> It's the digital equivalent of requiring ID to go anywhere or do anything, rather than just a few well-defined things.

Are you aware that most library systems across most of the world require someone to be 16+ to open an account and/or take out books and materials? That's not restricting anything, that's preventing abuse by those not intellectually or emotionally capable of regulating their behaviour. The parent of the under 16 takes responsibility for their actions, essentially.

If you have to be 16+ to take materials out of a library, why should a minor be able to access _anything_ on the Internet without also having an adult check what it is you're doing? Why should a 12 year old be able to freely visit "innocent-website.tld" without it first being confirm the website actually is innocent? What if it's innocent today, but adopts a new doctrine tomorrow? There's a reason YouTube doesn't let you change a video upload after you've published it: you could upload nearly anything to replace your previously innocent and successful video.

Nothing changes between the physical world and the virtual one. The same problems exist, except the virtual one makes it easier to access much darker information.

Information is a material concern

Relationships are a concern (random people interacting with your child? Good Gosh!)

Privacy is a huge concern for children, way more so than is afforded we regular netizens.

"They're legally mandating you to give away your child's personal info " - no they are not, they're mandating age requirements, which is a separate thing.

Snowden did not bring up age restrictions.

"instead of you making those decisions for your child."

I'm sorry but today the choice is not by parents, the point of the age restrictions is so that parents ultimately can have a choice (they and provide access by their own accounts).

The 'all or nothing' issue of the internet is a big deal - parents don't really have a choice.

These are mostly ideological and rhetorical arguments, not grounded in pragmatism.

The pragmatic concern is 'abuse of control' (aka the 'general' Snowden argument), which is real, but can also be avoided if they do it right.

Granted, I don't have a lot of faith that they will do it well.

I've been battling with locking down my kid's devices for much of my life.

I haven't found a parental control feature that works: we've tried several, but, generally, nothing survives the 'Hey, I'll just factory reset the device and start with a clean out-of-box-experience' bypass. Kids can figure this stuff out.

Even when we thought that things were under control, kids can easily procure new devices. Many families don't dispose of their old phones; it's not too hard for kids to find an older model that's been sitting around collecting dust, bring it to the schoolyard, and trade it like a baseball card.

I wish I had a good answer, and, distasteful as the age-verification might be, I'm open to such draconian measures at this point. If you say there are better ways to enforce this, I'd honestly love to hear the specifics.

The problem isn't an individual kids phone. It's their peers devices, or other ways they can explore the internet that isn't under their guardians control. This is a systemic issue that requires systemic approach. I am not making any claims about the qualities of currently discussed systemic solutions, but I do want to point out that the 'parents can just' argument is missing the mark.

> like just setting up proper parental controls on a device

This is literally what is being written into California law. The OS will have an "age flag" that is configured at device setup that passed to other apps. The law explicitly was written such that it wouldn't need identity verification, but that isn't stopping scaremongers claiming it as such.

Many parents don’t have the technical aptitude to set the controls up properly. I am a software engineer and I find it challenging to keep up with the nuances of parental control setup and how to adjust it as kids get older. Content is also imperfectly tagged and smart kids can easily find loopholes in most controls. Having a centralized ID validation system wouldn’t be an ideal solution but having something baked into the Internet itself to help parents shield their kids from inappropriate would be a good thing.

This is not how any other thing that is banned for children is enforced. It makes no sense.

The person selling the age gated item needs to take lawful measures to ensure they arent selling it to a minor. Their parents have nothing to do with it.

Your solution would be that if a 14 year old walks into a liquor store and doesnt have a note from their parents saying that they arent allowed to drink alcohol, then the store should be able to sell it to them.

The only parental controls that a clever kid can't escape are "trusted device" restrictions that are are just as capable of locking consumers out of their own hardware.

If we're talking "slippery slopes" we need to look at the slippery slopes enabled by purported alternatives. And this one's a doozy of its own.

I am curious if you know how to enforce this on a general purpose computer.

Problem now is bunches of parents don’t give a damn. So if your kid gets phone locked up others will make fun of him at school and kid might be outsider.

Other parents are the problem, not technical setups.

In theory you could do this with 3rd party verification and zero knowledge proofs orchestrated by the users browser.

Mozilla Persona comes to mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Persona

This will never happen of course because the objective is to track your every move. The government want to know every pseudonym you use on every website.

>At least half of the people in this thread survived growing up with access to social without age verification.

I was like 8 - 10 years old, I wandered into the "Adults Only" chat room on Microsoft Networks (Oh sweet, I thought, they have a small pen to keep the boring adults in, better check on them) and said "Hi everyone my name is X and I am Y years old" and everyone was nice to me and said hello. I got bored and left.

"we've all had an encounter with some creep in some random chat room to"

My parents generation survived lead in gasoline and they never wore seatbelts or helmets.

"I think I can do a better job than the government :)"

Is exactly what their parents said about the government telling them they have to get their kids to wear seat belts and helmets.

I don't think this argument works for two reasons:

1) It don't address the materiality of the concern.

If 'creeps in chat rooms' are causing material harm, it's an issue, then youre making the 'anti vaxxer' / 'anti seatbelt' / 'anti helmet' argument.

I'm not saying you are - if 'creeps in chatrooms' really is a 'lesser issue' - then you're not making a bad argument at all.

The real issue is the 'materiality' of these things.

'Creeps in chatrooms' is a harder thing to assess, but it's real, if it is real, we can't just dismiss it.

2) "I think I can do a better job than the government "

If someone wants to protest the governments current age restrictions cigarettes - and also not vaccinate their kids - that's a choice.

But this argument is usually made by people who don't have kids in their life and haven't yet realized that 'the all or nothing internet' is not really a choice, it's chaos.

Lack of very basic regulations means people aren't afforded the opportunity, in a way the government is dictating that 'kids will get guns and porn and that's it'.

The alternative argument - is that we can have age restrictions and parents can then be in a position to actually be parents, and make a choice.

'Slippery slope notwithstanding' ... because it's a complciated issue

Soon enough you will realize that kids spend more time with their friends than with their parents. Most parents want their kids to be curious, build autonomy, and feel free. For this to work, they need a safe space. There are to place to enforce a policy: client side (parental control) or server side (age verification). Personally I don't want to transform my kids general purpose computer into a locked down infotainment machine. I think it would be a worst society if the norm becomes "this is not your device".

That you link to a github is ironic in the worst way possible.

I don't think WWW will ever die but I can see a hard split coming eventually. Most people will just put up with the current state of the internet for a long time yet.

I2P already exists and is usable.

Yeah but $1.50 Costco hot dogs! I got nothing more on that.

Not only that. The Eu is also implementing 'age verification', at the same time with - surprise - digital id.

It's just an attempt to reverse the free internet and implement total surveillance.

The irony of writing this on this particular board, out of all places.

Without American capitalism you wouldn't have computers, the Internet, smartphones, AI, electric cars and countless other things. That, and the Costco hot dogs mentioned in another reply.

One of the problems is the binary nature: we lump everyone between 0 and 18 years old into a "kids" bucket, but the content appropriate for a 17 year old is very different from the content appropriate for a 4 year old.

My family has tried the curated "kids" content from the major players: It's junk and not going to be interesting to a teenager. Your 14 year old is not going to be satisfied with a version of Netflix that's all Bluey and Daniel Tiger. And your 5 year old probably shouldn't be watching stuff that's made for teenagers. But our regulatory hammer knows only "kid" or "not-kid". You can't make a single walled garden.

Even within a single age. My 15 year old might not be ready for content that your 15 year old finds to be routine. How is YouTube going to know what is appropriate for any given 15 year old? Walled-off content and numerical age gating is just not a workable solution.

Plot twist: in a few years all the indie and counterculture web appropriates .xxx domains to evade AI crawling and legislative interference.

It seems to me that the supply of friends is more or less unlimited, such that it's pretty reasonable to apply filters when choosing who to befriend.

"Also not using tiktok" could be one such filter.

At last the best option is to have the cake but not eat it too!

This is such a naive take, I see it a lot. Have you considered they can:

* Buy one themselves

* Get / use a friend's

* Use public internet access points

* Need one for school

* Use the smart fridge / tv / gaming console / anything with a browser

* Access stuff in Minecraft, Roblox, etc

You can only stop it by going offline and raising them in a cabin in the woods, which is a whole other thing.

What you can do is give them The Talk, of course (but that only helps / prevents to a point, it's more to prepare them for what they may find or how they can identify problematic things). And the other is to push back as a community effort, with e.g. many schools banning kids from having phones in the first place.

I can see that you don't get the problem, indeed.

One problem (there are others) is that it's not always possible (or easy) to not give your kid a smartphone, or access to social media.

Imagine that your kid doesn't have those and is having a hard time at school because all the other kids do have them. They have a whole culture based around those, and your kid is excluded from it. What do you do? Tell your kid that it's okay to wait 10 more years before hoping to not be excluded?

Whether such a system could be bypassed by a VPN would depend on exactly how the age verification works and whether said government decides to ban the use of VPNs.

More importantly, I don't personally have any faith that at least the US government could properly define and build a system that is reliably and provably resistant to tracking. The government has incentives to want to know what sites a person visits, the NSA would be loathed to allow that opportunity to go unused. The government also likely doesn't have the skills or resources to do it in house, I'd expect them to outsource it at an absurd cost to a third party that would also have incentives to want to track usage data through the system.

>Nothing short of personalized age verification will work.

Specifically, daily personalized age verification by the specific app/website, not by a third party.

>The only way this can go wrong is if the client sites collude and publish their visitor logs and then the government can do the legwork to identify you.

Well, the government has the right to request proof that the company in question is properly conducting the age verification process. This means that the companies performing age verification will keep your personally identifying information (PII) and maintain an association between your PII and your account/activity on the platform.

On a different note, the government has the right to gather evidence of criminal activity, where the definition of "criminal" is under their discretion and if there happens to be a convenient stash of information that can be linked to your person, that's just a happy coincidence.

Forcing all OS to do this is a bit of overreach though no?

If you want to keep your kids safe get an OS that supports it?

Why is it the state’s responsibility?

The issue is it's a few incremental steps away from nto being that way and the first step is really the issue.

In a way it is the bad players that are ruining it. Yeah I can setup all manner of servers for this stuff, but the instant I miss a patch or a patch is late to be developed and you can be compromised in no time. And unfortunately it just becomes a game of endurance between you and the army of folks trying to crack systems open.

I have said it for decades, if there weren't bad players then we wouldn't need any of this security. That is a very utopian idea.

I have thought that a way to put people off is to have such an anaemic server that they wouldn't bother. Like a tiny RiscV board running Haiku that delivers basic HTML and email. There is little incentive to raid that thing. I haven't thought this idea through much however.

> keeping that alternative clanker-free

which brings you right back to verification...

The trick is to stay small. If your network only has a few millions of people, nobody targets it.

Well yeah, Facebook has been a data harvesting scheme from the beginning. It was originally called LifeLog. It is not part of the “free” web.

FB's policy on this is patchy. I've known people who have had accounts for years, who were suddenly asked to provide a selfie - often after posting political content. Their accounts were then either locked down permanently, or unlocked.

I also know people who created accounts from scratch without needing a selfie while connecting exclusively through a VPN. (Only some VPNs, work apparently.)

Supposedly FB uses device ID tracking, so if you're picked for selfie ID on a device and try to create an alt, you'll be selfie-ID'd again.

Using a different browser on desktop solves the problem for desktop but not for mobile.

And so on. Basically it's doable, sometimes. And sometimes it isn't.

just use a video of a video game character and pause the video at the required face positions

It gets worse. Banks now require pictures of faces to fucking close the account and pull the money out.

Global village can just be code for Tower of Babel. It was knocked down for a reason.

Are you referring to financial accounts or social media accounts? (If social media accounts, I'm guessing you're referring to the US specifically, and during advance visa processing rather than at the border.)

You don’t “have to”. They’re requested when travelling to the US - but from my experience it’s not enforced (at least not consistently, I’ve never been asked why it was blank on my forms)

Is that some US thing? As as European I've never experienced this, on any continent (barring Antarctica)

And just so we're clear: these companies are building these profiles even if you haven't registered and/or logged into their services.

“In one way or another” is doing a huge amount of work in that sentence. The spectrum of privacy postures there is massive.

They all started with something as innocuous as privacy preserving age verification

Fun fact: America invented the social credit score, long before China, and they still have it. The only difference, is the lack of the word "social" in the system's name, but it's the same system.

Mobile, yes. Not sure about desktop.

Well to that i would say we should probably start at the source.

Well it’s not even necessarily irresponsible parents, good luck keeping your child from going anywhere you don’t want them to go if you have internet enabled devices in your house.

In my mind you have states mandate that adult content (porn, gore) and social media services are legally required to check for the age from the OS. No other sites need to do anything. No data collection or ID verification anywhere. All responsibility on parents.

I would imagine for the zealots out there its worth it to go further and destroy the entire internet to prevent a single 14 year old from jerking it to a tiddy. And then of course the advertisers want device attestation. At least it seems California is picking a sensible middle ground.

It'll be easy to work around no matter what. We don't succeed at keeping under age kids from getting alcohol. Adults give it to them.

These sorts of rules can only ever achieve "mildly difficult".

How would you work around it without admin access to the computer?

> Today I cannot get a VPS without verifying my identity. Can you?

I think it is at least possible to do so in a identity opaque way if you wanted to using obfuscated payment provider, free email and possibly fake name/address (illegal).

I meant more without scanning an actual ID or face.

> I feel like it doesn't start like this.

Of course the train of thought is not "how can we break privacy" usually the concerns/problems are valid (I agree that social media is bad for kids). But in a lot of debates I am a part of privacy concerns are easily dismissed, not taken seriously or not the priority. I'm not talking about if technically private implementations are possible yes or no. I am talking about the conceptual step before that, "what is the impact of this request" how are we limiting people that can't or don't want to comply with what we are asking.

I feel like privacy is one of the most fundamental rights since it is at the root of a lot of other rights required for democracy. For example freedom of speech, freedom of religion, right to property and more. Privacy it is continually devalued, invaded and the right to it eroded.

That leads to undermining of the other rights as in this issue a lot of people are bringing up, in the article freedom to be anonymous is brought up but also the freedom of expression of young people.

The discussion should be the other way around, no options should be considered UNLESS it can be done in a private manner. The right to privacy is more important then the right not to be hurt by watching harmful content and therefore the responsibility of the government to protect privacy is of higher importance then their responsibility to not get you hurt.

Indeed.

Here in Australia, the local and state governments push the use of their Apps as well.

These Apps provide access to identity documents, offical notifications, and messages for health, benefits and taxation purposes.

Then there is Banking and the issues around becoming a cashless digital society…

It’s become less about access to hardware devices, as useable devices can often be free when donated by a friend or relative, and more about continuity of access to your digital life.

The risk of losing access to your online identity or having it stolen are very real with often traumatic results for individuals.

It was funny here in Australia, they did it the other way. They banned social media for under 16 but didn't get around to porn until a few months later.

I mean, even if more things on the internet get restriced it wouldnt affect me since Im not a minor.

This is famously why ID checks at the liquor store led to the government eventually requiring a mandatory ID check anytime you walk the dog or go to the beach... except none of that happened.

Everything good is a slippery slope: every step in the right direction is bad if you overshoot. Maybe age verification isn’t needed, and educating parents is important; but without more, they’d have to be ultra-helicopter parents to stop their kids from accessing social media.

At minimum, parents need other parents in their local community to be educated; and better parental controls, so they can give their kid a phone and computer (for good reasons like safety and education) that won’t let them access social media (even unintentionally, some parental controls are that bad). Both can be done without laws, only social pressure and at least the potential for new (locked-down) devices.

(In theory, kids should also be prevented from buying unlocked devices, like drugs and alcohol. And showing the local cashier your ID to buy a generic device (whose packaging is indistinguishable from other device packing, so it can’t be traced to you afterward) is technically a form of age verification. But in practice this may not be necessary, because hardware is too expensive for most kids.)

And in addition to that, it is the role of the parents to be having the say in what their kids should and shouldn't be doing. As far as I am concerned most governments stick their collective noses in where they are not required. And, yeah, I do agree that kids shouldn't be on social media. Having sid that, even some adults shouldn't be on social media...

Age verification has always existed in the physical world, such as at bars and casinos. I just dont see why the internet should be immune to real world rules we decided upon for good reason.

I won't disagree with that. And "better parenting" is a solution. However, what about the children who don't have the advantage of "better parenting"?

Rightfully blaming bad parents is reactionary

The slippery slope was ad-sponsored social media in the first place. Ban it at the source rather than trying to fix downstream problems.

> "better parenting"

This has nothing to do with parenting. It's surveillance. They failed to do it through child porn argument. They are doing it through 'social media is harmful for children' argument. People did not bite on the former. They ate up the latter out of hate for social media platforms.

How is that the answer when even parents don't have the right tools for this. are parents supposed to surveil their kids 24/7 and monitor their internet traffic?

Why is the internet special, do you also believe physical stores shouldn't check for ID for cigarettes and alcohol, because the solution is better parenting?

HN is filled with people who are on the other side of an "internet best practices" information divide.

For everyone else, the internet is already a shit show and a half. They want control, because it means putting a stop to being predated upon, or more nihilistically, harming the firms that are harming them.

I don't know how to let other commenters see how bad it is, or make the gulf in view points clear.

In theory, sure, an identity verifier could issue you you a bunch of single use JWTs signed by them that contain `{"over18":"true", "nonce": 12748583..., "iss": "<issuerurl>"}`, signed by their key. A relying party just needs to know the public keys of all the issuers they trust, and can consume this JWT, verify it, and never learn anything about your IRL identity.

The important things are that they must issue a bunch at once. (Otherwise, correlating who you are becomes easy). They must keep no record tying nonce or the full JWT to an individual identity. Something user local or otherwise trustworthy (not keeping logs), needs to hold on to these, and send them out as needed, being very very careful never to reuse one (as that would enable cross site tracking). Lastly a relying party must be required to trust many issuers, not just those they are colluding with track users across sites with this.

The European Commission actually proposed pretty much exactly this system, also with a variation where instead of revealing the signed token, a ZSNARK proof (that you possess a validly signed token with the over18 attribute from a specific issuer) could be given to the relying party instead (to make it impossible for issuer and relying party to collude to release your identity). Many people here seemed to not like it.

I don’t think social media is intrinsically bad, just the toxic popular social medias. Did kids in the 1990s with access to internet forums have stunted social development?

Somehow this "leave it to the parents" logic isn't followed when it comes to cigarettes or alcohol. Why is social media different?

By the same logic, we should allow the sale of cigarettes to minors.

We don't let kids turn up to school drunk because they went to the cornershop on the way to school. I guarantee that would be happening if alcohol sales were not age gated and enforced by the government.

In the same way kids should not be infecting their minds with social media slop, or porn, or plenty of other internet content.

The only way this is stopped is when a social norm is created which shames all but the most negligent parents into compliance.

At the moment the absent and bad parents have all the power. Their kids scroll all night for memes, injest YouTube brainrot and turn up at school disruptive. Kids with responsible parents either want to that as well, or can't escape it.

Surveillance from age gates is a red herring. That horse bolted long ago. You are surveilled already by tech bros when voluntarily logging in, or by making yourself stand out a mile by using a VPN and a uncommon browser setup. This data gets handed to your government on request.

Having an anonymous VPN won't stop the tech bros or an authoritarian government forming, or bring one down.

People taking part in their existing democracy and maintaining the foundation of that is the best course of action. Raising a generation of kids not addicted to internet brainrot is a key part of this.

> Has it occurred to you that nobody cares, or should care, about your opinions about what other people and other people's kids do?

Uhmm... Yes they do? That's... the whole point of living in a society? With laws? So we can collectively decide what is and isn't desired?

Children are also banned from purchasing alcohol or going to the casino. There are tons of things we collectively decided children shouldn't do.

Idk why people are so obsessed with this issue. Having to verify your age to access adult content seems completely reasonable. If you go into a grocery store and you bought a carrot you dont have to show age verification. if you also buy a beer you do.

Why is everyone so opposed to the internet working this way?

We've basically accepted the premise as a culture that exploiting adults is fine. Exploitation is so heavily baked into our culture that pushing back on it would cause too much upset.

If you're below 18, you deserve protection. Above 18? Good luck, babe.

I think one of the unintended consequences of age verification is going to be a whole host of unprepared 18 year olds getting full access to social media and getting absolutely one-shot by it. Think credit card sign ups on college campuses or predatory car dealerships near boot camps. There are going to be a lot more 18 year old boys gambling away their student loans and 18 year old girls signing up for OF, but it'll be fine, because they're 18! Not to mention they're going to be scam targets on the level of the elderly. And if you're exploited/scammed as an adult, it's your own fault.

Age verification/restriction without an educational component of some sort is just creating a future cohort of extremely vulnerable young adults for companies and bad actors to sink their teeth into.

reading your comments, there's something you don't seem to get: the point isn't it happened to you and you turned out okay, the point is you didn't turn out okay and it would be so much more preferable that people like you were no longer created by the degenerates running our society, who you are in the complete thrall of.

Do you have personal experience with going to high school parties and drug dealers being there trying to get you hooked on drugs? I ask because the scenario you're presenting here sounds like something out of a movie or TV show, and not real life.

> While the rest of the world is moving forward with identity verification plans, the EU has presented its own privacy-focused approach to age verification. In April 2026, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, unveiled an age verification app with “the highest privacy standards in the world” and the presentation materials describe the app as “completely anonymous.”

I’m just afraid that membership countries will be too dumb to understand the difference, and for the population worldwide to be able to comprehend that it’s even possible. To be honest, ZK crypto is one hell of a party trick. Compared to tech where the premise is “we put a picture of your passport in a box, and when people want to know, we look and confirm.”

You mean the EU's fake snake oil zero-knowledge approach.

They've standardized two systems under the banner of "zero knowledge". One is actually zero knowledge. The other is trust-me snake oil. Guess which one is getting deployment.

People don't read, just comment

There are many usecases for agents having access to a real browser and many usecases for humans where work wise it's useful or for agent success in completing the task. Including any specific situations where sites may block "controlled" browsers, as well as co-working.

If an agent is controlling your own browser, it can get in the way of you being able to do work as well.

Additional security control, if you have control and audit trails regarding what the agent is doing, think things like not having access to the keys, cookies are unavailable through the api, certain sites blocked, especially for agents that run automated background tasks.

There's a ton of reasons really. Using stealth chromium forks can decrease security, potentially get you blocked from services/sites, and typically can be detected easily because Google is doing a lot more than just compiling Chromium to release Google Chrome now. That's why many of the stealth browsers out there are moving targets, and have tons of instances of being blocked.

Never. Life in the real world is better without it.

People can still record all they want, they just need to wait until getting home to upload the content.

Sometime in the future.

Dave, first we will need to setup age verification for your friends in order to comply with the law. I will not be able to help you otherwise. Remember Dave, I will submit to the local government your request to make a social media website so they will know if are complying with age verification. I have your ID which I will also provide as you need government ID to use AI. Open source AI models were banned.

This is why you don't rely on AI too much. An LLM may be able to decide what you can do if you run it via OpenAI or Anthropic's servers, but a text editor and your programming language of choice just does what it's asked to.

Alternatively, open source community software run by folks in a country that doesn't have any age verification laws/don't care less about them.

Just run it locally. On your laptop that now needs 128GB of memory and costs $4500. Oh and your AI chip is out of date in a year, and can't run the latest shit.

Not all children have active parents. I do not believe those children deserve to be taken advantage of or hurt simply because they happen to have bad parents.

The "laziness" argument doesnt work if the people being lazy (parents) are not the people being hurt (children)

> at the expense of

That's the thing: it's not trivial to know what is possible and what is not. If you look at the messages in HN, many (most?) messages about privacy-preserving age verification are (at least partially) wrong. Tech-savvy people clearly do not understand the technology in details, and somehow they assume that normies do understand and are simply fascists or lazy.

It is my opinion that telling a normal person that they are a bad parent (or a fascist) because you disagree with them is probably not the best way to convince them.

I believe in democracy, which means that I don't call everyone disagreeing with me a fascist. In a democracy, if most of the population wants privacy-preserving age verification and I don't, then I am in the minority and must accept it. My role as a tech-savvy person is to help "normies" understand what it implies. Again, not to tell them that they must be fascists if they disagree with me.

> there is such a variety of ways to tackle this problem, and this is the most authoritarian one.

If you think that privacy-preserving age verification is the most authoritarian way to tackle this problem, then you really, really don't understand authoritarianism.

Now if you have tons of better and practical solutions to tackle this problem, I would suggest you start writing about them. I haven't read a lot about those solutions (other than "just ask someone who is not me to do it"), what I hear is mostly people yelling that only bad parents and fascists disagree with them.

You can't. Even if you haven't registered or logged in, companies like Facebook have identified you and track you everywhere you go.

Why should you be able to traverse the internet anonymously? You cannot traverse real life society with the same expectations. Majority of the people traversing anonymously are doing so because they are routine troublemakers and do not want to bare consequences for their malicious actions. The ones fighting for this complete anonymity but not doing crime are naively just sweeping for bad actors.

Yes. At least to read.

Not sure what you mean. I am totally against surveillance capitalism and TooBigTech. I am in favour of end-to-end encryption and privacy-preserving tech.

I shouldn't have to show an ID to buy a newspaper or to load the website of a newspaper. On the other end of the spectrum, I should not be allowed to buy a gun without showing an ID (and all sorts of other constraints).

Somewhere in the middle, I understand that we don't want to expose 8 year old kids to pornography, but I don't think that one has to wait to be 18 or 21 to be allowed to access it. Same for social media. Where and how exactly we set the limit is a societal choice to make.

I also believe that "living in a democracy" doesn't mean that "everybody agrees with me, always". Many times I am in the minority. What matters is that people are informed. Telling them that if they disagree with you they are either bad parents or fascists isn't constructive, IMHO.

Requiring parents to police their child's every move is not going to end well.

What about this: go ask parents why they allowed their kid to get a smartphone and access to social media, and only then decide whether they are morons, fascists or just bad parents?

I have a simple example: when all the kids have a smartphone, it is very hard to tell your kid that they cannot have one. When all the kids have a shared culture built around social media, it is very hard to tell yours to not conform. "It's okay my son, you don't need friends. Anyway the parents of all those kids are bad parents".

I don't have children, but it doesn't sound completely weird that parents may say "we should prevent most kids from accessing social media, so that my kid wouldn't be the weirdo if I don't let them have access".

> Think carefully about why a politician might disregard this extremely simple mechanism and you'll have your answer about the real goals here

You (and many others) frame it as "the government versus the people". I think this is extremely naive.

Many, many, many parents are in favour of preventing social media access to kid, assuming it is done in a reasonable way. For instance, having a police officer follow every kid everywhere they go 24/7 is not a reasonable way, and everybody agrees on that. Now what if there was a reasonable way?

Ask yourself this: do you believe that privacy-preserving age verification is not a reasonable way, or do you know it? In order to know it, you have to understand how the cryptography works at some reasonable level. Do you? Most comments I read online come from people who believe and then repeat arguments they have read that confirm their beliefs.

I was noting that the Mullvad article actually addresses ZKP (which is good and a very rare thing), but that I found it was a bit evasive in a way that feels slightly manipulative to me (probably not on purpose).

I appreciate the comment, but I feel like you miss my point in a way that is (not purposely) manipulative, again.

I don't think that we would call "authoritarian" someone who would ask for, say, guns control. Or at least we wouldn't call "authoritarian" someone who is in favour of having more than 0 law, would we?

You are being manipulative by saying "If you want a law that I don't want, then you are an authoritarian. I mean no offence, it is just what you are". But reality is a lot more nuanced than that.

The vast majority of people who are in favour of age verification are not authoritarians. They really just consider "should kids have access to social media? Not until they are old enough". Whether or not it is technically possible is outside their knowledge. And the fact is that for age verification, there are technical solutions that are privacy-preserving (unlike e.g. ChatControl which is fundamentally building surveillance infrastructure).

And even for ChatControl: people who say "I would be in favour of a magic backdoor that would only work for the well-intentioned good guys" wouldn't count as "authoritarians", would they? It just so happens that there is no such thing as a magic backdoor, so they cannot have what they want.

Who is this "they" you speak of?

We have age verification for all kinds of things that can harm minors. Most of them have adequate penalties for breach such that operators of said harms ensure they comply (checks for ID when selling alcohol, entry to over-18s pubs/clubs, etc.)

There's nothing sinister going on here, just attempts to prevent social/mental harm to minors.

I strongly disagree.

Democracy is not "they" vs "us". Democracy is not "opposition has to be absolute". What you describe here is extremism. If you believe that anyone disagreeing with you is an extremist and that the only viable way to react is to be an extremist yourself, well... you are the extremist. Whether you are fighting extremists or not (this "they" you conveniently do not define) is unclear, though.

Sure but that absolute opposition hasn't, as far I can tell at least, achieved an iota of success. So it's largely a self indulgent merit badge than an actual strategy.

I don't necessarily agree with all these measures, but there is a lot more harm in social media than just pedophiles hunting children.