This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
For god's sake can corporations and governments stop trying to control and survey people do the job of parents and society. If parents are not doing their job then you need better awareness and education not to take over.
Pretty sure everyone understand it's not about the age.
Starmer really needs to fuck off.
When we were young adults and couldn't buy our own booze, we made it. Let's do something like that here.
That is what F-Droid would be, on Android. If it survives…
Of course, we have SailfishOS, postmarketOS, and other small ones, too.
Looks like the ways they’re doing this is via credit card or account age. I wanted to keep my current phone until it died before switching to something else but fuck me, who knows what nonsense they’ll make us do in the near future.
Why is there no privacy respecting solution for age verification? Like the government giving you some sort of token that says you’re over 18 and that’s it?
There is.
It's called Parental Controls.
It also does a fairly good job at preventing stuff from getting through.
One of the big issues right now is that there's a lot of sexualized content on social media right now that's bypassing parental controls because the social media services are doing a poor job of limiting that content when encountering a parental controlled device.
Because then you can share the token and everyone can use it
I'm sure a more robust solution is possible though.
The scheme from the Danish government, shared in another comment, avoids the sharing by allowing token to be used only once, and, because the government issues the tokens, it can block people from getting tokens if they detect abuse. This can be done by rate-limiting, geoblocking and all sorts of techniques.
Remember that the function of the anonymous token is to not allow the service provider (like an OS, or a a website) to see your identity. This still allows the government to see which service provider you are using.
Hopefully the service provider can form pools yo block the government from knowing each individual website, but that's not a given.
Because its not about age verification, its about tracking and controlling you and making a privacy respecting solution isn't compatible with that.
