EU chief calls for a bloc-wide push on an age verification app to protect children online. If enforced, users will have to prove their age to access legally restricted sites.
But please can you tell me how you believe this differs from age-gating the purchase of cigarettes, lottery tickets, age restricted cinema tickets, alcohol, firearms and so many other things we already have age-gating on?
Edit: I’d love any one of the downvoters to comment and actually explain what I’ve said that’s so atrocious? We DO age gate many things in society and many, I dare say most, would not want cigarettes to be available to a 13 year old. So what is it about online that makes it so different? If we CAN make age checks online anonymous (and indeed the EU standard downright requires it) why don’t we want this online?
But please can you tell me how you believe this differs from age-gating the purchase of cigarettes, lottery tickets, age restricted cinema tickets, alcohol, firearms and so many other things we already have age-gating on?
Did you just seriously compare smoking/drinking at 13 to seeing titties online (which is basically mandatory for growing up humans unless you want to develop mental disorders commonly seen in religious people, conservatives, rural Japan, etc. who didn’t have proper childhood)? Seriously?
No definitely not. Smoking at 13 is obviously worse than watching a picture of a naked person. FWIW I grew up in the Nordics which very much has a culture of nakedness (children and old and young all shower in a shared space, all naked, for example). I don’t have a concern at all about nakedness and I agree finding a bag of damp porno mags in a shed is part and parcel of growing up in your teens. No concerns from me.
Having said that, I hope you also will agree that “a couple of titties” is not what most pornography online, today, actually displays. The vast amount of pornography degrades women, and a lot of it glosses over the very real power imbalances and subsequent abuses of a lot of vulnerable people. I haven’t got a single concern with what consenting adults choose to do together - if you’d like to dress in a plastic outfit and be spanked red, go for it! And seeing naked people in communal spaces (beaches, dressing rooms) is super helpful for your development and understanding of what “normal” is (beautiful, flabby, wrinkled, brown, pink, curly and all the wonderful sizes and shapes we all are). Count me in on nakedness!!
But I do have a concern with the adult industry as a whole and I can’t help but wonder if a 12 year old having unfettered access to what porn today actually is can’t be that helpful for your development as a sexual creature.
All that said, age gating and access to pornography is clearly not the same discussion.
Age gating is a discussion that fundamentally asks “ok, if we age gate products in the real world, like alcohol and tobacco and pornography, why don’t we also age gate it online?”.
If we decided not to age gate pornography - at least “soft pornography”(hard to define, but let’s pretend that we could), I’d be all up for not also age gating this online.
But if we, as a democratic society, decide that some things should be age gated, I’m all for also attempting - indeed ensuring - that these are age gated online.
Of course there a enormous risks of age gating online - I get that showing an ID to a shop keeper is a transaction that’s very hard to log and therefore track at large - that has to be adequately handled. Here, I believe the US proposal is atrocious and an enormous violation of privacy. But, genuinely, when you read the EU implementation, I do not have the same privacy concerns. Don’t forget the EU proposal is authored by the same bodies that forced GDPR onto the world (with ALL the good that this brought for ensuring our PII was protected). The EU isn’t perfect, but largely the EU is of, by and for the people, still, and our collective democracy, with all the faults that it has, is trying to balance all these concerns appropriately. I think the current implementation achieves the right balance and I am frustrated that many who are against the EU proposal haven’t actually read it, then equate it with the US proposal, which is fundamentally different, and equate the democratic EU with the plutocratic US. Like always in the US, almost everything degrades into “how can this make the rich richer”. That is, luckily, not yet the case in the EU.
While there are categories of porn that are degrading to women (this is really subjective by the way as many women don’t see it that way), there are just as many categories for vice versa, whether’s that’s free use, BDSM, dom-play, etc., so it’s hard for me to see this as a women-specific thing.
Alright, let me ask you this - when/where do you think women had/have less respect from men - during the era of porn, or when/where porn is not easily accessible? This of course also applies to countries who are more actively censoring porn in modern age.
Personally, I can’t really explain it, but I prefer categories where women dominate over men. When it comes to sex, I like to be ordered around.
Are you the type of person who would think woman sitting on a man’s face is degrading towards the man, or do you claim it’s only degrading when these intimate things are done towards women?
I grew up playing Postal 2, shoving cats onto my shotgun, pissing on Indians (I’m sorry) and basically terrorizing everyone. Yet, I turned out complete opposite of that.
I think we are veering off topic. I agree that pornography can degrade all genders, not just women, and that much of what appears degrading to an observer is actually just someone’s kink (and power to them).
That said, this is a slightly different discussion to age gating.
I’d love to engage in this. Before we do that, please can we be clear if we are talking about the EU system, or the USA-proposed OS-based system? Given they are now the same, the reactions to these two systems have also not been the same.
Both. There’s a difference between showing some clerk your ID compared to uploading it to the internet. It’s not a question of if it being hacked. It will be. Denial of this is dangerous. If you don’t see this as important, you’re desensitized by the sheer number of yearly cyber attacks.
And that’s only the start. Children will only be marginalized. Protected groups will be increasingly threatened. Take your pick on whatever organization you want to look at, and they’ll say this doesn’t help anyone, except maybe foreign adversaries and hacking groups.
What happens when the next government comes along and decides to make a more US kind of implementation? The point is, that we should not make this the precedent. Ever. Kick it while it’s down.
Ok, but for what it’s worth, I’m only trying to defend the EU proposal. This discussion was about the EU proposal, from the very first OP. The US proposal, such as I understand it (I haven’t looked into it that much, since I don’t live there), seems a huge privacy risk that plays into the hands of corporations. No thanks.
In the EU system, you start with a verifiable online identity system. These differ from country to country but all perform the same task: They allow you to prove who you are.
So you go to an online portal and you log in, as you. This system issues you a set of tokens, which does not hold your PII. They solely say “This person is over 18”. If you want a token to say “this person is over 13”, you need a different token. A token is a number that has been signed by the issuing authority in a way that can only be done by the issuing authority. You store these tokens, encrypted, in your age verification app.
Now IF the issuing authority stored “I issued token X to person Y” we would have a huge problem. They don’t. All they do is store “this token was issued”. If they chose to store that a specific token was issued to a specific person, they could track what sites you used the tokens at. So you have to trust your state here, just like you have to trust them not to access your phone records, or your credit card transactions or which mobile mast your phone logs on to.
You proceed to a site that requires an age gate. You are presented with QR code, which you scan with your age verification app (the one that stores the age verification tokens). This QR code contains a URL that holds the verification attempt ID (created by the gater) and your app now connects to this URL (be advised this URL is not the URL of the gater, but of a third party gating service) and sends one of your verification tokens. The third party verification service checks this with the issuing authority and confirms it is a valid token, then retires it if it is. The third party service now calls to the gater and says “this verification attempt has indeed proven their age”.
The gater then lets you proceed.
Throughout this attempt the only place that can be hacked to reveal your PII would be the issuing authority - no other services knows anything about you. What a hacker would have to do is insert code that captures the issuing of tokens and somehow grabs your PII at tha time. But what’s important to understand is that the issuing service also doesn’t know who you are, because they don’t store all your PII when they issue your tokens - they just have the required information about you from the identity service you used to log in (chiefly your age). So even if a hacker got in here, they couldn’t grab who you were, merely when you were born).
Many security experts have analysed this flow and supported it. I myself cannot see what a hacker could really do here. So, in this case, specifically for the EU system, which this post was about, I am willing to accept that the advantages of not having minors access tobacco, alcohol or age gated media far outweighs the privacy risks.
You don’t need to show ID to enter the store just because they sell cigarettes at the front counter. The staff person checking the OD at the front counter isn’t memorizing the information on the ID and using it to track every other purchase you make in the store, or to piece together what you’re doing once you leave the store.
Locking individual content behind age verification (and it entirely depends on how they are handling the age verification), is different than a blanket identification check to use the platform at all. Age verification is used to prevent children from buying cigarettes from a store while under aged, but it’s up to parents to prevent them from getting cigarettes other ways.
But let’s separate the technical/privacy discussion of age gating from the discussion about age gating social media platforms.
If I go to a Scottish distillery website and buys chocolate, they are not going to age gate me. If I buy whisky they will. That’s not age gating at the door, that’s age gating for a specific product that we, our democratic society, have decided, through democratic means, should not be available to minors.
Regulating social media age gating is a different discussion altogether. The discussion is about whether we want to be able to anonymously check (again, the EU standard requires anonymity) someone’s age online.
Stop moving the goal posts. Also, no one has convincingly shown they can do that anonymously, but lots have shown they CAN’T. You can’t divorce the privacy implications because they are intrinsically linked right now and there is no evidence supporting the ability to unlink them.
The architecture for Zero Knowledge Proofs is not novel and well understood.
You prove your identity to the issuer of tokens. They issue you a set of signed tokens that only they could have signed. You issue one of these tokens and a nullifier to a location that needs to verify your age. The verifying location checks the signature and lets you in. They return the nullifier to the token issuer.
The issuer can OF COURSE verify that you’ve used your tokens if they store the tokens they issue. You do have to trust your government for this system to work. But you already trust your government not to mass-surveil you through your ISP, mobile phone provider and credit card spend. This doesn’t increase your defend surface.
I don’t believe this is an honest question. They aren’t age-gating, they’re checking IDs of everyone so they know exactly who is saying everything online, and can easily persecute opposing viewpoints. The excuse is kids, they don’t give a shit about kids.
Where have you read that this is about checking everyone’s ID?
They are specifically building an anonymous system for verifying age required to buy to products and access media that we already check ID for (not anonymously, but distributed) in physical stores.
Most countries don’t have age gates for accessing social media and, under the EU system proposed for the EU, if they did, this system is exactly providing a method of verifying a user’s age without knowing who the user is. So it’s literally the opposite of what you claim it to be.
Lmao. Anonymous system my ass. You trust the government to do that? And pray tell how the government is going to implement id verification on os?
It’s such a stupid idea. How are you even going to enforce that? And even if it gets implemented, what’s stopping a kid from using an adult’s device to bypass it?
The EU age verification system, of which I’m talking and of which the OP was about, is not baked into the OS. That might be the case in the US. I’m lucky I don’t live there. And this discussion here is about the EU system, not the US one.
Your ISP has a record over every single website you’ve visited and your payment provider knows 99% of all purchases you’ve made and your phone knows where you’ve been at all times. Your threshold for having to trust that laws prevent wanton use of all this information doesn’t shift with anonymous age gating.
Frankly the concerns you display in the post reveal to me that you’ve not spent a great detail looking into what’s actually being proposed.
Why doesn’t EU investigate criminals and pedos with questionable search queries and website history? The corpos have the data of every individual. It was never about protecting the children in the first place. Otherwise they’d be solving the root of the problem instead of using such half measures.
You dont have your id printed on every cigarette. The government doesnt dilute the alcohol with unique radiomarkers to track your piss (yet). Firearms tracking is nowhere near this comprehensive or invasive anywhere in the world. Not even on military ranges. Cinema tickets? Really?
Qnd as pointed elsewhere: you font need to show ID if youre just buyong pink monster vegan jerky condoms and new usb cable for your fav sex toy.
But have you read the EU standard? Anonymity is a requirement. There is no tracking. The age check does not refer back to you. Indeed, it cannot.
You can of course believe that the legal requirements aren’t adhered to and that the state is actually lying, but if you believe that the state already has a million ways to track you, including 99.9999% of us who carry our phones around with us and pay with credit cards in physical stores.
It can’t be anonymous if you need a google or apple account to use. I’m not concerned about what the government tracks (well, not in this context at least), I’m concerned about who and what they’re working with to do the tracking. If the app verifies me as an adult but I couldn’t use the app without google butting in, google now has yet another data point in a secret ad profile that the government should be putting a stop to, not helping them build up. It’d be like announcing a plan to stop illegal drug usage by partnering with the cartel.
If they wanted a government-sponsored age verification sort of thing, it should’ve been an app whose only job was to type in a code you got from going in person to some government body and verifying in person. Town office, DMV, somewhere like that.
More fundamentally, though, “protecting the children” shouldn’t go anywhere near anything that can be used for identity theft. Showing my ID to the cashier at the cigarette shop is significantly safer than showing it to any business on the internet, because sharing a high-quality picture of something is giving them a copy. The cashier gets to see it, but it never leaves my sight and isn’t recorded in any way except probably some dodgy security camera where you can’t read it anyway.
When you say “Google butting in” can you be more specific about what it is you believe Google tracks in an app they haven’t made themselves but only ingested in their store? Is it your belief that Google tracks all app interactions even in apps without firebase or Google Ads SDK?
Honestly, I don’t know exactly what google can or can’t track if the app developer doesn’t specifically enable them. I don’t have specific evidence that they’ll even be able to tell if the user was verified or not
What I do know is they have repeatedly shown that they’re happy to hide or lie about what and how they track people, and more broadly about their business as a whole.
Again I cite the drug analogy. Google is in the business of tracking people and harvesting data for ads. It’s like inviting the cartel to the DARE program and expecting everything to go swimmingly.
If they want their age verification app to actually be anonymous, they shouldn’t force people to use a tracking service to use it. The app specifically won’t be functional on degoogled android phones and won’t be offered on desktop computers. Maybe Google can’t spy on anything going on in the app, but even so, they could correlate “used verification app, roblox usage went up” or “used verification app, continued to use Tinder, concluded adult, ignoring ‘do not track’ preference as it doesn’t violate laws about tracking minors”.
It’s true that a minority of users have taken the steps where this inferred information would be particularly helpful to google, but not having the option to opt out is going to get harder and harder, and this service doesn’t provide enough good to give the information cartel that is Google any more information, even inferred, in my opinion.
So you’re not sure what Google can and can’t track and you have no evidence, and the specification for the system is available online, which you seemingly haven’t read, but you’re just generally “worried” without citing specific evidence.
@sunbeam60@Squizzy forr me the issue is mass survilance… Gate keeping cigarretes dont record the number of times a kid or a adult tried to but cigarretes
When you go to purchase those things in person, you present your ID, but then it is given back. They do not keep your ID. They do not get to make a copy of it’s information for them to store and sell and track you with. It is presented at that particular moment, and then control of it is returned to you.
That is not the case with these digital ID requirements. With these digital ID requirements, they absolutely make and keep a copy. They absolutely use the information from that copy to track you and sell your data on to others. They use it to build a profile on you about your behaviours and purchases etc which will absolutely be used to tighten the noose of control. And we’ve already seen, over and over and over again that pretty much every time they claim they aren’t doing those things, they absolutely still are. Even if they weren’t, they’ve also repeatedly demonstrated a complete and utter inability to secure that data from third parties accessing it too.
It is completely different and enormously more invasive than presenting your ID in person.
Most of what you’ve said is blatantly not true. Google (let’s use them instead of Apple here) can of course track your app use if the app uses Firebase or the Adds SDK - which clearly a verification should never do.
But Google doesn’t have the ability to see what you do inside of an app that aren’t voluntarily sending telemetry to Google. If you have proof that they do, please present it.
I largely agree with you.
But please can you tell me how you believe this differs from age-gating the purchase of cigarettes, lottery tickets, age restricted cinema tickets, alcohol, firearms and so many other things we already have age-gating on?
Edit: I’d love any one of the downvoters to comment and actually explain what I’ve said that’s so atrocious? We DO age gate many things in society and many, I dare say most, would not want cigarettes to be available to a 13 year old. So what is it about online that makes it so different? If we CAN make age checks online anonymous (and indeed the EU standard downright requires it) why don’t we want this online?
Did you just seriously compare smoking/drinking at 13 to seeing titties online (which is basically mandatory for growing up humans unless you want to develop mental disorders commonly seen in religious people, conservatives, rural Japan, etc. who didn’t have proper childhood)? Seriously?
No definitely not. Smoking at 13 is obviously worse than watching a picture of a naked person. FWIW I grew up in the Nordics which very much has a culture of nakedness (children and old and young all shower in a shared space, all naked, for example). I don’t have a concern at all about nakedness and I agree finding a bag of damp porno mags in a shed is part and parcel of growing up in your teens. No concerns from me.
Having said that, I hope you also will agree that “a couple of titties” is not what most pornography online, today, actually displays. The vast amount of pornography degrades women, and a lot of it glosses over the very real power imbalances and subsequent abuses of a lot of vulnerable people. I haven’t got a single concern with what consenting adults choose to do together - if you’d like to dress in a plastic outfit and be spanked red, go for it! And seeing naked people in communal spaces (beaches, dressing rooms) is super helpful for your development and understanding of what “normal” is (beautiful, flabby, wrinkled, brown, pink, curly and all the wonderful sizes and shapes we all are). Count me in on nakedness!!
But I do have a concern with the adult industry as a whole and I can’t help but wonder if a 12 year old having unfettered access to what porn today actually is can’t be that helpful for your development as a sexual creature.
All that said, age gating and access to pornography is clearly not the same discussion.
Age gating is a discussion that fundamentally asks “ok, if we age gate products in the real world, like alcohol and tobacco and pornography, why don’t we also age gate it online?”.
If we decided not to age gate pornography - at least “soft pornography”(hard to define, but let’s pretend that we could), I’d be all up for not also age gating this online.
But if we, as a democratic society, decide that some things should be age gated, I’m all for also attempting - indeed ensuring - that these are age gated online.
Of course there a enormous risks of age gating online - I get that showing an ID to a shop keeper is a transaction that’s very hard to log and therefore track at large - that has to be adequately handled. Here, I believe the US proposal is atrocious and an enormous violation of privacy. But, genuinely, when you read the EU implementation, I do not have the same privacy concerns. Don’t forget the EU proposal is authored by the same bodies that forced GDPR onto the world (with ALL the good that this brought for ensuring our PII was protected). The EU isn’t perfect, but largely the EU is of, by and for the people, still, and our collective democracy, with all the faults that it has, is trying to balance all these concerns appropriately. I think the current implementation achieves the right balance and I am frustrated that many who are against the EU proposal haven’t actually read it, then equate it with the US proposal, which is fundamentally different, and equate the democratic EU with the plutocratic US. Like always in the US, almost everything degrades into “how can this make the rich richer”. That is, luckily, not yet the case in the EU.
While there are categories of porn that are degrading to women (this is really subjective by the way as many women don’t see it that way), there are just as many categories for vice versa, whether’s that’s free use, BDSM, dom-play, etc., so it’s hard for me to see this as a women-specific thing.
Alright, let me ask you this - when/where do you think women had/have less respect from men - during the era of porn, or when/where porn is not easily accessible? This of course also applies to countries who are more actively censoring porn in modern age.
Personally, I can’t really explain it, but I prefer categories where women dominate over men. When it comes to sex, I like to be ordered around.
Are you the type of person who would think woman sitting on a man’s face is degrading towards the man, or do you claim it’s only degrading when these intimate things are done towards women?
I grew up playing Postal 2, shoving cats onto my shotgun, pissing on Indians (I’m sorry) and basically terrorizing everyone. Yet, I turned out complete opposite of that.
I think we are veering off topic. I agree that pornography can degrade all genders, not just women, and that much of what appears degrading to an observer is actually just someone’s kink (and power to them).
That said, this is a slightly different discussion to age gating.
Is it? The discussion is about whether kids online should be able to access that material and whether it’s protecting, or damaging.
How many of your rights are you willing to give up so little Timmy doesn’t search titties on Google.
I don’t have to give up any rights for age gating to work anonymously and properly. Neither do you.
Explain basically every privacy, cyber security and child safety organization saying this is a bad idea, then.
I’d love to engage in this. Before we do that, please can we be clear if we are talking about the EU system, or the USA-proposed OS-based system? Given they are now the same, the reactions to these two systems have also not been the same.
Both. There’s a difference between showing some clerk your ID compared to uploading it to the internet. It’s not a question of if it being hacked. It will be. Denial of this is dangerous. If you don’t see this as important, you’re desensitized by the sheer number of yearly cyber attacks.
And that’s only the start. Children will only be marginalized. Protected groups will be increasingly threatened. Take your pick on whatever organization you want to look at, and they’ll say this doesn’t help anyone, except maybe foreign adversaries and hacking groups. What happens when the next government comes along and decides to make a more US kind of implementation? The point is, that we should not make this the precedent. Ever. Kick it while it’s down.
Ok, but for what it’s worth, I’m only trying to defend the EU proposal. This discussion was about the EU proposal, from the very first OP. The US proposal, such as I understand it (I haven’t looked into it that much, since I don’t live there), seems a huge privacy risk that plays into the hands of corporations. No thanks.
In the EU system, you start with a verifiable online identity system. These differ from country to country but all perform the same task: They allow you to prove who you are.
So you go to an online portal and you log in, as you. This system issues you a set of tokens, which does not hold your PII. They solely say “This person is over 18”. If you want a token to say “this person is over 13”, you need a different token. A token is a number that has been signed by the issuing authority in a way that can only be done by the issuing authority. You store these tokens, encrypted, in your age verification app.
Now IF the issuing authority stored “I issued token X to person Y” we would have a huge problem. They don’t. All they do is store “this token was issued”. If they chose to store that a specific token was issued to a specific person, they could track what sites you used the tokens at. So you have to trust your state here, just like you have to trust them not to access your phone records, or your credit card transactions or which mobile mast your phone logs on to.
You proceed to a site that requires an age gate. You are presented with QR code, which you scan with your age verification app (the one that stores the age verification tokens). This QR code contains a URL that holds the verification attempt ID (created by the gater) and your app now connects to this URL (be advised this URL is not the URL of the gater, but of a third party gating service) and sends one of your verification tokens. The third party verification service checks this with the issuing authority and confirms it is a valid token, then retires it if it is. The third party service now calls to the gater and says “this verification attempt has indeed proven their age”.
The gater then lets you proceed.
Throughout this attempt the only place that can be hacked to reveal your PII would be the issuing authority - no other services knows anything about you. What a hacker would have to do is insert code that captures the issuing of tokens and somehow grabs your PII at tha time. But what’s important to understand is that the issuing service also doesn’t know who you are, because they don’t store all your PII when they issue your tokens - they just have the required information about you from the identity service you used to log in (chiefly your age). So even if a hacker got in here, they couldn’t grab who you were, merely when you were born).
Many security experts have analysed this flow and supported it. I myself cannot see what a hacker could really do here. So, in this case, specifically for the EU system, which this post was about, I am willing to accept that the advantages of not having minors access tobacco, alcohol or age gated media far outweighs the privacy risks.
You don’t need to show ID to enter the store just because they sell cigarettes at the front counter. The staff person checking the OD at the front counter isn’t memorizing the information on the ID and using it to track every other purchase you make in the store, or to piece together what you’re doing once you leave the store.
Locking individual content behind age verification (and it entirely depends on how they are handling the age verification), is different than a blanket identification check to use the platform at all. Age verification is used to prevent children from buying cigarettes from a store while under aged, but it’s up to parents to prevent them from getting cigarettes other ways.
But let’s separate the technical/privacy discussion of age gating from the discussion about age gating social media platforms.
If I go to a Scottish distillery website and buys chocolate, they are not going to age gate me. If I buy whisky they will. That’s not age gating at the door, that’s age gating for a specific product that we, our democratic society, have decided, through democratic means, should not be available to minors.
Regulating social media age gating is a different discussion altogether. The discussion is about whether we want to be able to anonymously check (again, the EU standard requires anonymity) someone’s age online.
Stop moving the goal posts. Also, no one has convincingly shown they can do that anonymously, but lots have shown they CAN’T. You can’t divorce the privacy implications because they are intrinsically linked right now and there is no evidence supporting the ability to unlink them.
Which goal posts have I moved?
The architecture for Zero Knowledge Proofs is not novel and well understood.
You prove your identity to the issuer of tokens. They issue you a set of signed tokens that only they could have signed. You issue one of these tokens and a nullifier to a location that needs to verify your age. The verifying location checks the signature and lets you in. They return the nullifier to the token issuer.
The issuer can OF COURSE verify that you’ve used your tokens if they store the tokens they issue. You do have to trust your government for this system to work. But you already trust your government not to mass-surveil you through your ISP, mobile phone provider and credit card spend. This doesn’t increase your defend surface.
I don’t believe this is an honest question. They aren’t age-gating, they’re checking IDs of everyone so they know exactly who is saying everything online, and can easily persecute opposing viewpoints. The excuse is kids, they don’t give a shit about kids.
Where have you read that this is about checking everyone’s ID?
They are specifically building an anonymous system for verifying age required to buy to products and access media that we already check ID for (not anonymously, but distributed) in physical stores.
Most countries don’t have age gates for accessing social media and, under the EU system proposed for the EU, if they did, this system is exactly providing a method of verifying a user’s age without knowing who the user is. So it’s literally the opposite of what you claim it to be.
Lmao. Anonymous system my ass. You trust the government to do that? And pray tell how the government is going to implement id verification on os? It’s such a stupid idea. How are you even going to enforce that? And even if it gets implemented, what’s stopping a kid from using an adult’s device to bypass it?
The EU age verification system, of which I’m talking and of which the OP was about, is not baked into the OS. That might be the case in the US. I’m lucky I don’t live there. And this discussion here is about the EU system, not the US one.
Your ISP has a record over every single website you’ve visited and your payment provider knows 99% of all purchases you’ve made and your phone knows where you’ve been at all times. Your threshold for having to trust that laws prevent wanton use of all this information doesn’t shift with anonymous age gating.
Frankly the concerns you display in the post reveal to me that you’ve not spent a great detail looking into what’s actually being proposed.
Why doesn’t EU investigate criminals and pedos with questionable search queries and website history? The corpos have the data of every individual. It was never about protecting the children in the first place. Otherwise they’d be solving the root of the problem instead of using such half measures.
You dont have your id printed on every cigarette. The government doesnt dilute the alcohol with unique radiomarkers to track your piss (yet). Firearms tracking is nowhere near this comprehensive or invasive anywhere in the world. Not even on military ranges. Cinema tickets? Really?
Qnd as pointed elsewhere: you font need to show ID if youre just buyong pink monster vegan jerky condoms and new usb cable for your fav sex toy.
But have you read the EU standard? Anonymity is a requirement. There is no tracking. The age check does not refer back to you. Indeed, it cannot.
You can of course believe that the legal requirements aren’t adhered to and that the state is actually lying, but if you believe that the state already has a million ways to track you, including 99.9999% of us who carry our phones around with us and pay with credit cards in physical stores.
It can’t be anonymous if you need a google or apple account to use. I’m not concerned about what the government tracks (well, not in this context at least), I’m concerned about who and what they’re working with to do the tracking. If the app verifies me as an adult but I couldn’t use the app without google butting in, google now has yet another data point in a secret ad profile that the government should be putting a stop to, not helping them build up. It’d be like announcing a plan to stop illegal drug usage by partnering with the cartel.
If they wanted a government-sponsored age verification sort of thing, it should’ve been an app whose only job was to type in a code you got from going in person to some government body and verifying in person. Town office, DMV, somewhere like that.
More fundamentally, though, “protecting the children” shouldn’t go anywhere near anything that can be used for identity theft. Showing my ID to the cashier at the cigarette shop is significantly safer than showing it to any business on the internet, because sharing a high-quality picture of something is giving them a copy. The cashier gets to see it, but it never leaves my sight and isn’t recorded in any way except probably some dodgy security camera where you can’t read it anyway.
Ok, so it’s about Google and Apple accounts.
When you say “Google butting in” can you be more specific about what it is you believe Google tracks in an app they haven’t made themselves but only ingested in their store? Is it your belief that Google tracks all app interactions even in apps without firebase or Google Ads SDK?
Honestly, I don’t know exactly what google can or can’t track if the app developer doesn’t specifically enable them. I don’t have specific evidence that they’ll even be able to tell if the user was verified or not
What I do know is they have repeatedly shown that they’re happy to hide or lie about what and how they track people, and more broadly about their business as a whole.
Again I cite the drug analogy. Google is in the business of tracking people and harvesting data for ads. It’s like inviting the cartel to the DARE program and expecting everything to go swimmingly.
If they want their age verification app to actually be anonymous, they shouldn’t force people to use a tracking service to use it. The app specifically won’t be functional on degoogled android phones and won’t be offered on desktop computers. Maybe Google can’t spy on anything going on in the app, but even so, they could correlate “used verification app, roblox usage went up” or “used verification app, continued to use Tinder, concluded adult, ignoring ‘do not track’ preference as it doesn’t violate laws about tracking minors”.
It’s true that a minority of users have taken the steps where this inferred information would be particularly helpful to google, but not having the option to opt out is going to get harder and harder, and this service doesn’t provide enough good to give the information cartel that is Google any more information, even inferred, in my opinion.
So you’re not sure what Google can and can’t track and you have no evidence, and the specification for the system is available online, which you seemingly haven’t read, but you’re just generally “worried” without citing specific evidence.
@sunbeam60 @Squizzy forr me the issue is mass survilance… Gate keeping cigarretes dont record the number of times a kid or a adult tried to but cigarretes
When you go to purchase those things in person, you present your ID, but then it is given back. They do not keep your ID. They do not get to make a copy of it’s information for them to store and sell and track you with. It is presented at that particular moment, and then control of it is returned to you.
That is not the case with these digital ID requirements. With these digital ID requirements, they absolutely make and keep a copy. They absolutely use the information from that copy to track you and sell your data on to others. They use it to build a profile on you about your behaviours and purchases etc which will absolutely be used to tighten the noose of control. And we’ve already seen, over and over and over again that pretty much every time they claim they aren’t doing those things, they absolutely still are. Even if they weren’t, they’ve also repeatedly demonstrated a complete and utter inability to secure that data from third parties accessing it too.
It is completely different and enormously more invasive than presenting your ID in person.
Most of what you’ve said is blatantly not true. Google (let’s use them instead of Apple here) can of course track your app use if the app uses Firebase or the Adds SDK - which clearly a verification should never do.
But Google doesn’t have the ability to see what you do inside of an app that aren’t voluntarily sending telemetry to Google. If you have proof that they do, please present it.
Those are physical things you purchase in real life.
A cinema screening is not a physical good. Yet we still age gate it.
How do you attend the cinema?