Do the EU citizens want this? Where's the democracy?
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2026
45 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
43596 readers
203 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
The democracy is in the process. Stuff like this gets introduced all the time by some politicians and pushed by some lobby groups, with counter-arguments from other lobby groups, and then gets rejected by other politicians and/or by the courts.
It's how a functioning democracy is supposed to work.
If you're an EU citizen and worried about this there are many ways to contact EU representatives and also to track what your EU MEPs are up to.
Many half-assed ideas will never make a full-assed idea.
Between this and Wsocial, it is pretty clear that whoever is making IT decisions needs to be let go.
This is not Doctorow's enshittification; this is an attempt at domesticating users into thinking it is a normal thing to upload your ID to random cloud servers or hand over your biometric data to use WhatsApp??? This isn't protecting children. It is giving the social media giants permission to allow ads for things like gambling and line their pockets. If I worked in advertising, I'd be pretty happy.
You not uploading to cloud, you validate your docs locally
Locally, how does that work?
FWIW, identity verifications schemes that attempt to maintain privacy are a contradiction in terms and cannot work. Same as encryption that both works and doesn't work (backdoors).
Verbose version here: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/
Based on paper here: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/age-verify.pdf
If anything truly local and zero knowledge was allowed, there would be someone sharing their access eu-wide and everyone could install that and be done with it. One person authenticating millions.
Just due to that every system proposed has at minimum a central authority that does rate limiting.
And the anonymous internet gets another nail in the coffin. Endgame is every comment identifiable and legally (unlike state intelligence agencies) actionable against you, and the chilling effect that will have on free speech, communication, and organization.
Hail the rise of techno fascism, the entire internet will be facebook.
Can they not palm it off on the corpos to do for them? The states already have the identification apparatus, they should step up and provide age verification services. Meta and Steam do not need my photo ID, just that I'm over 18. If we can't have freedom, at least minimize the harm.