Okay you are ready to take a stand for freedom!
You are going to use an OS that isn’t going to bend the knee and comply with age verification laws. I solute you, comrade!
Here are the likely consequences of your choice:
The Feds aren’t coming after you. You aren’t going to be out on a watch list.
What will likely happen is that if you try to log into your Facebook account you will get a message that says “Your Operating System is not currently supported. Your user experience will be limited to Groups labeled “Everyone”.”
That’s basically it. Your personal user experience will be limited to “kid friendly” areas of the Internet. (Same with apps and games.)
That’s the real driver of these laws. Facebook and other app producers know that the days where they can just shrug off child predators using their products is coming to and end. Regardless of your opinion on age verification is as a solution, child predators are a real world problem and it’s not just the parents fault. The platforms have some responsibility too.
Which is exactly what Facebook and the others specifically don’t want -responsibility for their own platforms. That’s why they are pushing for these laws that off load their responsibility onto the OS makers. Then they can just say “Oh, we don’t have any responsibility for this child being abused in our platform. We asked the OS what the user’s age was and the OS reported 18+. What else could we have done?”
So, that’s the consequence if you choose to use an OS that refuses to comply. You’ll just be relegated to the kid friendly version of website, games, and applications.
(On the other hand, if your OS chooses to falsely report to a website or an app an age for a child that is abused, then the OS should also be held responsible. But at that point you can go ahead and blame the parents too for letting their child use an OS that isn’t safe for them to use.)
Call me a cynic, but I absolutely do not believe that companies “know that the days where they can just shrug off child predators using their products is coming to and end”. I don’t believe they give a fuck at all. In fact, if somehow a case made it to court and the court laid the blame at the foot of, say, Facebook, or whatever company, for a child being harmed, they still wouldn’t care because the money they make simply existing as is so wildly outstrips any fine they could possibly be levied that it doesn’t make economic sense to do anything differently.
There is real damage being done now and no one seems to care enough to stop it. Why go through all this negative PR about privacy violations if you can just keep doing the same thing?
Now, I can’t claim to know what the “real reason” these laws are being passed is, but if I had to hazard a guess, it would be because it gives more accurate data on users to sell and it is cheaper to advertise to your users when they directly tell you their age. Now, you can freely show pornographic ads, gambling ads, whatever, to your adults without ever having to worry about buying user data to know who will receive it. If a kid sees porn, well, you shouldn’t have let them on an adult account.
Paraphrasing Karl Mark:
original quote
child predators are a real world problem
I cannot emphasize this enough - I absolutely do not care what your children do on the Internet.
I know you don’t. And you don’t have to. No one is forcing you to care. No law anywhere threatens any legal liability on the user.
But it’s because providers of games and online platforms don’t care that governments are having to pass laws to force organizations producing these products to care.
(Which is also why Meta is pushing these laws so hard, so that it becomes someone else’s legal responsibility to care.)
@1dalm@lemmy.today @linux@lemmy.ml
The country I exist in (Brazil) passed an age verification law “Lei 15.211/2025” which, to a certain extent, is even more dystopian than Californian one. Because, at least, the Californian “allows” self-declared age, while Brazilian don’t. This means systems must employ mechanisms such as ID’ing, age estimation by selfie or behavioral analysis.
When UK passed their law, threatening and, to certain extent, effectively sanctioning even even non-UK “disobedient”, something happened: many sites and platforms started to geoblock UK. Many Fediverse instances geoblocked UK.
Brazil has a similar history of legal outreach, we had court decisions trying to enforce and rule over non-Brazilians. Something similar is expected to happen when it comes to this age verification law. So I’d expect a similar widespread reaction of sites and platforms geoblocking Brazil.
In fact, it’s already happening: in mere two days since the law became effective, MidnightBSD geoblocked Brazil, Arch Linux 32-bits (not the mainstream Arch Linux) geoblocked Brazil, and others are expected to follow, both distros and websites as well. Including the Fediverse.
This kind of law will hardly stay in the countries and USian states where they’ve been implemented. It’ll spread, because the narrative it’s wrapped with is too alluring and compelling (from emotional appealing “Think about the children!?” all the way to the strawman “If you disagree with age checking laws, you’re literally a pdf file”). So expect more countries embracing this dystopia. This means fewer and fewer places where it’s not a thing. It reeks of a coordinated agenda, especially because it achieves similar things that intended by projects such as Chat Control, PIPA/SOPA, among many other previous authoritarian attempts. The authoritarian found the correct recipe: wrap 1984 in a cute “children protection” wrapping, rinse and repeat.
Therefore, some Fediverse instances, especially those sitting under the hurricane’s eye (e.g. Lemmy Brasil) may end up implementing age checking, or stopping altogether if they can’t afford the additional costs of age checking (it won’t be a free thing for platforms to do; a trivial cost for giants such as Meta, Google and Microsoft, but unfeasible for, say, Fediverse instances and FOSS projects).
Now, regarding the “kid friendly” limitation: if the Web gets limited to “non-adult content”… what’s “adult content” to begin with? Is it just porn, or it may end up covering several non-pornographic things?
It turns out, and here I’m risking getting too off-topic, many things would end up beneath this purposefully vague terminology “adult content”, content from many vulnerable groups: LGBTQIA+ (check out what happened during the recent itch.io and Steam crusade against “adult games”), women, pagans/occultists, political dissidents and whistleblowers, among others. This is what age verification laws are about: silencing everything deemed non-normative.
The latter part of your points is what really scares me as well. It’s only a matter of time until “protecting the children” becomes “defining what adult content is” and policing gender, sexuality, and politically inconvenient ideas under the guise of morality.
This should be a post on its own in some appropriate communities. Completely agree with you.
It reeks of a coordinated agenda,
It is a coordinated agenda, just not a secret one like people want to think. It’s being pushed by Meta and a string of popular app makers and games to avoid having to be responsible for their own platforms.
Therefore, some Fediverse instances, may end up implementing age checking, or stopping altogether if they can’t afford the additional costs of age checking.
That’s a strange argument to me. That’s exactly what Meta is intending to prevent from having to do by pushing these laws. If countries and states pass laws like the California law specifically, then no fediverse instance will need to worry about age verification. They just ask the user’s browser to ask the OS. California’s version of the law would really help small businesses and small developers, because it puts all the child protection responsibility onto the OS.
Now, regarding the “kid friendly” limitation: if the Web gets limited to “non-adult content”… what’s “adult content” to begin with?
In this case, “kid friendly content” becomes “any content that the website wants to be responsible and liable for letting users that report being <18 have access to”.
I diagree. Look at Privacy Policies and ToS. They are extremely invasive. Basically they say more or less “we will do whatever we want”. Why? Because no one reads them or cares, and they want to CYA in any and all situations. Now picture you want to navigate to a website, but the website creator is afraid that, one way or another, some adult content may find it’s way their website, so what do they do? Age-gate it. And now they’ve shirked any responsibility for such content. Every god damn website, the entire internet, will be age-gated. Not just Facebook and Reddit. Children and privacy-concerned adults will not be able to access the internet. And no one will care. That’s where we’re headed.
I’m not sure what you are disagreeing with. That’s generally what I said. If you use a non-compliant OS, your experience will be “age-gated”.
Though I don’t think they will completely block access entirely. Collecting data on kids is extremely valuable to these companies, because kids grow up to be consumers. They will happily continue to let you in, but you won’t be able to go to the 18+ areas.
I’m not sure what you are disagreeing with. That’s generally what I said. If you use a non-compliant OS, your experience will be “age-gated”.
There will just be OS and OS forks that mimic other OS to ‘trick’ websites into thinking they’re verified.
Sure. And if a parent knowingly installs one of those OS’s on a computer they let their children use, THEN you can fully blame the parent.
My point here is that they won’t be able to stop people with ‘unverified’ OS accessing the internet.
Collecting data on kids is extremely valuable to these companies
Nope - it is extremely risky/costly. Facebook is actively pushing for these laws to push the “blame” onto the OS to get out of a potential $50 Billion worth of fines due to COPPA violations for collecting data on kids. Facebook wants the OS to do all of the actual collecting of data while being required to share that data with Facebook - they get all of the benefit of stealing your data without any of the liability (or work). That’s the entire point of these laws.
That’s basically it. Your personal user experience will be limited to “kid friendly” areas of the Internet.
I’m disagreeing with this. I’m saying there will be no “kid-friendly” areas of the internet, outside of areas that are explicitly for children.
I don’t understand. There will still be porn sites for people.
The way it will work is that when you tell your browser to go to a porn site, the site will ask your Bowser for your verified age. Your browser will then ask your OS for your verified age. Your OS will respond “18+” to your browser. Your browser will tell the porn site “the OS says 18+”. Then the porn site will say “Cool, here’s the porn.” That’s it.
If you use a non-compliant OS, then your browser will say to the porn site “I asked the OS and the OS says ‘null’.” Then the porn site will say, “Well sorry. Then your OS isn’t supported. Come back when you are using a supported OS.”
That’s it.
I don’t understand.
That’s obvious.
The browsers sooner or later will always respond “18+” and do not ask the OS.
… And if a kid using that browser was abused because the browser lied to the website about the users’ age, then the browser’s creators should bare some consequences for lying to the website that otherwise would have put up protections. Right?
Ever heard of parents? It’s not the job of the OS or the browserto monitor and control a kids internet access.
In most jurisdictions you need to be an adult to legally get an Internet access.
So people using the Internet are either adults or under the supervision of adults.
Perhaps we could update our software licenses to include “no implied babysitting”.
It’s not the job of the [Catholic Church] or the [Boy Scouts] to monitor and control a kids access.
Yes it is. It absolutely is. If you provide a service, you should responsible for the safety of that service, especially if you are providing and advertising that service to kids.
No, absoluetly not. Because the whole thing is notnto protect the children, but to gather more data.
Do you also believe that the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church also have no responsibility to protect kids, because doing to would similarly require collecting data on people?
(I would disagree with you if you said yes, but I’ll respect your position for being consistent.)
Collecting data on kids is extremely valuable to these companies, because kids grow up to be consumers.
This is not true. From an adtech perspective, child user data is virtually worthless. Because COPPA exists, most demand platforms (including those outside COPPA jurisdiction) simply will not issue any bid for that type of traffic. To try to bypass this, sketchy publisher groups will try to issue a regs.coppa=0 in their bid requests with the justification of “we couldn’t determine that info”. COPPA is largely self-reporting based if you didn’t know.
Outside of that, what you are describing is called the Chilling Effect. It is were legitimate activities on a site are restricted out of fear that they may break a vaguely worded law. This is a genuine concern and one that federated services had when Lemmy first started to take off. Instance owners were faced with the possibility that without CSAM detection processes in place that they could be held liable for that material being present on their instance.
I don’t think that COPPA says that companies can’t collect data on kids l at all. Just that there are limitations on how they can use that data while the kids are still kids. When the kids grow up then the previously collected data is fair game. (Why the do you think Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, etc. are so willing to invest in “for Kids” products?)
And, we’ll probably disagree on this, but I generally think that people and companies that provide a service are responsible for that service. That includes the Boy Scouts, the Catholic Church, and Lemmy hosts. And everyone in between. (Including parents, but the responsibility is no only on them alone.)
What should Lemmy hosts have to do, out of interest?
We aren’t talking about publishing side groups like Youtube, FB, etc. We’re talking about advertisers like DV360 or Tradedesk (the largest ad firms). COPPA has vastly decreased value on the demand side. And user data isn’t stored for 20+ years expecting to capitalize on it. After several weeks that data becomes stale and useless. In the 11 years I’ve worked in adtech engineering, I can confirm that how you think this works vs how this actually works is not the same thing.
And what you are talking about for responsibility is part of the Section 230 amendments being made to force liability on hosts for the “sake of the children”. These amendments have nothing to do with children though. They have to do with opening hosts up to liability in defamation suits raised against them to force silence of political critics (this has been WELL documented).
Right now? Nothing. Down the road, life in prison for terrorism. I’d suggest moving away from that jurisdiction
If their goal is to find an excuse to declare you a terrorist then there are much easier ways to do that that are already available to them. This really isn’t an efficient way to do that.
And, as best as I’m aware, no age verification laws anywhere threaten any consequences for the user. The consequences are only for the OS makers.
(Granted, the California law, at least, could be read to say that it’s the entity installing the OS to confirm ages, not necessarily the OS maker. So for most Linux distros that would shift the user age verification responsibility completely to the user installing the OS, but I’m not sure how that would work out in courts or whether websites and applications would recognize that. It will probably never actually be an issue that is adjudicated.)
Yet
This entire post is the frog sitting in their comfortable pot of water saying “This is fine, nothing to worry about!”
Exactly. I’m super surprised how many people are just kind of OK with all of this.
“It’s just a date, you can lie, don’t worry”
“It’s just your ID, if you’re over 18, don’t worry.”
“They’re only looking for criminals, if you’re not a criminal, don’t worry”
“They’re only looking for people who don’t act like them, look like them, believe the things they believe, vote the way they do, speak the way they do, so as long as you match them exactly, don’t worry”
My biggest frustration with the community is not that people don’t like the proposed solution but that
- There is so much flat denial that there is actually a major online child predator problem, and/or
- No one should be held responsible to fix it, and/or
- no one is offering alternative solutions.
I’m really not upset with individual users here. I understand that you are removed from the problem and don’t understand it. I really don’t blame you personally. I have had training on youth protection and it’s not an easy problem, and just throwing the parents under the bus isn’t fair. When it comes to child predators, they are often just as much the victims as the kids are. (Yes, I mean that.)
I’m upset with the EFF. They don’t have an excuse for their ignorance. They’ve been taught the problem many times and just refuse to acknowledge it. (Red flag if there ever was one, if you ask me.) If they didn’t like the verification rules then they need to start proposing alternative solutions (which they don’t have).
Age verification laws have nothing to do with child predators. They never have. If they cared, they would focus on the problem—the platform. But they don’t.
The real single problem here is parents aren’t monitoring their children. When these bad things happen, the parents are ALWAYS like, “I had no idea that was going on.” The fuck are they doing with kids then?
But nooooooooooooooo…. Asking someone to be responsible for their own offspring is way too much for people to handle.
It’s 10pm, do you know who your kid has been talking to today?
If you don’t, you’re a shit-fuck parent and your kids should be rehoused.
They are focusing on the platforms. That’s exactly why Meta, et. al., are pushing for these laws. To off load that responsibility.
And if you are blaming the parents then you don’t understand the problem.
just to contrast with @org@lemmy.org here, I agree that this does not just fall on the parents. That is the same line of reasoning that gave us recycling as a solution for climate change. We need serious legislation and serious judicial action from our governments, and we’re not getting that. ID gate laws are a flimsy attempt to do something that looks good on the news and maybe even seems like a no-brainer to people who are unfamiliar with the technical side of things. These companies that show clear negligence need to be seized by the state and stripped for parts. Only then will companies (maybe) be scared into good-faith engagement to protect people that need it. Really though, serious anti-trust action would make a huge dent in this issue as it would have a chilling effect on a growth-first economy. Really really though, we need revolution against capital.
Yeah someone needs to get sued hard and have a big loss. But the reality of the world is that everyone keeps passing the buck, and right now it has landed on you and me, and that’s pretty fucked up.
These companies that show clear negligence need to be seized by the state and stripped for parts.
Yes! That’s what you should be upset about. These companies are pushing these laws to get out of being held accountable for their products. Be upset about THAT and I’m on your side!
(But that would also mean that small developers and Fediverse hosts would also have to be held accountable for their service.)
