Technology

You will be sent to die for Israel 🤣

The German ID card has that functionality. Date of birth is saved on the chip card and you can identify yourself via NFC reader and the open source ID app. You can see what information is transmitted before sending it. In the case of age verification, it would only be "underage yes/no". It's not perfect but pretty good from a privacy standpoint.

Or we could just let people do what they want on their own god damn computers.

I would support a simple toggle, a content safe mode and an unrestricted mode, selectable at the OS level through a parental controls option. Then have sites flag all "objectionable" or not safe for work material. The restricted mode would not even download such content.

Done, more power to parents, and smart kids, while not destroying the internet to block content that conservatives don't like. Which is what all of these laws are based on.

Wholeheartedly disagree. OS level age verification only removes the responsibility to protect users from the software developer and shifts it to the OS makers. Meta and OpenAI want this so bad so they don’t have to protect their users and their users children. Meta created the software the has lead to hundreds, if not thousands, of child suicide and they don’t want to be held accountable. AI companies have allowed the proliferation of CSAM, copyright infringement, and straight up theft of intellectual property, and want to push that off to OS as the responsible party. Google and Apple don’t fight it because they have extraordinarily deep pockets and already have the infrastructures in place in their app stores to accommodate this tomfoolery. This is also another avenue for increased surveillance at the deepest level of your digital life that is already extremely compromised. If we want parents to have more controls, then mandate easy to use parent controls for OS’s, apps, and web apps. Legislate mandating firewalls and routers have easy to use parental controls for internet settings. Pay people living wages and work them less hours so they can learn to use those things. Don’t add spyware into the OS. “Take off your tin hat dude.” How do you think they’ll verify age at the OS level? It will have to have an api that can be used to obtain the age verified information. Who’s responsive for reviewing all that PII? Where does that go? Who retains that information and for how long? What encryption technology is mandated to protect it from breach? Nah, man, no thanks.

This is steel-manning an argument for a feature no one wants which is most likely the thin end of the wedge for increased surveillance and censorship.

This is just how it starts so they can trick well meaning developers into making websites and platforms which make use of this verification while it is still self-ID, but when the laws become more demanding and require connecting your user account to your real-world identity, it'll already be too late, all of your online activity can be tied back to you.

When I make this argument, people like to call it a slippery slope, but the fact is that there are so many nations cracking down on free, unmonitored access to the internet, with social media restrictions, platforms like Discord requiring you to provide identification, and so on.

All for this, all of that risk, all for a feature that adds very little value to the computing experience of anyone.

This isn't why those pushing for want it. It isn't about the kids safety but harvesting more information so they can tie all the other tracking data they have to a individual. its alway think of the children but lets make some money while we are at it.

Wrong. There are things that belong at the application level and others that belong in user space. Fundamentally it doesn’t make sense for any sort of mandate.

TF should I have to put my age or any other personal information into my pihole or any other system I’m running.

Absolutely not, age data is biometric data. It can and will be used to fingerprint you.

Sure, make it an optional field that you can fill in with whatever. Don't make laws requiring it though.

I'll appreciate that it's hard to be a devil's advocate on an argument and provide a nuanced take. But I will say the points made on the Ageless Linux website demonstrate why that's an issue, primarily around how you're teaching kids from their first time on the internet to lie. It really doesn't matter whether this happens through a drivers' license pic or a DOB selector.