Tetsuo

You fell for the trap of thinking that you can only protect childrens by accepting to sacrifice privacy.

My post was clearly pushing for doing both :

Proving anonymously that you are an adult without giving your identity.

Again I have to repeat I’m not against preventing childrens from accessing social networks.

Where we disagree is that you think you have to give up on some privacy to achieve that goal. I don’t.

Now let’s agree that we disagree and I will let you give your faceid to shady businesses and see them leak two weeks later.

Believe what you want.

But don’t point your finger toward people that do their best to maximize their privacy.

Talk about yourself.

You might have surrendered but many have not.

I’m on linux, extensively use encryption, I’m not on any social network beside Lemmy, so I strongly disagree that anonymity is dead online.

Even doing what you’ve suggested won’t reduce the ability for the government and even data brokers to identify you.

That confirms you didn’t read my comment.

EUID has exactly the feature I’m describing in my post. Being able to prove your an adult without divulging your identity.

As my comment said, I’m not against the ban of kids accessing social networks. But I’m against age verification laws that are not protecting anonymity which is in my opinion the logical next step for politicians.

My comment is very much explaining why I want people to be able to verify their age anonymously.

And no, just because governments surveil their population doesn’t mean we should make it even easier with privacy invading age verification laws.

So can you explain to me how you don’t think the government has the technical capabilities to already monitor internet usage of its citizens?

Never said or even implied that.

Here is how I wish we would solve this problem :

Every adult citizen gets an electronic ID card. Said smartcard let’s you authenticate on government websites (FIDO2). And maybe it could sign your vote for referendums if that’s possible in your country. Every smartcard would be secured with a PIN code.

It also can create an anonymous “adult cryptographic token” to register on adult sites, gambling sites and social networks.

Parents could create a token for their childs but they take responsibility for any illegal use, for example in this case using social networks below 16 years old.

Edit : This seems to already be a project in the EU with the EUDI Wallet. It is supposed to start deployment before the end of 2026. Too bad the UK left the EU, this EUDI wallet has features to prove anonymously that you are an adult…

Now what really will happen is politics will say “think of the children” and use that opportunity for more surveillance of their population.

It’s too bad technical problems are answered by politicians and not engineers. We are also very late in term of digital ID cards. Everybody should have for free the means to authenticate online and do so anonymously when needed. We live in a digital world, we need the tools to evolve in it.