Social media is going the way of alcohol, gambling, and other social sins: societies are deciding it’s no longer kids’ stuff. Lawmakers point to compulsive use, exposure to harmful content, and mounting concerns about adolescent mental health. So, many propose to set a minimum age, usually 13 or 16.
In cases when regulators demand real enforcement rather than symbolic rules, platforms run into a basic technical problem. The only way to prove that someone is old enough to use a site is to collect personal data about who they are. And the only way to prove that you checked is to keep the data indefinitely. Age-restriction laws push platforms toward intrusive verification systems that often directly conflict with modern data-privacy law.
This is the age-verification trap. Strong enforcement of age rules undermines data privacy.
Somehow everyone has forgotten about parental controls that have been apart of consumer grade home routers for years.
Parental controls are there specifically to help parents. These settings allow a parent to block everything online only allowing access to approved lists of websites, generaly done through a whitelist or approved websites.
What is missing at a government level is a curation effort of websites, similar to Libraries that classify books by genres and appropriate age levels.
I would propose a government fund where Librarians or similar organizations can start this effort, and make these lists easily accessible within routers for non tech individuals, together with local initiatives and programs for parents that have a interest to learn more.
For power users lists like these already exists curated by public individuals very similar to pihole block lists and whitelists.
This concept would be the most privacy respectful IMO giving parents the most power to parent, while respecting everyone else’s privacy online including children.
If this is the way forward, I’d very reluctantly accept some central organization (Apple, Google) to provide a Boolean isOfAge = true that you can use across the web. To be clear, I don’t like this either, but it’s just barely more stomachable than providing my ID to every fly-by-night poorly-secured website.
There’s no reason to give in to any of this shit in Any way
Ah, well most people use the internet for banking, employment, housing, medical care, government services, and communicating with friends and family, so… how would you propose to avoid it once it’s imemented?
That’s the point unfortunately.
The recent designation of anyone in the EU developing E2EE as a “hostile actor” makes that much clear.
The end of the anonymous web is nigh. We may not like it, but it’s probably the only way. We used to joke in the 90s about requiring an internet driver’s license before allowing people on Usenet. It might actually be happening.
And it might be a good decision in the dawn of the bot-internet. It forces even bots to be traceable to some real person or getting no access to the mentioned platforms. May be even bot-free platforms
Hypothetically: Lemmy instances where every user has to have physically met an admin and proved that they’re real or something. And they’ll only federate to other instances following the same rules.
It’ll almost be like the early 90s dialup BBS small communities, with FIDOnet ;)
