a better approach. Governments here are pushing hard to force ID requirements. Sure, they start by pretending it's "for the children" and they "only want age verification". They also claim that e-IDs will be voluntary. Camel. Nose. Tent.
These are the same governments that file criminal charges when you compare lying leader to Pinocchio (Germany). The UK records something like 30 arrests per day for social media posts. Just imagine how much better they could do, if you were not pseudo-anonymous in the Internet!
I quite like the EU approach. It's a decent spec. Most countries already have digital apps to verify identity, like Denmark's MitID (https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/get-started-with-mitid/). These could be expanded to fully EUDI compliant wallets and deliver encrypted proof-of-age without exposing any other identity.
For example a gambling site could require MitID auth, but only request proof-of-age and nothing else. You can see in the app which information is being requested, like with OAuth.
If there's no information provided beyond proof-of-age, what's stopping my friend's 18 year old brother from lending his ID to every 14 year old at school? IRL that's negated by the liquor store clerk looking at the kid who is obviously underage and seeing that his face doesn't match the borrowed card he just nervously presented.
> what's stopping my friend's 18 year old brother from lending his ID to every 14 year old at school?
MitID is 2fa. You log in with username, then you have to open the app, enter password or scan biometric, then scan the QR code of the screen* and you are logged in.
He would need to be next to you every time you log in. I think that is too high friction to make it feasible on large scale.
* Assuming you open the website on the Desktop, and MitID on phone. If both on phone, skip this step.
Gambling sites already have payment information, which should include real names! (no, you should not be allowed to do non-KYC gambling, that's just money laundering)
But how do you go from real name to age verification?
I think it's more that proof of identity from the union of {payment information, KYC} also includes both of age verification and name, not that name leads to age.
I don’t mean to be as aggressive as this sounds but the frogs probably liked the increasingly warm water too until it started boiling. How many steps between MitID and a fork that is used to enforce extreme censorship?
MitID is run by the government. How would anyone fork it? Any service implementing MitID auth can verify through signatures that they're connecting to the official service.
I don't want my kids to have access to gambling websites like Stake, but I also want to keep my digital identity anonymous. The eIDAS is a solution that achieves both of these goals.
If you can choose between the discord shitshow with a face scan, or a digital encrypted proof-of-age in a 2FA app you already use, issues and verified only by the government of your country (who have all your personal details anyway), what would you choose?
> During the 19th century, several experiments were performed to observe the reaction of frogs to slowly heated water. In 1869, while doing experiments searching for the location of the soul, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but an intact frog attempted to escape the water when it reached 25 °C.
From wikipedia.
Having the government be the issuer and verifier of personal IDs is hardly a "boiling frog" situation anywhere in the world.
Everything is a slippery slope if you tilt & twist it enough...
This particular slope has consistently had people pratfalling over and over again for hundreds of years.
Regarding the Pinocchio thing: Local police said „that‘s probably insult“ and sent it to public prosecutors. Public prosecutors investigated and said „nope, free speech“.
I really don’t see the problem.
Sure, but the fact remains that it was referred for criminal prosecution. They didn't follow through, this time, but the victim still had his "lesson" about insulting his betters.
And Germany really did sentence people for calling Mr. Habeck "Schwachkopf", which is about as mild an insult as you can find.
If you can disturb enough people that think differently, independent of the final result, you can end up silencing them. Is the same that happens with bogus DCMA claims in Youtube channels, when they negative reviews of products. For a normal guy, having the police showing up, going to court, lawyer, etc, can be a significant burden. I DO see a problem.
Indeed, police misusing their authority is a problem, and they require constant oversight. But this is true completely independently from if you need to provide an age to order drugs online.
No authority was used (or misused). Anybody can report a crime and prosecution is required, by law, to investigate.
>"Here’s where the lobbying gets surgical. The proposed laws hammer Apple’s App Store and Google Play with compliance requirements but reportedly spare social media platforms—Meta’s core busines
Because social media already has the age info exactly?
I think an OS and a web platform with accounts are different product categories. Not even sure what an interpretation of the bill that would affect meta would be.
> Because social media already has the age info exactly?
Then it shouldn't be difficult to comply.
"Because social media already has the age info exactly?" I don't know what this question means. What information does social media have "exactly"?
Facebook can make a very accurate guess from your photos, your posts, your friends' ages, and the data brokers they link it all up with.
You said it. An accurate _guess_. Not exactly.
This is how bad journalism results in conspiracy theories.
I looked at the original analysis and it was fraught with language that leads to specific conclusions. It was most certainly LLM aided, if not generated.
I am not ascribing malice, but the author seems inexperienced with the repercussions of making assertions out of partial knowledge.
Also: Good grief, this article is also written via LLM! Human+machine comes up with theory that goes viral, and then Humans+machines amplify it? Is this the brilliant future we have to look forward to?
Here's some more technical details of the Swiss new official way (yet to be implemented) of doing age verification and more: https://www.liip.ch/en/blog/swiss-eid-from-a-developer-persp...