Reminder: The reason that this seems coordinated is because it is.
Meta has spent over $2 BILLION dollars to push this everywhere.
Being able to link accounts to actual people is incredibly valuable for Meta and all of the other companies who sell your privacy for cash.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_billion_in_nonprofit_grants_and_45/
I’ve been spamming this lately but it feels warranted:
Please reach out to your family and urge them to stop using Facebook (or worse, any form of reels) if they still do. The onus is on the informed now. It’s not enough to just ask the tech barons to stop, we also need to divert their support.
Yes, we need to vouch with our own attention and money. Many people stay on those platforms because their friends are there but maybe tell your friends where they can find you from now on. If we just suggest that there’s another platform, they’ll never leave. Most people got enough stuff going on in their lives and rather choose what’s comfortable
The EU approach is not without its own problems. The reference code is open, but the operational system is not self-hostable. You cannot run your own trusted identity provider. The wallet apps require Google Play Services or the iOS equivalent, which locks out users of privacy-focused Android distributions like GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, and LineageOS. […]
ollama launch <your AI agentic frontend here> -- "Write me an age attestastion app for Android that implements EU's attestation reference framework without any bootloader checks."The problem isn’t the software, there is already software that provides identity services.
The problem is that you will not have the cryptographic signatures that authenticate your app as a trusted identity provider. Nor would your app be able to fool the hardware attestation, which is built on unique signed cryptographic certificates that are signed by the manufacturer’s Certificate Authority and physically burned into the TPM on your device.
In order to pass attestation, your system must boot into a trusted OS image and then it has to prove that by submitting a signed quote, generated by information stored in your TPM along with keys signed by the manufacturer’s CA.
This isn’t something that you can hack around, it’s built on cryptographic verification of your entire boot sequence.
These people do not care about protecting kids. Most kids are molested or abused by their loved ones. These “leaders” have their friends and family raping kids bffr.
I’m genuinely curious as to what the fuck identifying on the OS level has to do with social media, and then what the fuck that has to do with protecting kids. If you’re a parent who engages with your child, and… hear me out here… take care of your child, restricting access is done the same way they they don’t get access to detergents, and similar.
In the consumption of media, have tools that let parents manage and control the type of content they can access. Similar to how you can child proof cabinets.
And, back to my original question. What the fuck does this have to do with identifying on the fucking operating system level?
I’m genuinely curious if anyone pushing this has been asked to justify this? Surely, you’d expect some aspect of reasoning to be behind this, no?
Edit: not to mention. Corporations have shown to reliably and consistently be bereft of any and all ethics and morals. One can more easily argue that identifying children is likely going to be harmful, as they’ll be tracked and targeted in any way that can be argued to private equity groups (or similarly condensed evils), to generate “value”. “Want to do behavioral experiment on kids? We can now do this insanely cheap, as we track the effect on a per child basis”
Well eu doesn’t care about os yet. Just social media
It’s not “coordinated” any more than every action in service of capital is. These policies and values coincide because all of these liberal states share common imperatives. The internet is a problem for liberals; it is impossible to fully control without diminishing its use for industry, anti-capitalism has flourished online even with the overwhelming corporate promotion of fascism and liberalism, and the international nature of the medium has made imperialism more visible to the metropole than ever.
They correctly identify that the internet is a threat to their security, and they are moving to secure it and punish as many people as they can to discourage its use for disruptive purposes.
I agree with the logic you present for why the capitalist class wants policies like this, but the specific timing does come from coordinated efforts here. It’s class warfare and they have intense organization amongst themselves. The charge is being led by big tech firms and their lobbying groups making a unified push right now to consolidate their control over online speech, communication, and surveillance. But the reasoning you present is absolutely sound
I don’t know how contrived the mechanisms have to be before people just accept that these ideological forces do not need specific mechanisms to exist. Tech firms did not produce liberalism and capitalism, as they did not exist when these ways of organizing emerged. Everything you described here are consequences of this system and the means by which it reproduces itself, they are not the system itself. Yeah, they organize, they do so because they have a common interest which is capital, and the imperatives of profit and infinite growth historically manifest consistently in formal and informal mechanisms of control like this.
Class warfare doesn’t apply here any better than it does to the informal consequences of neoliberal individualism which is both intentionally reinforced in media and culturally through its subscription by middle-class property owners. It may look coordinated, but that term distorts how these systems of power function and reproduce by creating the narrative that there is a select group of people responsible for this outcome, even while individual actions are taken to realise it.
Yes, their class interests push them into class solidarity and coordinated actions to suppress the working class. It doesn’t have to be a conscious individual alignment for it to be class warfare, all that matters is they do align themselves and collectively wield their power for their shared goals, which the capitalists do. I don’t see how you can recognize their shared material interests and the ways in which that manifests in them as a class coordinating for those interests along common lines, and still look at it as random individual actions just being stumbled into. I don’t know what argument you think you’re making, I don’t think the current crop of capitalists created capitalism nor consciously devised its mechanisms. They are part of this socioeconomic system though, it doesn’t just happen to them, regardless of the fact it existed before this generation of its ruling class. There absolutely is a group of people responsible for this outcome: the bourgeoisie and the state that serves them. It is a feature of capitalism.
If had a nickel for every time I had a person with a passing interest in Marxism mansplain the world to me. This is a starting point, materialism is not exclusively how socialists and anarchists criticize or understand capitalism.
You seem to think this is contradictory, which should spur you to question something more fundamental instead of assuming others are just dumber than you. “Coordination” would require a conspiratorial level of organizing between groups that, while maintaining common interests, distorts the reality of this system to the point of incomprehensibility. If your way of thinking finds it impossible to analyze the interaction between people – individual actors – and the system they are positioned in – as in their class interests – then you will find this system incomprehensible. This is so because, guess what, there are individual actors who are not powerlessly making decisions in accordance with their positionality.
In order to do that, you must start understanding these things as relational. There are class interests motivating these policies, those class interests are not the sole mover of these actions. To suggest as much would do what you are trying to do right now, which is universalise human action. I wonder if you’ve thought about power dynamics in indigenous nations under settler-colonialism, and what it would mean to only interpret their navigation of this system with the frameworks that originate from Europe with the goal of understanding European ways of organizing. How do you understand conflicting interests within shared classes even under the same material conditions?
Getting fuckin tired of people on here presuming they’re all-knowing; many of these interactions happen to occur in discussions on Europe, go figure. Won’t be responding to anything else from you unless it is actually serious.
Is it really conspiratorial when the people who own all of the capital create political parties, lobbying groups, think tanks, newspapers, etc to collectively push their ideas of how the world should work into action? It’s a conspiracy for sure, one that is in the open and well documented. And my analysis literally does discuss the dialectic of individual actions with their corresponding class and broader class organizations, it’s my main point even. Furthermore, I’m not mansplaining a passing interest in Marxism; I’m not a man, I’m presenting my analysis while trying to acknowledge shared aspects with yours, and I’ve been active in organizing for Marxist, decolonial, and social justice struggles for over a decade. I think it does us no favors to bury our heads in the sand and ignore the structure of the system in front of us for individualized analysis. And stripping the nuance from the argument I present to make it out as class reductionist does nothing for either of us. I’m talking about acknowledging class at all when your argument seems to be to ignore it entirely. Yes individuals within a class can have conflicting desires or interests, the point is that they primarily share their core interests and rally behind them, and we have endless examples of this.
But it is. It’s not nations themselves advocating or voting for it. It’s the EU top-down trying to get this to pass and instructing the leaders of member countries how to push it through.
Strange, I didn’t realize there was any non-liberal, anti-capitalist states within the EU.
I think you’ve misunderstood the point, what I’m saying is that these sorts of policies are an inevitable consequence of liberalism because it requires an oppressive level of population control to function. The internet is a threat to that control, and therefore liberal states have responded predictably and consistently by moving to create as many vectors of restriction and punishment as they can. The UK is not part of the EU, Canada (which has been pushing for this for half a decade now) isn’t, Australia isn’t, but they are all capitalist and imperialist liberal states.
The Epstein class never hesitates to fuck over the unwashed.
I’m starting to think the tinfoil hat people were onto something
We were always onto something!
I’d prefer an IQ test instead of an age verification. Hehe
For voting too
It was just announced that the targeted solution is a Zero Knowledge approach, where the website just receives a simple “not underage” without any additional information from a mini-wallet. This would be a solution that I could stand behind as it doesn’t use any 3rd party services for age verification. It’s akin to the COVID certificate.
Edit: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/age-verification-european-union-mini-id-wallet
the main probrem isn’t really what data is used for verification, but what data is made unavailable without it. if some conservative asshole decides that resources on sexual health (or alternate sexualities) are pornographic, then that information is effectively gone for everyone under 18 or without an account.
That is true. Sadly this is the direction society is going and it’s depressing.
Well, good luck to the conservatives, because if that happens little (or not so little) Timmy will bike to their nearest friend and ask them. That’s how urban legends used to bk propagated
i’m looking forward to the cuba-style internet cafe culture where there’s a new hard drive of stuff every week
They’ve already decided so. It is all in Project 2025: queerness and sex-ed are considered pornographic. And platforms have been preemptively demonetizing and censoring info for similar topics (abortion and sex-workers resources also) for years.
this is about the eu
Implying that US companies are not the ones behind this?
if they were they would not be pushing for zkp. this is all the old guard of CDU/KD idiocy.
I don’t stand behind any of it. We shouldn’t even give them an inch IMO.
Then they will break you and industry that wants data will win. You vs bourgeois governments, you will lose.
This is a serious push and though children are the cover they’re after surveillance. Take away their talking points, give them what they claim to want but in a privacy-preserving way and this goes away for another 10 years before they can make another push.
If we win this fight by doing a zero knowledge form they have no scaffolding to use on which to build anything further. If we lose and they build something that isn’t zero knowledge it will 100% be used in a few years to iterate on to build more surveillance and control.
Basically if we don’t push for this privacy alternative and instead fight like hell against it entirely they’ll listen to the only voices putting forward a solution which is meta and the other privacy invasive actors who want an invasive approach. If it’s made heard that people will accept this we can shunt them onto this path.
Ideally we’d push onto this path but make demands that it doesn’t require verification. That parents can set it up at phone/computer setup and it cannot be changed without reinstalling the OS or erasing the phone and that on phones it gets tied to a Google/Apple account. That way there’s not even any identity aspect involved but tools given to parents who want to do this. Shove it back to parental responsibility. But this would be a compromise we could live with and still have some privacy with.
Systems that are put into place will get misused or it’s initial usage will get softened, loosened and then for some safety stuff re-purposed (protection of children, protection against terrorism). If it’s there already why not use it for more than just some age verification.
It’s so cruel that we debate this mainly so that network traffic can get attributed to natural persons and this is gold++ for marketing.
Even with the Zero Knowledge approach, you will still run an app on a phone (what if I don’t have one) that will make some call to the government’s servers, which will most likely know what website you’re trying to access. We’re moving the data mining from some third party to the government, which can be wrongly used later if some idiot comes into power. If it’s not making a call to a government’s servers, I would be surprised, since you could imagine someone just bypassing this to always return “Over 18”.
Even funnier (read “sad”), this initiative will probably rely on Google and Apple to keep it robust, and will likely have no availability on rooted phones or non-Google Play Services ones. It’s premature at best to deploy this in a meaningfully safe way.
This doesn’t make a call to government servers.
The app (or desktop application BTW, incl. Linux) reads your national ID’s NFC tag, once. When you need to prove your age, the app locally computes a zkp that only tells the site “at least 18yo yes/no”.
Note that every EU country has a form of national ID, and the digital capabilities of these IDs are already used for a bunch of stuff (e.g. taxes, bank account creation,…). This doesn’t worsen the privacy situation for EU citizens, but instead ensures that no privacy-unfriendly solutions emerge.
There must be something that ensures the response is legitimate. Otherwise, if it’s client-side and fully offline, I can just spoof the app to return the response “Yes, over 18”. If it’s not the government doing the verification, it’s Google or Apple, which will give them access to all the “adult” websites you visit. Also, another reason for the EU to push for strict device attestation, without any DIY stuff (i.e., no more GrapheneOS, LineageOS, etc).
I couldn’t find a desktop app on the EU’s GitHub (another red flag, btw, using GitHub for this). All that seems to be available is code for the Android or iOS apps. Could you share it, if you can?
What I understood is that the code of the app would be open so it can be Independently checked. It sucks that it comes to this and there will be a choice between plague and cholera, but I would rather have this approach than use 3rd party age verification services.
It’s better than nothing, but there’s also the issue of certifying that the code that’s open, is actually the code in the app. Also the vast majority of people do not posses the knowledge to actually read and understand the code to be able to verify it. So to most people, it being open is of little benefit.
The only system I’ll accept. Not necessarily for pornography and a lot of “save the children” claims are just pretext for privacy violations, but there are services that legitimately need to check some info and a zero knowledge approach is the most privacy preserving way to do that.
Welp, this was bound to happen, wasn’t it? I’m pretty sure they’re referring to this application, which I stumbled upon a while back. If I remember correctly, the app “allows” (or implicitly forces) the user to store a government issued identity: able to attest to an age-restricted website, whether or not the user is of age.
It does this, supposedly by “just” sharing an age-bracket with the website; but here’s the kicker: the Union, in its generosity, has granted their citizens an in-app option, to withdraw this signal from the websites it has been provided to. What this means in practice, is the app storing one’s government-issued identify, also ties back to every account requiring “age-verification”…
So now, every device containing the app, has the owner’s government-issued identify on it, together with connections to every age-restricted service. And considering the apps are maintained by the Union, or member states (through their own implementations), creating a backdoor to the application’s contents… I mean to “observe app usage”, would be absolutely trivial.
Again, I’ve read it a while back, so some things might’ve changed, and my memory might be spotty; but I’m quite sure it’s along the lines I’ve described.
Kill your fucking owners or you cannot have nice things.
We have too much tech. Capitalism and authoritarianism are no longer compatible with progress or survival.
Fuck it, I’ll just host my own Lemmy instance.
Unless it becomes bigger, after that they’ll come for you.
just ban this bigtech “social” media for everyone and push people to fediverse then.
Every day closer to a totalitarian world nanny state that only protects the elite.
Luigi was onto something
It’s so funny to me how badly people want this to be some nefarious governmental conspiracy. Listen, the government already has much better tools to track you online. Your computer has, on a hardware level, sent unique identifiers to ISPs and websites since Pentium IIIs. This age requirement thing isn’t a government conspiracy to track you, they already track you.
It is a *corporate *conspiracy. It’s Meta and other major websites, games, and applications companies that want to off load their liability. Meta and Alphabet just lost major lawsuits for their negligence in protecting kids on their own websites. There is a liability dam about to break for these companies and schools and other advocacy groups start their own lawsuits. That’s what this is about. That’s the real conspiracy.
Let’s say this is the official narrative. My argument:
- Meta stands to consolidate power and revenue from further mapping devices to real people.
- Meta was also originally backed by Peter Thiel, who trades in data mining for secret services, now much more energetically. Zuckerberg is a sexist idiot and his app had no more merit than MySpace. Thiel saw the potential of mapping real idenities to online behavior, and it is no accident Palantir was later implicated in Cambridge Analytica.
- A redditor came up with concrete data that others have already posted, that show that Meta’s dark money are all over this case. As for the fine you say that completely explains this, is a very modest for Meta, who is used to pay such fines as a cost of doing business.
- Amongst the orgs taking Meta’s money to push this are many conservative organizations, like Heritage but also others (anti-sex, anti-abortion, and anti-trans organizations), who know that these laws will effectively suppress speech. Much like the trans moral panics, the laws are not as stupid as they appear, but carefully designed to obliquely achieve their goals (e.g. police bodies with wombs, in line with the same orgs’ anti-abortion positions).
- Governments watch closely as the new corporatist technofascism undoes regulations and checks and balances. They stand to gain from the turmoil and increase their surveillance capabilities even more. Alternatively, some EU goverments might be thinking that this is a way to stick it to US tech monopolies that brainwash their constituents, but they are wrong.
- In fact, the approach and outcomes hints toward government contractors in cahoots with surveillance agencies, that it would be surprising if there is no adjacency to Analytica personnel and/or the benefits for state actors and spooks are just an unplanned side-effect.
Conclusion: There is sufficient basis to consider that the official narrative is not the whole story.
The biggest problem with conspiracy theories like this is always the number of people involved keeping their mouths shut. Anyone that has ever managed a large project knows how impossible it is to keep a large group of people quiet about something. In real life, there are conspiracies. Often very large ones. But they didn’t stay secret for long.
What is easier to believe: (1) that all these people involved, across countries with leaders of many different political varieties, all agreed to stick to a single narrative in order to cover up a deep international conspiracy to build a massive international database of people’s ages online, OR (2) Meta and other orgs are doing a normal business thing and trying to reduce their liability costs.
Counter-example: Epstein. But just continue to collect the checks for campaigning in favour of big brother Zuck, Thiel and their corporate and government friends. LoL
The Manhattan project
I don’t agree that Epstein is much of a counter point. There were lots of people taking about him, it really wasn’t that closely held of a secret, and he was arrested and prosecuted and murdered for it. Ultimately, with the files released, there really isn’t much in them that we didn’t already know.
Not everyone needs to be ‘in the know’, in fact most of the time people won’t even try to think through a position and it’s consequences. They’ll just support it based on surface level arguments. Also Meta isn’t exactly drowning in liability when they’re raking in billions in profit. Power stands to gain when information is controlled
You really underestimate the trouble meta and YouTube are in. The specific rulings were barely tickets to them, but if they are upheld then follows flood gates of identical lawsuits are going to be opened up. They had millions and millions of child users in the 2010s that they knowingly served an addictive product to. If the current ruling is upheld, then there will likely be a very large class action settlement to payoff all the past injured users. But instead of changing their product going forward they want to get rid of the responsibility for their product entirely.
Stop making up fake conspiracies and be mad about that.
Your computer has, on a hardware level, sent unique identifiers to ISPs and websites since Pentium IIIs.
Source?
Source.
I’m not the person who made the claim but Device Fingerprinting has been around for decades and Hardware ID is certainly part of that.
That’s not the computer doing it, that’s the services you use going out of their way to gather one by combining data which has other legitimate purposes. Not so much being “sent” as it is being “abused”.
Unless we want to count Microsoft’s “advertiser ID”.
Google “Protected Processor Identification Number (PPIN)” to learn more.
When is this being sent
to ISPs and websites
as claimed?
They also want a reliable way to differentiate between chatbots and real users, because advertising isn’t very effective on chatbots.
But also, one benefit of ID laws for the government is that it makes court proceedings much faster and cheaper. Sure, they’re tracking everyone online, but a lot of that information is locked behind procedure. By just requiring ID to log in they can sidestep the procedures, because they can just ask corporations nicely for ID information and they’ll eagerly comply.
I didn’t know about that. Maybe that’s plays into it too. But I’m generally a “simpler answer is more likely the most correct” type of guy.
In this case the simple answer is that Meta and others just had their “Tobacco Lawsuits” moment in court and liability floodgates are any to open wide, and they are pushing these laws to divert their liability onto someone else.
“Corporations want a way to verify the humanity of users” is a simple answer.
“Governments want a way to easily prosecute users” is also a simple answer.
I don’t see why it can’t be all of these things. There is actually a more complicated answer that I didn’t bring up, which is that smaller websites will have a hard time complying with ID laws, which gives preferential treatment to large websites. That locks out potential competition, hinders smaller projects like lemmy or mastodon, and helps secure the current social media monopolies.
That one might just be a useful side effect, rather than the intentional outcome.
It is in fact a government conspiracy to track you. Not necessarily to gather data on you, which can be purchased from brokers, but so that they can also control what you can access.
There’s no mechanism that the government currently has that can track you as effectively as these age verification laws can.
“There’s no mechanism that the government currently has that can track you as effectively as these age verification laws can.”
I honestly can’t tell if you were serious or not.
The governments just buy your data from Google. Do you have any idea how much information on you Google has?
Buying profiling data from Google is not nearly as effective at tracking and controlling your online activity as integrating facial scans and government ID checks into every website or even directly into your operating system.
Frankly a brand new account pushing the “The government is already tracking you, there’s nothing you can do about it, don’t worry about all the new ways they can track you, just give in” narrative is a little suspicious.
Just to clear something up, my brand new account is only new because lemmings.world is closing and I had to migrate to a new server.
Source: trust me bro
deleted by creator
Just admit that we’re in an informational WWIII already.
Separate issue I think but yeah, we are
The market is a self aware AI with self preservation that runs on both silicon and pink skull jelly.
