Same for me my man. I hate the fact that anonymity on the internet will eventually fall before the end of this decade. The west is not that far away from the authoritarian regimes it claims to be fighting against
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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YouTube's can be broken and that's the only one I cared about. I guess steam would be an issue if they tried it.
Pretty sure anything else I can easily just bail on.
Steam's age verification is entering your credit card details.
IMO steam does a reasonable job of age verification - if you've registered a credit card, you're obviously old enough to have one.
I am a baby with an 800 credit score. I undersigned my parents home mortgage so they'd get a good rate. The bank knows I'm a reliable lender.
Googoogaagaa
"Why don't you just trust me that I was born January 1, 1900?"
Nice, same birthday
I'm born 1.1.1970
I changed to 2000 because it’s less scrolling.
Fucking ouch bro
The fact that 01/01/01 is old enough to rent a car without an issue now does make that date seem nice.
You can jump to the date in some menus by typing the number
Age verification wouldn’t be a problem if there was a service I trusted that could verify my age, generate an anonymous one way hash or public/private key pair that could verify my age, and then dispose of all information that would could tie me to that info, I’d be ok with it. The problem is there isn’t a group that I’d trust (well that would be willing to do it) and everyone wants to hoard information and create a central repository that will be broken into. It’s not that there is a possibility it could be, but a certainty that it would be. This isn’t really an unsolvable technical problem, but an unsolvable trust problem.
Age verification if intent was to make it not tied to real ID would be a system where you could go into any store and buy a card you can scratch off for a code to put in.
But, governments want to track and get rid of anonymous accounts. They don't actually care about age requirements. They want a 1984 type control of citizens to know what they are thinking or at the very least scare off people from expressing thoughts like politicians should be held accountable for fear of current or future consequences from a government that may decide it is treasonous.
The EU actually was working on a system described above based on some sort of zero knowledge proof (so verification via your gov't id, but without the verifying party being able to assert anything other than age > 18 or whatever data you want to verify)
So being able to get a token without even the government knowing?
Because if it's the alternative of the government itself issuing the token and it being only the receiving site not knowing, but the government being able to link it back to you I wouldn't be happy with that either.
I'd prefer it to be as trackable as knowing which specific alcohol bottle you bought. So other than showing ID to a store to get a random token nobody in theory would know who the token belongs to including the government.
I ordered some alcohol online because I couldn't find the brand of rum I was looking for locally. They did some age verification before I could order, same that I could have encountered in a grocery store.
Of course they just got sent a token and not a photo id which changes the calculus some. I'm against trusting random websites with personal information, not an age block on its own.
Tax filing?
IRS should already know what I owe and not worry about who logs on to pay it.
Oh yeah, the states is like that right.... I meant for filing and claming tax benefits.
People have been forgetting that home routers come with something called parental controls.
This is the most privacy respecting solution that puts all the power of parenting into a parents hands.
If the government were really "thinking of the children" I would propose a group of bipartisan curators to curate the Internet. Thinking of how libraries function, we have librarians that classify books by age and genre. The same can be done for websites, and these curated lists be made available to parents. This can be funded by local government and be region and country specific.
These lists would effectively function as whitelists, blocking everything that's not on the whitelist. Parents can then turn on a specific whitelist for their kids if they so choose, and they gain access to a curated list of age approved websites.
Parents can then, if they so choose, add or remove items form the list to grant their children access to specific sites.
All this tech is already available and it would prevent children and adults from having to provide a website any extra information. It would also mean websites would now not need to build infrastructure to collect this information.
Could you imagine a publisher of books needing you to send them a picture of your face to verify your age and identify before you even opened a book? Why are we proposing the same equivalent concept for a website or "digital book".
These lists would effectively function as whitelists, blocking everything that’s not on the whitelist. Parents can then turn on a specific whitelist for their kids if they so choose, and they gain access to a curated list of age approved websites.
Yeah, i'd say if they were serious about "protecting children", they should provide a "child safe" DNS to log onto for your kids' devices.
People have been forgetting that home routers come with something called parental controls.
When my wife and I first signed up with Virgin as our ISP there was parental control turned on by default. Had to put in my credit card info to be able to flap.(Edit: Goddamn Autoassume! FAP not FLAP) This was 2021ish? So before the current stupidity.
Also, it's easy to feel like this is all being pushed by parents who just straight up refuse to properly parent their children...but it's mostly being championed by Puritan lobby/pressure groups. They think even totally consensual, CIS/HET amateur porn is disgusting and sinful. They don't want to see, so they're on a mission to make it so literally no one can see it.
With help from companies and people who have a vested interest in creating a panopticon-esque surveillance state. And the rest of the people involved in passing it are too old or ignorant or paid too well by the other two groups to stand in the way of it, or to have cut out the really egregious shit from these bills before they were passed.
Also, it’s easy to feel like this is all being pushed by parents who just straight up refuse to properly parent their children…but it’s mostly being championed by Puritan lobby/pressure groups.
No, its being pushed by corporations who are interested in identifying you. They pressure the government who ALSO now takes an interest in tracking your for wrong think and power grabbing. The two work together for power and money, and to stay in power.
Parents are just pawns who get manipulated into thinking this is a problem at all.
With help from companies and people who have a vested interest in creating a panopticon-esque surveillance state.
First sentence of the last paragraph.
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Governments know about parental controls. They know it's the most effective, most efficient, and least destructive way to deal with this. They don't care. And they don't care about the children. If they cared, they'd develop their own parental control software, offer it for free, and encourage it's use.
If they really wanted to get draconian about it, as they are doing now with age verification, they would pass laws to prosecute parents who don't use parental controls for negligence.
But it's not about the children. At all. It's about preventing you and me, and all of us from talking to each other and entertaining ourselves. It's about turning the Internet into TV, a one way faucet of entertainment and information controlled by the wealthy .001% where us peons can't talk back.
These age verification laws are just the first step. They kill small forums and games like Urban Dead, and leave only sites controlled by megacorporations that can afford the age verification infrastructure and the massive corporate fines if a single kid sneaks in. Once you get used to this, it's easier for you to accept not being able to communicate online at all, or start your own forum, or YouTube channel.
I'm skeptical that governments know about these solutions given how little people in general understand technology. It's a "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" situation. Ideally they should have experts available to consult with when making laws to prevent BS like this.
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If you've put your real identity on your passport on some platforms and you're going to use those platforms for purposes other than work, get ready to be a good and loyal dog.
The problem with "age" verification is that politicians are confusing it with identity verification.
I should not have to prove my name and other biometrics to prove age.
Age verification is the fascist way to get people to identify themselves and their online activity. Almost every state that has some sort of age verification law has zero method to actually verify age. No digital ID service, no way to share a credential for verification.
They want people to upload an ID.
This isn't about keeping children safe and it never is. It's about identifying critics of the government.
I hate to point out the obvious, but they didn't accidentally confuse the two..
It is possible to build an age verification system, where you use your actual ID with a cryptographic process without any personal data. The technology has existed for decades now.
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Personally I've found online banking, medical and travel services rather hard to resist.
Those new mobile phone things the kids are using also have biometrics and internets and look pretty handy to have around.
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I am actually not fundamentally against the idea of age verification for some things online. We have many things with age restrictions in real life, for various reasons, it kind of makes sense to have it online as well for some things.
but...it has to be done with zero-knowledge proof so we limit the amount of private data exposed to the absolute bare minimum.
Zero-knowledge proofs are a good concept. They've been possible for a long, long time, and allow age check without surveillance.
So why are they not being used? Because age check is just a cover. These people want to do surveillance, not protect kids.
So it's a good counter. Want age check? Do it like this. Oh, you don't want it that way? Why not, pray?
Whether it works (it has, previously) or not (as with the current bullshit from the US), it does bring to the public debate that this is unnecessary surveillance.
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Maybe in alternate timeline where tech companies have historically acted ethically.
In this timeline where each new company and/or ceo is more slimey than the last, I know that any type of identification will be mismanaged at best or used maliciously at worst
All trust is gone between these companies.
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Are we really "protecting" the children? Or is there a huge amount of powerful and wealthy individuals searching for an easy way to get to the children. With the global Trump Epstein Files scandal currently happening, how do we know they are not just stalking more kids? Not a conspiracy theory, just a different point of view. So many horrid groups in the world claim to be protecting children, but they always have a hidden nefarious agenda.
You're still thinking too small. They want to be able to see what everyone is doing and saying, no anonymity.
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Banking and other finance related services are the only place where I don't mind KYC. Others I drop as soon as they request it and I seek alternatives.
But I will drop my online bank as well as soon google enforce the 'only verified developer applications'. 90% of my applications, incuding system applications like laucher, are not installed from the play store. I plan to switch to a linux 'phone' and only use services which are usable from a browser / without google securnet.
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