Age verification for social media – the beginning of the end for a free internet? | Mullvad VPN
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So-called age verification for social media is spreading across the world, framed as an effort to create a safer internet for children. In reality, age verification lays the foundation for a fully government controlled internet.
  • alpha1beta@piefed.socialEnglish
    3·
    6 days ago

    Duh. Of course it is.
    It’s Meta’s final nail in the open internet.

    Meta wants to know everything from your penis size to how many nose hairs you have - after all, both are lucrative marketing opportunities!

    And they want to be free from wrongdoing, like being accused of harming kids through addiction, bullying or malicious ads. With an ID, if a parent allows a kid to use theirs for social media and gets addicted or dies, Meta gets to say it’s the parent’s fault.

    Meta wants it to be at the OS level, so it doesn’t cost them anything, they don’t risk data breaches and stuff, but they get the info and the benefits. Microsoft, Google and Apple will foot the cost of the build out and risk of hacks. Facebook is free from liability, free of the technical work, the security aspects and can blame anything that goes wrong on someone else.

    And if it’s more than just an age, like it passes the name or ID numbers, or anything more sensitive, they’ll piggyback on that to sell more ads.

    If this can go from nowhere to everywhere in like 2 years, than at that rate in 10 years you’ll have to swipe a government issue passkey to log into anything and each tweet will be cryptographically signed to verify the sender.

  • LemmyEntertainYou@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    At this point I’m pretty much prepared to go back to a life with no internet. It’s been quite surprising discovering how little of my time spent online I’d actually class as essential.