This consolidation of power is a dream come true for the Big Tech platforms, but it’s a nightmare for users. While the megacorporations get more traffic and a whole lot more user data (read: profit), users are left with far fewer community options and a bland, corporate surveillance machine instead of a vibrant public sphere. The internet we all fell in love with is a diverse and colorful place, full of innovation, connection, and unique opportunities for self-expression. That internet—our internet—is worth defending.
What if devices would have a private chip to have the ID, so the website would just request if user is underage or not. Would this be private? Instead of sending the whole id to the online platform?
Some kind of anonymous token that says “I’m adult” and smart card on credit cards are kind of that, but they have a unique identifier that identifies you. They’re not anonymous which is the only acceptable kind of adult verification. It makes more sense to cordon off all parts of the internet with identity/age verification and consider them destroyed. I’d like to have an IP banlist of all participants in his harebrained scheme, just rip off the bandair immediately rather than have them shit the bed down the line.
Amazes me how the UK Labour Party and Starmer managed to absolutely squander their one opportunity after gaining power for the first time in many years.
i find it interesting that some of the most debased, vile, disgusting perverts to ever live are passing laws to force regular, everyday people to dox themselves just so they can see a tig ol gilf bitty.
Depends on the platform surely, couldn’t a lemmy instance just ignore the UK? Not block, ignore.
I am sure I saw that smaller platforms are seeing a surge in popularity because they are not doing it while pornhub saw a large drop. How many switched to a VPN and how many use another site?
Even safer might be that image that’s been circulating. It states that if you’re in the UK, the hosting site is required to verify your age, but they’re not required to verify your location. Now, please click on of these buttons indicating whether or not you’re in the UK to determine whether age verification must be performed.
(Presumably “I am in the UK” leads to an innocuous website)
I’d prefer: “I’m in the UK and want to be age verified” and “I’m not in the UK and don’t want to be age verified.”
Could you elaborate on why?
It gives more info as to the consequences of clicking that button. If they just ask if you’re in the UK, people could reasonably assume they’re going to serve UK-relevant content. If they say it’s for ave verification purposes directly, people will know they can click the other button to avoid the spyware.
I don’t think I agree, as I think almost any individual clicking those buttons could extrapolate that there was some subterfuge involved, but I do appreciate your take.
Did you see the original meme to which I’m referring?
Nope. Not a brit, so probably didn’t see it in my circles.
I’m also not a Brit, but it was popular here on lemmy for a day or two. Unfortunately, my very brief image searches aren’t returning it, but I’ll try to find it for you.
Most of the smaller sites are doing just that. But mainstream sites do have identification in place.
I still think it’s a clearly designed plan by VPN providers to make themselves relevant.
Absolutely never using any service that requires this. I dont even have any account on those platforms and I never will.
I completely agree. The minute a platform asks me to do age verification is the moment I leave that platform.
I will take my traffic to platforms that won’t do shit like that.
Hard to avoid using services that do it when it’s your own government that forces the sites & services you use to do this
‘Forces’ should not even be used in this context. These companies are all too happy to be able to get even more PII from everyone.
Some of them. Yes, many others not so much. Are you not realizing the thread you’re commenting on here?
That smaller site services and companies who really don’t want to collect this data are going to be forced to at an expense that may be too high for their entry point into the market they’re trying to work in?
Or even worse websites or services that are hosted for free may have to incur costs they cannot afford for data they don’t want to collect.
Unfortunately sometimes it’s too late. Any platform can lock your account and keep your data until you unlock it and GDPR and similar do not protect against it. That’s what Twitter and LinkedIn started to do - require verification and no way to delete your account if you decline.
Thanks to GDPR you can email them to have your data deleted though. In fact, it’s what I’d suggest. Give them extra work.
How do you verify it’s you? Just email address seems weird.
Should be enough given it’s the same address the account was registered with.
I’ve tried emailing LinkedIn with no response. Apparently this is not covered by gdpr because you still need to confirm identity
Then I will just update my profile to a link my own cv page.
You can’t do anything with a locked account. Just a screen to do a web cam verification.
Ah you meant like that…
Yeah, the power these companies have over our lives is very disturbing. They have positioned themselves as something most academic people really need, at least linkedin has.
I am disinclined to believe that this is a death-sentence for smaller platforms longterm.
Depends on the nature of the platform. It is not good for small commercial entities that will be required to enact a ID verification system because it will increase the cost of entry to the market.
Increasing the cost of entry will benefit large corporations that will easily absorb the cost. Platforms that don’t require it will likely be unaffected.
It is not good for small commercial entities that will be required to enact a ID verification system because it will increase the cost of entry to the market.
As someone who works in this space, I doubt it’s going to be an issue for smaller entities. We already have SSO for basic login identity from a variety of providers (Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple) — smaller sites already love to use these as it provides easy access to existing users, and saves a ton of coding for having to handle login information, password management, etc.
These same entities can handle the age verification. Now I can see arguments as to why centralizing logins and age verification like this could be a problem for users, but if I decided to start my own social media app tomorrow I’d likely rely on the big platforms to handle all of this (as we already see everywhere — heck, app for ordering pizza support Facebook, Google, and Apple logins), and save myself the cost and hassle of implementing this myself (never mind the potential embarrassment and liability should someone hack my site). Then it’s on those platforms to worry about age verification.
All of these services are currently free, and save you from a ton of coding around user accounts and authentication, so using them is usually cheaper then having to DIY it.
Yes, but I will never log in to any site with those. If those are my only options I am not using your website.
And that’s just fine. Considering how many people do login with those services, I doubt any that use the SSO services will particularly miss you and the small subset of users who don’t want to let a third-party service confirm your login.
That’s not meant as snark — every app and website out there has some subset of users who will decry “I won’t use that because it does X”. And that’s fine. It’s a personal decision. But it likely won’t significantly affect development decisions, as it’s going to happen with some group for some reason anyway.
currently free
And that’s always worked out in the past, hasn’t it?
Imagine putting your entire business in a position where one of Google’s half-assed AIs could decide tomorrow at zero notice to cut you off from your entire user base.
This is why most apps that do use such services use more than one. Lots of modern sites have buttons for “Login with Google”, “Login with Facebook”, “Login with Apple”. None of them want to lose access to the user data and analytics they get from these services — so I doubt one is going to jump into cutting you off or requiring payment while the others are still free.
It would take all of these services to (illegally) coordinate to suddenly start charging — and of all of them I don’t see that being in the interest at all for Apple. Apple’s login service uses Touch and Face ID on their devices, and is part of the selling point for those devices (extremely easy logins with no password). They’re not making their money off Single Sign-On (SSO) login services — they make their money off selling devices, and they make the case for selling these devices in large part by selling “simplicity”.
So if you’re worried today about a login service yanking the rug out from under you, you just implement many/all of them. It’s not significantly more work — all of them are based off OAuth — so long as your website or app can authenticate via OAuth you just need to use the APIs each company provides to implement the authentication, and you’re done.
Nothing them stops you as you get bigger form implementing your own login/authentication service — and if you ever get big enough, you too can offer it as a service for other websites.
“Don’t worry, it’ll only affect the 70% of your users that choose that one” isn’t the safeguard you seem to think it is.
I will take your word for it then. Thanks for letting me know.
Hopefully, in the EU at least, the verification will be provided by the government. Like a 2FA, meaning Big Tech would only get a verified token and nothing else.
The government already got passports with our face, and have had it for many years. They could use that information.
That would mean that any platform could implement this verification, and never get hold on any data.
Best case in a shitty scenario, I know.
No. There’s no “hopefully” anything when it comes to this bullshit. It’s bad for the individual, full stop. This is not a thing to compromise on, because any compromise at all will eventually harm the users (though leaks/hacks, or government overreach, etc.) without any actual benefit or offset to them.
Its bad, but a govt service is the best implementation.
Will vpns still work? What would the legal ramifications be if you used one?
They’re planning on making vpns illegal. They haven’t said that yet but they are.
making vpns illegal
PRC anthem intensifies
You can’t always simply VPN around it. I applied for a job via one of the popular job sites. Tried to log back in to the job site a week later only to to find my account had been blocked until I provide proof of ID to a US based third party company …I’m in Europe. Spoiler alert: I did not provide proof of ID & so have no idea whether or not I was a suitable applicant for the job.
Guess i won’t be job hunting through that site again. The whole thing is farcical.
This is the display of how we fight this. And I can only imagine the balls it took for you to take that position and move along. You’re one of those scarce unsung heroes that stands by his values instead of bending over to avoid inconvenience or even potentially detrimental outcomes.
Well done for not backing down, mate. Fuck the private info scrapers.
there need to be dedicated 3rd party age verification services separate from the site. the people with my identity info don’t need to see what i’m doing on the site, and the site doesn’t need to know my identity any more than a general age group.
No, as soon as you ask the government to send a site a token verifying you, you’ve given up your privacy to the government.
Also, how are smaller sites going to pay for this service? This is the tech bros using the religious nuts to pull the ladder up behind them. Locking in the monopoly. The only answer is the freedom we’ve had for the last 35 years.
Well, as much as I hate it, there’s no privacy when it comes to your government, and this is the case even since the internet was a thing.
Yes, we can keep some stuff obscured from the government, but the fact is that they know everything about us since we are born (probably even before). We need driver’s license, passport, bank accounts, registering homes, cars, even dogs, putting kids in the school system, health services, the list seems infinite.
But that does not mean we have to stop pushing back, because if we do, we’re utterly fucked.
My government doesn’t know everything about me. Look at the news and how long it takes for basic information about a high profile criminal to come out. It takes a lot of investigative effort to put all that info together, even if it’s all largely from various government agencies.
Some stuff is easy to track (e.g. registrations), but a lot isn’t. That means there’s absolutely precedent for privacy from the government on things that don’t matter to it. Why should the welfare department need information about my driving history or whether I have a passport? It doesn’t, so it shouldn’t have access.
I agree, it shouldn’t, but I but they do. Don’t deceive yourself like that. As I said, some stuff you can (still) keep under wraps, that’s how criminals do it, but connecting the dots they almost invariably get caught, sooner or later.
Right, like Al Capone got caught for tax evasion instead of all the murders and whatnot. If they’re digging, they’ll find it, and they can get almost anything with a warrant.
My point is that governments are generally pretty dysfunctional with information sharing, so even if they have a piece of information, it’s unlikely the appropriate agency has it. They’re getting more and more information the more crap like age verification gets passed, but that doesn’t change the dysfunction between agencies.
users are left with far fewer community options
Where is the fediverse in this analysis?
Edit: The article references Bluesky fleeing Mississippi due to risk of fines. Do admins running fediverse instances run similar risks?
Bluesky was the first platform to make the announcement. In a public blogpost, Bluesky condemned H.B. 1126’s broad scope, barriers to innovation, and privacy implications, explaining that the law forces platforms to “make every Mississippi Bluesky user hand over sensitive personal information and undergo age checks to access the site—or risk massive fines.” As Bluesky noted, “This dynamic entrenches existing big tech platforms while stifling the innovation and competition that benefits users.” Instead, Bluesky made the decision to cut off Mississippians entirely until the courts consider whether to overturn the law.
Just goes to show that blue sky isn’t as decentralized as they would like you to think they are.
