If every country starts requiring that people provide official ID in order to "verify their age" to use social media, there will be no way to use any social media without associating the account with a legal identity.

This is horrible for democracy,
and should terrify everyone.

It doesn't matter if platforms use third-parties or not. It doesn't matter if they use some special encrypted code, the result is the same. This gatekeeps open discussions and government criticisms free from reprisals.

This is bad.
This is China "free-speech" bad.

#Democracy #AgeVerification #Privacy

This entry was edited (2 hours ago)
in reply to Em

This is not true, there are cryptographic protocols that let you verify some assertion about your identity without revealing anything else about yourself.

The simplest, low-tech solution would be to require a single-use scratch card to sign up for any website. Stores could then be required to verify ID before such a scratchcard could be sold, just like they do now for alcohol and cigarettes.

in reply to Patrick Breyer

🇪🇺#ChatControl now officially removed from the agenda for Oct. 14th🥳: data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/d…

⚠️However, EU governments continue to work on the proposal.
🗓️The next meeting of EU interior ministers is on Dec. 6/7.

🚫📡🔐Mission: No mass scanning, no backdoors!

This entry was edited (7 hours ago)

Periodic self-repetition: As a data librarian I can say that "AI" is not a matter of personal preference -- whether you like it or not, or whether you have found some use that you think is useful. It actively destroys organized knowledge, and therefore it actively destroys civilization.

Whenever someone looks for a human written text and can't find it because statistical near variants have been created and indexed, whenever "AI" "hallucinates" a reference, knowledge has been destroyed.