Online threats to children are real, but the headlong pursuit of age verification that we’re seeing around the world is unacceptable in its approach and far too broad in scope — and we simply can’t afford to get this wrong.
To be clear, parents’ concerns are valid and sincere. Few people would argue that kids should have unfettered access to adult material, to self-harm how-tos, to social media platforms that manipulate them and expose them to abuse.
But it’s the very depth of those worries that is being cynically exploited. Age verification as is currently being proposed in country after country would mean the death of anonymity online.
And we know exactly who stands to gain: The same tech giants who built the privacy nightmare that the internet is today.
https://proton.me/blog/anonymity-vs-privacy
These guys are such clowns. They stop just short of saying anonymity is bad by saying things like you can’t use your logging if you anonymously log in (duh) and bizarrely you may be more secure without it.
"A good example of this is Proton Mail‘s optional authentication logs feature. Enabling this prevents you from logging into your account anonymously, but it improves your security by allowing you to detect suspicious logins (for example, a login from another country).
For most people, privacy is a great deal more important than anonymity’
They won’t provide it with their own service and instead push it onto the user. For instance, most recently they have been known to log credit card data. A company really concerned with security would not store this data on their own servers and there are practical ways to accomplish this.
This company makes its money on security theatre. I swear they are a honeypot for criminals actors and they know it hence why they downplay anonymity.