the very same rules that have allowed literally every single piece of my data to be leaked several separate times, and now i have free credit monitoring instead of privacy? and all of those companies still operate normally, as if nothing ever happened? very neat.

>Discord said it is using the additional time this year to add more verification options, including credit cards, more transparency on vendors and technical detail of how age verification will work

and why didnt we start with credit cards? instead of facial recognition with peter thiel? (this is a rhetorical question)

Remember it's not just about pornography. It's anything deemed "harmful to minors" including platforms like Reddit, Bluesky or stuff conservative lawmakers think is harmful like discussion forums for LGBTQ people, sexual health information or dissident political opinions.

They also examine how these laws, which are often backed by the religious Right, are getting support more broadly from people who see it as a way to rein in Big Tech who are creating "social media addiction" and so forth.

And even within our industry there is a lot of money to be made by creating and selling compliance products, so even on forums like this you will find people advocating for them.

"Another Internet Law That Punishes Everyone" - Power User Podcast 1/9/26: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bnp3nmpK9g

I'm not saying the inverse is the answer either, just that if anyone without an agenda of surveillance looked at this for a second, the penny would have dropped. So I can only assume that this was the purpose the whole time.

The UK's Online Safety Act originally had a proposal that would allow users to purchase an ID code anonymously in cash from a corner store, presenting only ID to the cashier the same way as buying alcohol. This was never implemented, because it's more useful for the government and corporations to link all online usage to a government ID.

If it was actually about kids, we'd have done it a long time ago. With more focus on things like porn and gambling (including 'loot box' gambling in games) rather than social media.

The second option is ignoring the verification request. Goodbye online-gaming-with-strangers on Xbox. (I see this as a positive). Same goes for Ubisoft who aggressively wanted my secret papers to verify my identity.

I've yet to come across anything I want or need outside banking or government use where age verification benefits me, or is so useful/important that I would willingly hand over critical secret documents. I've not even needed to use a VPN for anything. It doesn't mean it won't happen, but when it does, option #1 or #2 is going to cover everything.

Which circles back to the main point here - if I ignore it, then effectively I get identified as a non-adult. How does this protect anybody?

(UK-based, might not be the same everywhere)

This could have been avoided [1] if the real goal was to protect small children. No need for third parties or sharing sensitive data that will eventually be "ooopsie leaked totally by mistake" or outright sold/shared. No perfect, nothing is.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152074

The tiktok/youtube recommendation algorithms will undoubtedly cause more harm to minors than wandering onto an adult website and learning about how babies are made.

[0] "Cypherpunks Uncut." https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xt3hpb

Anonymous and uncensored information exchange can prevent the vast majority of violent conflicts and shorten the necessary ones. Most violence in human history could have been prevented if every human being had 1) the ability to telepathically communicate with anyone else in the world without being eavesdropped, and 2) the ability to broadcast information anonymously to all of humanity in real-time. I will leave the details of why for you to deduce. These things are within reach right now for the first time in history. So we can and should build the decentralized web, and democratize the entire computing supply chain all the way down to chip fabbing and electricity generation. It is the greatest unrealized potential of the Internet, and we mustn't cede ground to ensure the path to that future remains open.

I also wouldn't be surprised if there were plenty of people only dimly aware of the idea of a VPN who are now sitting up and taking note.

The problem with any online age verification system is not only that many other info is leaked (personal, IP address etc) but even the fact that YOU apply for such a service and might use it for nasty things.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260308223909/https://www.cnbc....

I can see how the problem is real. (Not sarcasm.)

In technical terms, "balance" is trivial. Put an air/security gap between information collected for age verification and the dossiers they have on users.

In business terms, conflict. They have relentless incentives and pressures to collect, collate and leverage every bit of information that can increase their return on users. Legal gray and black behaviors are rampant and tolerated where protectable. The number of paths to a creative interpretation of "balance" is unbounded. Right up to the c-suite.

It is sad, but self-aware, if they feel awkward trusting themselves with a mandated database full of tasty information they are not supposed to taste.

But maybe this is yet another attemption to produce mindless factory workers who won't rise against their lords even if someone inserts something something to them. While recording it, of course. For the profit... Erm, science.

Discord’s age verification is optional and only required to disable the image content filter, join adult servers, and a couple other features. I’m not saying it’s a good decision, but I am getting tired of the repeated claim that it’s mandatory to go do age verification to use the service.

This lazy reporting is hurting the messaging because readers will believe that mandatory age verification was implemented and everything is fine, so new laws will not change anything for the worse. It needs to be clear that age verification laws would change the situation considerably, not be a nothingburger.

I don’t plan to do the Discord age verification and neither do most of the people I interact with on Discord. It’s not mandatory.

I don’t recommend anyone rush to do the Discord age verification unless you really need to for some reason. Don’t believe all of the lazy articles saying it’s mandatory.

we, as a society, need to stop taking companies at their word when they say that the obvious harms that are right around the corner are overblown.

You were supposed to be the bastions of freedom and justice, and the rest of the world begrudgingly admired you for that and were slowly improving to become like you, but ever since 9/11/2001 the rich old people that rule you have been feeding you boogeymen to make you their complacent b*tches and you lay down and crawl along and accept everything without even a whimper.

Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai etc where the old money cabals run everything, and it's not some third world backhole that was suffering already anyway, but you yourself that are the worst victims of all their laws and wars.

It makes sense for some specific situations, but the goal is always to move towards a classes society. Classes (including Types, Traits, Lifetimes) are something you use because you have to, not because you want to. They warp thinking (and traceability) in measurable ways.

And I'm sick of being strapped to a population of have-nots that are too fuck-dumb to do anything about it.

#notabug #wontfix

Can anyone point to resources to help me end my habitual dependence on the internet?

>most people will not verify their age

>can't be sure they're an adult so treat everyone like children just in case

>wait what? the trojan horse allows them to monitor and surveil them?

I'm shocked. Shocked! Well, not that shocked.

All for making sites to send a header with restrictions as they apply in law (age rating per location for example -- so a site could send "US:16 US-TX:18 IE:14 GB:18 DE:16" etc), and even categorise as not required in law (category=gambling or category=healthcare)

That gives the browser/app/accessing device the power to display or not display

The second part of this is to empower parents -- let them choose the age rating which can only be changed with a parental code etc. Make this the law on all consumer commercial devices -- i.e phones, macbooks, windows.

This is trivial and worthwhile.

Yes some 15 year old will build something in python in a user session to work around it as they have a general purpose computer, that's a tiny amount of the problem. Solve the 90% problem first.

But to be honest I don't understand where they come from. Seems people are upset about being de anonymized on the internet. It was my understanding that it is trivial for the government to deanonymize you directly through their own tooling and trivial for private industry to deanonymize you through statistical analysis.

So in that sense, what new thing are we fearing that will come to bear that hasn't come to bear already? Seems to me we are already in a post anonymous world and just maybe most people don't understand that memo until this story came out. Media runs with it so much because people read about it not because it is actually anything new per say.