So, OS-level age-gating is going federal, which will effectively kill your rights to device ownership and what’s left of free speech and expression.
Enjoy your free speech while you still have it because this is a clear attempt to erase that right.
SOPA never died, it just went into hiding until time to reemerge, and now’s that time, this is basically SOPA in a save the kids trenchcoat.
This bill is being pushed by Meta and they are NOT going to stop with age verification. It is not about “protecting children” and it never has been. It’s always been about surveillance and control. Meta wants to know who you are, where you are, what you buy, what you download, who you associate with and what your politics are.
If Meta succeeds in putting all this on your computer at the operating system level, then what is the point of even having a VPN anymore? Also Meta will sell this information to anyone who asks for it.
Meta is pushing this because their platforms are overrun by bots. Ironically because partly of the AI tools they have created. And advertisers have caught up and aren’t willing to pay top dollars anymore on Meta’s platforms. Hence why Meta desperately wants a way to proof that their traffic comes from real people.
They also benefit from it as it impacts OS providers like Apple and Google. These companies need to contend with privacy flaws and supporting them on their devices, spending resources on that, while Meta just uses the OS API to “verify” user age pretending they care about children. Profit.