The alternative is you don’t why all of a sudden are we supposed to go along with all this madness?

Also if this is the wrong community please some one point me in right direction

The way things are going, I wonder how long before a politician admits that it is more efficient to have the kids positively identify themselves and then be forced to provide their if details to which ever paedophile asks. We can’t have the inefficiencies of yesteryear in our modern world kiddy fiddlers need to move fast and break stuff.

After all it turns out the people agitating for these laws, when the mask is ripped off them like a pirate ghost at the end of a Scooby Do episode, the villain was the people who most directly benefit from government mandated doxxing all along, like fucking Meta and OpenAI. What a fucking amazing coincidence.

One idea I’ve seen floated was a certificate-based authentication. Providers that know your age by design, such as banks, could hand out certificates in bulk. That way, only those institutions would know that you have received certificates, but they can’t tell for what exactly. Source: https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission/114852402217569321

If I had to choose a method, it would involve an authentication site - one it would have its security validated by a trusted entity and guarantee that you will be fully compensated should they be hacked. Even better if that’s backed up by a large insurance policy.

You verify your identity with them. Then they verify information requested by other sites. The risk of hacking is minimized to that one company. They should collect your IP and information about your browser, operating system, and hardware. Then issue you a cookie stored on your browser.

Subsequently, when you use a website that needs to verify your age, they read your identification cookie and validate it with the identification company, asking if you are of majority age and providing the information they collected. The identification company gives a yes or no response. They do not give out any other information about you, preserving your privacy. As long as you are using the same computer on the same IP you don’t have to revalidate. A hacker would need access to your computer if they wanted to impersonate you.

The point is to

1. gain more exploitation-leverage for the big-tech owners of our civilization, while
2. making Linux illegal, because it isn’t locked-proprietary-enforcing-this-regime.

Elegant as can be.

Removal of competition while breaking the population from civilrights, too.

there needs to be an age-verification-ONLY ID, which makes it illegal for age-verifying companies to ask passport-images, or driver’s-license images, etc, so as to break the identity-theft-chain that big-tech’s working at creating, as fast as it can.

The whole thing about making operating systems be the “owners” of the authority, is to make all non-Microsoft/Apple/Google OS’s illegal.

Period.

ID should always be orthogonal.

Healthcard ought never be used for anything else.

There ought be a specific ID card for one’s province/canton/prefecture/state, which provides only the minimum-required information.

Years ago, I discovered that anybody could run a name on the local drivers’-license ID database, & it would provide a picture of said person, which is WRONG.

Secure by design, not when “lucky”.

Every ID ought be purpose-only, locked-down, & illegal to abuse.

( I also hold that it ought be illegal for the “credit rating” companies to protect disinformation, while disallowing the life in-question from fixing it with true information,

AND that legal-address ought be a right, such that even homeless people can have a mailing-address, so as to not be locked-out from the ability to get ID, or to have a cellphone, etc )

Solving the wrong problem, for machiavellian purposes, is all that this is.

_ /\ _

IMO the issue is way deeper than the method of age verification because you cannot automate child safety (from what I’ve read Roblox and Youtube Kids are notable failures here), and tech platforms are going to pick between some half-assed attempt at such automation and entirely banning minors, at which point they find a way to bypass it or go somewhere else on the internet that is also unsafe for children. It’s all about deferring blame to someone else, not creating a society where people are making sure the kids are ok, and cannot possibly address the actual problem.

But if the idea is that people are too stupid to understand this and it’s necessary to come up with the least bad form of plausibly functional age verification to placate them, maybe the best bet would be something like those self-attesting OS verification laws but modified to be less shitty. Something like a more voluntary system where when you buy a device, there’s a prominent option to get a version of it that is for kids and has parental control software preinstalled as bloatware. This could (optionally!) broadcast a flag (only to preapproved apps and websites!) that lets the service block the user from seeing or interacting with certain stuff, and otherwise do parental control things. It could at least somewhat work since kids don’t have the ability to buy their own hardware. It could be open source and collectively developed and funded as a set of common standards that experts have thought about and agreed on.

It wouldn’t solve the biggest issues, but at least it might make it a little simpler for parents who are overwhelmed and need a simpler solution for handling the problem of the raw internet.

If you start to argue how to better implement age verification, you’ve already accepted the premise that it is necessary and useful in any way.
It isn’t. All it will do is positively identify children to people who prey on children.

opposition needs an argument

The argument is that it’s fundamentally a bad idea, not that we know a better way to do it. I realize that’s a harder argument to make.

Take porn for example. Above board porn sites generally try to comply with the law. They either perform age verification or block jurisdictions that require it. They verify the ages of performers. They comply with copyright law. They enforce rules against unauthorized deepfakes.

Sites exist which are hosted outside the jurisdiction of USA/EU/AU/etc… legal systems which do none of those things. On such sites, there’s a good chance of finding CSAM, stolen content, and deepfakes; I will not list any here. Driving teenagers who want to see porn from mainstream sites to poorly moderated ones is the likely outcome of a successful age verification scheme, and an undesirable one.

Apart from the question of desirability of such checks in the first place: with attestations, the digital equivalent if a signed government document.

This process involves three parties:

• you
• the identity provider (the government)
• the third party (who wants to verify your age).

1. You click a button that takes you to the identity provider (government e-identiy). There you log in.
2. Identity provider asks you to confirm what you want to share with the third party, like your age bracket.
3. The third party receives a digitally signed attestation with this information.

The proof of identity is exclusively between you and the government’s e-identity platform. The third party only gets to see what’s shared with them (like your age bracket).

Government e-identity isn’t hypothetical btw, e.g. in the Netherlands that’s DigiD.