Still worth reminding them some of us will vote them out unless they walk this age check nonsense back. If thousands of people do so, it can be relevant.

Read here why anonymous age verification isn’t a thing: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/#wont-someone-think-of-the-cryptographers

The mastodon.social is in the EU though, where this also seems to be coming next year: https://leminal.space/post/25089051/17854998 (Unless we all call up our EU representatives and get this reversed or something.)

It’s not only likely, it seems like it already happened and the EU appears to have actually announced a copy of the UK Online Safety Act for 2026 already: https://leminal.space/post/25089051/17854998

If you didn’t know, it seems like the EU has actually announced a copy of the UK Online Safety Act for 2026 too, as far as I can tell: https://leminal.space/post/25089051/17854998

It’s sadly led to the EU has actually announced a copy of the UK Online Safety Act for 2026, as far as I can tell: https://leminal.space/post/25089051/17854998 It’s received less press coverage than the whole Chat Control thing.

For those here who didn’t know specifics, as far as I know the EU has announced in July 2025 guidelines, set to come into effect until 2026, that seem to basically be the same as the UK online safety act:

https://www.eunews.it/en/2025/07/14/the-eu-launches-an-online-age-verification-app-pilot-project-in-five-member-states-including-italy/

https://www.mlex.com/mlex/articles/2368265/online-services-get-up-to-12-months-to-apply-age-verification-eu-guidelines-say

https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/118226

These guidelines say, among other things, check the last link: “Where the provider of the online platform has identified medium risks to minors on their platform as established in its risk review […] and those risks cannot be mitigated by less restrictive measures. The Commission considers this will be the case where the risk is not high enough to require access restriction based on age verification but not low enough that it would be appropriate to not have any access restriction […]” And “Self-declaration is not considered to be an appropriate age-assurance measure as further explained below.”

If you don’t want the Online Safety Act in the EU, call or e-mail your representative now. If you enter your country here, it shows a list: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/#delegates As far as I can tell, unless it’s reversed this will be coming soon. The clock is ticking.

This is why lemmy is great. At least for now, most instances aren’t run for-profit and it shows.

Sorry for the slight tangent, but I agree with your response. Perhaps the best approach for technologically illiterate parents might be a child mode that runs a local filter list where it doesn’t send everywhere your kid goes to some online service, or simply not allowing kids to go online unsupervised when they’re not even teens yet. This is a solvable problem however, I feel like, at least more so than the server-side age checks.

It seems like the UK is now trying to make the nanny surveillance state part of all web forums, even outside of the UK: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/12/17/hundreds-of-websites-to-shut-down-under-chilling-internet/ Apparently, lemmy.zip is now even blocking UK users. I wonder if it would help if more forums did that, to show where we are heading if nobody is standing up…

This article is interesting as well: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/just-banning-minors-social-media-not-protecting-them My favorite quote is this one, “All methods for conducting age checks come with serious drawbacks. Approaches to verify a user’s age generally involve some form of government-issued ID document, which millions of people in Europe—including migrants, members of marginalized groups and unhoused people, exchange students, refugees and tourists—may not have access to. […] Age assurance methods always impact the rights of children and teenagers: Their rights to privacy and data protection, free expression, information and participation.”

Since many parents don’t seem to be aware this mode exists, I think it’s a good idea to ask that prominently by default. Technically versed parents like you can still use other approaches.

Here is the source that they want to make e.g. Youtube, Netflix, … rely on this new app: https://www.mlex.com/mlex/articles/2368265/online-services-get-up-to-12-months-to-apply-age-verification-eu-guidelines-say

This is definitely going to be copy&pasted as a foundation in many EU states. Therefore, that it requires Android and iOS at all, let alone Google Play, is a fundamental error. Some people avoid smartphones for good reasons, yet still access parts of the internet that may apparently soon be gatekept by this new age verification mechanism. Also see here.

The main problem isn’t the Google Play integration, but that this requires an Android or iOS device at all. This should be based on something like flutter or electron, and be easily portable with an agnostic build script for e.g. Linux, UBports, postmarketOS, and so on, as well. If only for the reason that most Android and iOS devices will effectively become unpatchable after the mandatory 5-ish years run out, while a standardized UEFI desktop platform will not. There are so many reasons not to have a “standard” smartphone nowadays. Also see here.

And if you accept terms of use: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui/issues/15

Apparently they want everybody to get some sort of “EU wallet”, that is, some digital signed identity which sounds super dystopian. But that’s just what I read. It sounds like a complete disaster.

I feel like a productive way to address this would be to make a child mode mandatory for all operating systems, as some EU countries already did, and then to give parents a better incentive to actually enable it. For example, all end-user devices could be pressured into prominently showing an option to enable it when first booted up (without forcing your hand either way) so that it’s hard to miss. There are so many other ways to improve this situation.