cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/42943610
Taken from the readme of the app on github:
The current release provides only basic functionality, with several key features to be introduced in future versions, including:
App and device verification based on Google Play Integrity API and Apple App Attestation
Additional issuance methods beyond the currently implemented eID based method.
These planned features align with the requirements and methods described in the Age Verification Profile.
There is an issue opened to remove this as it’s basically telling us that to verify our age in the EU an American corporation has the last word, making it not only a privacy nightmare but a de-facto monopoly on the phone market that will leave out of the verification checks even the fairphone (european) with /e/os.
Sorry for the slight tangent, but I agree with your response. Perhaps the best approach for technologically illiterate parents might be a child mode that runs a local filter list where it doesn’t send everywhere your kid goes to some online service, or simply not allowing kids to go online unsupervised when they’re not even teens yet. This is a solvable problem however, I feel like, at least more so than the server-side age checks.
It seems like the UK is now trying to make the nanny surveillance state part of all web forums, even outside of the UK: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/12/17/hundreds-of-websites-to-shut-down-under-chilling-internet/ Apparently, lemmy.zip is now even blocking UK users. I wonder if it would help if more forums did that, to show where we are heading if nobody is standing up…
This article is interesting as well: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/just-banning-minors-social-media-not-protecting-them My favorite quote is this one, “All methods for conducting age checks come with serious drawbacks. Approaches to verify a user’s age generally involve some form of government-issued ID document, which millions of people in Europe—including migrants, members of marginalized groups and unhoused people, exchange students, refugees and tourists—may not have access to. […] Age assurance methods always impact the rights of children and teenagers: Their rights to privacy and data protection, free expression, information and participation.”
Thanks so much. It’s refreshing to see how some people still have common sense.
In all honesty, I’m very tired of these invasions. But the reality is that this was created by us, parents, families, and tech corps and governments just saw the opening and walked right in.
Tech made us lazy, we fell into the bliss of convenience while entirely dropping our rights on their laps to do with as they wish. I’m guilty of that myself. I allowed Google home and Alexa devices into my home and used them all the time. Then it all clicked when I started seeing information on subjects that interested me, my wife and my kids all over the place, without even looking for them. I panicked bad when I realized something was very wrong, but the damage was already done.
This is what got me into the Privacy and security wagon, and it took me almost 8 years to revert that as much as possible and finally have some sense of safety (because some of that stuff is out there for good, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it).
Now I keep a sort of digital fortress around my family and myself, and I not willing to let it go anymore. This has made our family much more interactive in real life while at the same time harder targets for tech corps and governments.
Evidently, there are some of these that are unavoidable for us common folk, but we can compartmentalize our lives in ways that it’s harder, if not impossible to tie everything about us together into a single fully integrated profile. Yes, it requires work, time, money and missing out on some convenience, but the alternative is infinitely worse, full of unknown dangers that can affect us now or later.
Until most people are fully pushing back on all these dangers, it will only get way worse over time.
I believe that removing the possibility of profit for tech companies is the only way to effectively reverse this trend, however, most people are too distracted by all the screens around them and the carefully crafted content made precisely for this purpose to figure out what is really going on, and by the time we all end up figuring it out, it may very well be too late.
So, I would like to see less excuses by most people on how “it’s too hard for most people”, “some parents are not as tech savvy” and similar BS. That only helps keep the myth of “there’s nothing I can do about it” I alive, which is what all these institutions are banking on.
This is why lemmy is great. At least for now, most instances aren’t run for-profit and it shows.