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.
Absolutely never using any service that requires this. I dont even have any account on those platforms and I never will.
What if the platform you use with your relatives suddenly requires this?
If my relatives want to talk to me, they can pick up the phone.
I will stop using it of course. There is a price to pay for not being affected by this. Its not going to be free.
I personally don’t use Instagram already, no need to wait for age verification.
WhatsApp is the one I can’t skip yet, but it they force this shit I’m out.
May I suggest using Signal messenger over WhatsApp.
WhatsApp does use the Signal messaging protocol but I don’t trust meta not to modify their implementation of it.
Signal is a privacy at all costs foundation.
I suggest to my friends and family, but they don’t care. A few will use it, but for groups and such is basically dead
Yeah, that’s the one I am fearing, the enshitification of Whatsapp, I think it already happened in some countries.
I’ve never used WhatsApp and never will. My friends and family can contact me through a number of other ways, and I’m introverted enough that it won’t bother me too much if they don’t.
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.