Device attestation is another - making sure you're using an unmodified government approved operating system and apps linked to your ID.

Any site, with any concern about age of user liability, is likely to adopt the practice. Strong laws, sold on their face value safety benefits, will increase that liability.

You won’t see any laws removing or limiting that liability.

The trend will be many more sites becoming government-gated, than we are imagining now.

Beyond surveillance, it’s a real step into government permissioned internet access, on an individual citizen level.

> Everything you say CAN and WILL be used against you.

Especially when what you said has already been recorded and tied to your identity before you faced the authorities.

Edit: from last week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632269

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

As the internet become the place where people do a lot of things, no government (and especially no security services) will be able to keep themselves from trying to control it or at least monitor it. And with the new LLM features they can automatically do much more than before.

Human nature is a constant and when the government sees an easy way to enforce something, many more bureaucrats will try to do it.

If you're located in, say, Norway - and send someone who is also located in Norway a message via Messenger, there's a good likelihood that message will go to some foreign located Meta server, and back to Norway.

When this was being implemented, there was some noise and protests from experts, but that's about it. For the general population it went quietly and without notice.

You need to explain to and convince those parents that this will result in something worse.

Everyone else can stay anonymous.

I look forward to hearing why that won't work and what problems it will cause.

Instead of arguing on the bad this brings, we should push our authorities to enforce mechanism that still respect the anonymity of a person.

France's "France Identité" started to implement an approach that respect anonymity by using what they call a "double anonymity: a principle that ensures that neither the adult site nor the age-appropriate provider can know who is accessing what. Using advanced cryptographic technologies—digital signatures and zero-knowledge proofs—the system generates proof of age without revealing identity or browsing history." (source: https://entrevue.fr/en/police-justice/verification-dage-sur-...)

French's state should already have these informations from us (as a French citizen) so asking them to provide a certificate that guarantee my age seems like an obvious choice, and giving that digital certificate to any site without having to tell the issuer where I'm going is, I think, the best solution for the worst project.

(There a lot of news about this, but mostly in French. If you are curious:

- https://www.franceinfo.fr/societe/pornographie/l-arcom-impos...

- https://www.frandroid.com/culture-tech/web/2962099_france-id... )

The internet, as we knew it, is over. It has been dead for a few years, but it is getting clear now only. It had its great moments, while it lasted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_in_Italy#Venice

"The tradition of wearing masks seems to stem from the 13th century. During the ages the Venetians disguised themselves with mask whenever they thought necessary. It allowed them to escape from the rigid rules of the class hierarchy. All classes could mingle, men could be women, women could be men. It also led to unwanted behaviour, from throwing eggs filled with ink to all imaginable kinds of vulgarities. Masks made people unrecognisable, so they could not be prosecuted.

Near the end of the Republic, the right to wear masks in daily life was severely restricted. By the 18th century, it was limited to three months starting at December 26 and ending on the last day of Carnival, Shrove Tuesday. Masks were also used in ceremonies, eg. when ambassadors arrived and at the five ritual grand banquets offered each year to Venetian dignitaries by the doge. This resembles the Masquerade Balls during Carnival nowadays. Venetian noblemen and noblewomen wore a costume called a bautta consisting of a white mask (volto), a tricorn hat (tricorno), a hood worn under the hat (zendale) and a tabarro, a loose-fitting cloak. There were subtle differences between noble and non-noble (cittadini or popolani), and the popolani were known to wear more colorful, fun masks to festivities like the bull runs."

https://www.carnival-in-venice.eu/venetian-carnival-masks.ht...

At least in the case of the EU, this is not the case. The age verification is performed anonymously based on the eWallet.[0]

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EU...

The internet needs new spaces that are more decentralized and less in bed with governments.

We already lost our freedom when we agreed to move from IRC to Discord, from phpBB to Reddit, etc.

The teenagers who are blocked from mainstream social media will deliver us new free online spaces that are better than what they're blocked from.

Yet the powerful continue to insist on "papers, please" anonymity-rending personal authentication over anonymous authorization. It's not often that the villains of history so clearly identify themselves.

My bunch is that the people driving this stuff were unaware that age verification could be privacy-preserving and can't exactly back down now.

No, they don't. The proposed EU verification system provides a proof of age to the service but no physical identity data.

This is possibly a slippery slope, but I don't think it's correct to state the two things are equivalent.

There is a huge difference between protecting children and prosecuting/punishing children. Age verification can only be an implementation of the latter.

It is a catastrophically dangerous idea, and it's exactly what the abusive social media companies want.

Better yet, how about - "call your representatives"?

Some nerds, for lack of a better term, think crypto and cryptography are the answers to every privacy problem. The only way to fix society and the law is by engaging with those things. Not sidestepping them with cryptography, an unscalable approach in any case.

I'm deeply pessimistic about the future. The only group competent enough to oppose identity verification has its head in the sand.

I think this Cloudflare business ties into it, although it is masquerading as bot protection.

I'll call it out because your article doesn't, but does reference Australia. Here our eSafety commissioner has set the requirements such that the use of Government ID for verification must not be the only option.

There are other age verification technologies that do not assign identity but use other means as a method to identify age. For example, when our ban came into play I wasn't all of a sudden required to offer my ID.

Nobody would support a "give away my anonymity online so I can be shown an ad for Coca Cola" bill. But it's easier to sell a law to boomers and lawmakers if you use the disguise of "It's for the children ." As if any of these companies care about the well being of children. See Meta confirming their platforms affect the mental health of children and doing nothing about it. Also platforms like TikTok and YouTube optimizing their algorithms for stealing user's attention spans.

The problem is not if you have done something ethically wrong ('I have nothing to hide'), but if you can trust the people who will have control over those systems in the future. Who will be in control in 10 years?

Can you trust future governments to respect "Nulla poena sine lege"?

Why should it be different on the internet ? Provided we live in countries where freedom of speech is enacted.

Of course in Russia or china it's different but surely they already have tools like that.

What is illegal immigration?

I think it's funny that most people who scream about freedom only mean their own freedom. "Age verification" is nothing more as a new law, from a state. You all so naive that the state would stop by their "own" citizens, because... because why?

This is the thing that so upsetting with the discourse. Privacy is already eroded, its just by private companies, not the state. All social networks have a gateway for law enforcement that allows getting extra details about users.

There is another gateway with ISPs to correlate IPs with end users.

In the USA you can just buy most of that info through brokers.

Sure, people who takes precautions it takes extra work, but for dave on facebook, its pretty automatic.

I really wish people would foccus on that bit, because the way to get privacy back is to get a handle on social media companies(and google). They are the ones who've eroded our privacy, and if we just say "Oooo age gating is bad mmkay" without a viable alternative, then we'll all get something worse.

The solution is to limit what social media companies can profit from, so _they_ can regulate what shit they put in front of kids eyes. They can totally do it (after all how much porn is actually hosted on youtube? its really really hard, because they put in place systems to stop it.)

The term "social media" as used here means a third party website, e.g., Mark Zuckerberg's website, Elon Musk's website, Larry Page's website, etc., encouraging internet users to communicate and/or share files with other internet users via the website, allowing the third party to intermediate, collect data, perform surveillance and provide ad services to other third parties who want to target the "social media" user

‘If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him”

I know that reads like I'm being snarky, but I'm not trying to be. Within the last decade in the UK we have had (among others):

- the 2016 Snoopers' Charter

- the 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act

- the 2023 Public Order Act

- the 2023 Online Safety Act

- the 2024 Addendum to the 2016 Snoopers' Charter

Couple that with the whole push to repeal the 1998 Human Rights Act and withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, and the fact we've started imprisoning pensioners for holding up signs, and it's really difficult to _not_ see exactly where this leaves us.

I wish I could look away and get on with my life, but I can't - and I'm starting to realise that that is also part of the design. The increasing reluctance to express controversial opinion online isn't an accidental side effect of all of this legislation. It is intended behaviour, the desired outcome.

Age restriction has been around for longer than the internet itself, so its regulators applying that logic to the online world.

Whilst I think age verification has its issues, I don't see what other options they actually have. I'll also make the point that in Australia, our regulations explicitly require that Government ID verification CANNOT be the only way and that companies must adopt an additional approach.

Almost everything in technology used to protect us can be used against us by those want or choosing to do the wrong thing, does that mean we don't do anything?

If you ask any millenial, none of this bs existed during our time, parents wouldn't think twice to educate you, if you know you know haha

That statement is weird in itself because said parents are yesterday's millenial.

Add to that how companies and governments are trying to become a China. You cannot silence those that you don't know who they are.

Ohh did you say something a politician or a cop didn't like??? Now they can hunt you down and force you to delete the post or whatever.

Sci-fi movies are no longer just si-fi movies, it is easier than never to:

1. Know how you are and all the consequence behind that

2. Be a victim of identity theft. Look at how many millions of personal information including passports have been leaked into the dark web. In 2026, if you have the right skill and like doing the wrong thing, you can be anyone because their name, address, phone, photo, passporte, everything, is right there.

What gives me peace of mind is that by the time everything goes to shit, I am not longer in this world lmao haha

The title is almost obvious. Surveilance is already 24/7/365. If you're not completely appalled you haven't been paying attention.

With regards to 'democracy', as with jurors, common-sense is a mixed bag... A politician in an area close to mine ran a write-in campaign contacted ~8000+ people, got ~5k votes. The Democrat on the ballot was unknown, signed-up last minute, gave no ballot statment, didn't advertise, or canvas and won; surmisably because they were listed as Democrat.

Another, earlier, was a Democrat state representative who got redistricted out of their seat by their own party for lack of toeing the party line.

Most of my ballot here is single person for each category, Should a challenger come up... well money is speech and thus taxation is censorship, and propaganda costs. When you hear a politician speak they are psychologically projecting from their own affectual experience.

Freedom ended with the concept of allodium. We've all been slaves ever since. Don't believe that, walk nude, spouting nazi, or Stalinist slogans at work or even in your front yard or porch and see if you can pay your property tax or rent for the next period.

- A 30 year prison sentence for tansporting a box of zines in Texas [1]. To do so they invented "antifa" as an organization out of whole cloth and will now use those convictions as further proof. I've seen this compared to the Salem witch trials;

- Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident, was detained and there is still ongoing deportation proceedings. What for? Organizing a peaceful protest at Columbia against the genocide being committed by Israel [2];

- Renee Good and Alex Pretti who were simply protesting ICE were killed essentially in cold blood and there have been zero consequences;

- Over 700 charged under the Terrorist Act in the UK for expressing support for Palestine. Defenders will argue Palestine Action is a designated terrorism group without asking why. Also, that's how it always works. Slavery was legal once. Freeing slaves was illegal. Does that make the Underground Railroad a terrorist organization? Today it would;

- In ~35 states in the US to work for or in government you have to express varying degrees of loyalty to Israel or at least commit never to boycott Israel eg [3]. To date, the Supreme Court has never substantively taken up these cases as the clear First Amendment violation they are;

- In PA, the Swarthmore 9 are being charged over their protests with the bullshit charge of "defiant trespass" [4];

- In Australia, in the wake of the Bondi shooting, new anti-"hate crime" legislation was passed that is so broad and sweeping that the Greens claim you could be charged with criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu [5].

- Numerous examples of the administration pulling funding and bringing colleges to heel over not cracking down sufficiently on Gaza protests.

So why I find these tired tropes about China so exhausting and lazy is because:

1. Look at what's happening here and in the West at large; and

2. Ironically, China has a system for age verification that actually works and the answer is really simple. The government issues the IDs. It can verify the IDs. We do this all the time with employment (eg E-Verify). You can even do it in such a way that the app doesn't get any sensitive information.

But it's like people say "you can't trust government" (even though the government already has all that data) and then thinks that a private company is the only possible solution (eg Peter Thiel's Persona).

If you've gotten this far you should know that at no point in any of the above have I argued for age verification. So far all I've said is that there is an absolute double standard in the fearmongering around it and that is it possible to create a relatively effective regime for it without handing everyone's data to Peter Thiel.

I think it's inarguable at this point that what we're doing now has been a dismal failure and something's gotta give. I think we should start by attacking the financial incentives here, namely:

1. Tech companies already use behavioural analysis to guess your demographics. If they figure out you're under 18 you should have a restricted experience. That should include no advertising, a much more limited algorithmic feed, etc;

2. Stop tech companies from being able to sell advertising to minors. Don't allow an advertiser to target an audience that includes minors as best as the tech company knows they are minors.

I personally think we could eliminate a bunch of harm just by attacking the advertising incentive here.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Mahmoud_Khalil

[3]: https://www.txdot.gov/manuals/csd/ncp/standards_for_contract...

[4]: https://iacenter.org/2026/06/27/swarthmore-9-on-trial-for-pr...

[5]: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jan/21/criti...

In all these operations, anonymity is what drives it.

I was born and raised in the anonymous internet, and tasted its freedoms. I oppose censorship. But, at this point, I have come to wonder it it would be best to always have your real-life personality attached to all you do. At least to any action that feeds an algorithm or creates something someone else can see.

It is the nature of the internet that you could never achieve absolute censorship -- and maybe anonymity should belong to the hackers and tinkers with the will and drive to hunt and craft for it.

I do not like holding this opinion, because it feels as though it is on the similar boat as that of those who 'pull up the ladder after themselves'. Increasingly, I see it as pulling shut the trapdoors to hell.

P.S. This goes without saying -- it's also the only was to defend against "ai" bots.

EDIT: I'm thoroughly convinced that my initial position here was wrong. Yeah -- easy to forget that, with, COINTELPRO, the feds are not bound by the same laws as the people, and that oligarch-controlled media will bend over backwards to give them backdoors. Thanks for all the feedback.

The only thing that the requester needs to save is the "this person is 18+ as verified by this party".

Granted, that's still an avenue for law enforcement to find out who you are, but then, so is your internet service provider or VPN (where the VPN is likely already a honeypot)

There’s nothing new in publishing anonymously, just ask George Elliot. What’s new is the notion that publishers have no liability. Social media companies do not claim to speak for themselves. They have no reporters, no sources to protect. They’re one giant “letters to the editor” section. They should know for whom they speak.

Whether or not a writer commits libel is for the courts to decide. Neither the writer nor publisher has the right to avoid responsibility by camouflage.

I always find this form of argument in favor of privacy (which is valuable in its own right to be clear) so roundabout. If you’re concerned about the government impinging on your freedom of speech, then why not write an essay arguing for expansive freedom of speech protections? That seems like a much more direct solution to the problem presented in this essay.