I hate when people validate the core idea of needing to protect children through age verification. Timmy lying about being over 18 to look at some boobs is not a problem that needs to be resolved. It's like requiring everyone to wear body cameras specifically to prevent store clerks from being rude to you.
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Man this is fucking exhausting. The treadmill of these policies.
EU lemmings, who or what groups are promoting these? It feels like every time one gets defeated another crops up and that it's relentless. Is this an astroturfed or organic campaign?
I would be very surprised to learn there is an organic demand for this shit. Sure there are some lazy parents who might want this without understanding the wider ramifications, but for the most part it is mix of authoritarian politicians and corporate lobbyism doing the work.
Any legitimate political demand would not be made again, and again, and again, and again... Even after it gets voted down repeatedly. There are undemocratic forces at work for sure.
Sure but there have to be organizations behind these policies. Someone is proposing this stuff again and again. This is mirrored by corporate lobbying in the US, where grassroots movements can resist it, but corporate lobbying almost always wins out in the end, because its sustained by industry. So we can resist a policy a few times, but if the same bad ideas keep re-emerging, eventually one gets through.
There's broad support for stopping predatory behavior by corporations that are targetting kids (and adults, but mostly kids). This is mostly the same stuff people have been complaining about for a decade or so at this point. Loot boxes, gacha mechanics, ad infested (and therefore stuffed with spyware for "marketing"), complicated multilayered digital currencies, battle passes, daily login rewards, etc. Basically all the well known dark patterns.
However rather than addressing the bad behavior directly, politicians either through malice or incompetence (likely at the behest of corporate lobbyists) keep putting forth these ID laws that just make things worse instead of actually solving the problem people have been complaining about.
These politicians know full well what they're doing. At least they should and there's no excuse. But they know.
Its well documented at this point that Meta is funding these campaigns.
It's tech giants in general trying to monopolize the Internet through regulatory capture. They're the only ones who can afford to implement the age verification methods demanded. Laws like this effectively turn the Internet into cable TV.
Imagine failing so hard to create a metaverse, blowing literal billions of dollars and a large chunk of their entire net worth, and still having a ton of money leftover to push this shitty idea for almost a year at a global scale.
I'm fed up with this shit. My parents educated me on the internet and the potential of seeing things you don't want to see. They knew there was no change to 100% block or monitor what we did and instead made sure that they were always there if we did see something disturbing.
Now I'm at the frontier age of getting kids and I just know that my kids will be just as smart in circumventing this kind of bs as I was (school monitoring web traffic ain't working with a vpn) and I will gladly teach them about the internet. Hell, I'll even take them back to when the internet of old and show what kind of crap we had to deal with.
Solutions like these are like a bandaid. You're not solving the problems. And even that is a utopian thought, but they ought to focus on the people that make the web unsafe, not the kids
I think it's important to point out that is yet again the EPP, this one being led by Henna Virkunnen.
As was the undemocratic vote that was pushed through by Roberta Metsola
The most effective way for all of us to stop these relentless attacks on the internet and our privacy, is to stop them getting elected in the first place.
EPP representation in each country.
Use the internet for something useful -
#STOP THE EPP
If it applies to mastodon it also applies to IMAP right? I wonder his exactly they see email protocol being updated to check how old is the recipient and i bet all those spammers will NOT send their unwanted content to my child inbox.
Fuckers don't understand the internet
I feel all of this is to prepare for future legal enforcement of approved internet use. AI is destroying the internet we know and value because rich people want more power, as they do with everything they touch.
And lead to state intranets only accessible by thin clients tied to your ID.
It is unclear which servers are covered. The draft adopts the definition of a social network from the Digital Markets Act. Its Recital 11 clarifies that it concerns “information society services,” which EU law defines as services generally provided for remuneration. Whether a private, non-commercial hobby server falls under this depends on the legal classification of the specific offering. The statement that every instance without exception is covered is therefore an overstatement.
Funny when the article itself contradicts the breathless clickbait headline.
That said, perhaps this will apply and cause problems. Or perhaps not.
The way it's imposed on the fediverse is bad, but I like this part:
The Blueprint is open source and uses zero-knowledge proofs: cryptographic methods that prove a statement like “over 15” without revealing the underlying data. Each member state must provide at least one such solution free of charge to its citizens.
How often can I probe it? If I can establish you are over 15 but under 17... I know you are 16 (squeeze theorem or something)
It's not clear but it seems like the service is restricted to the same age ranges it asks anyone, so it couldn't do that as effectively. Although it could just use when the user passes from one category from another to get their age, at least if the account was created when the user was >18, but that seems unavoidable.
Hey Europeans, can you make your continent less cringe? Thanks.
I'm really tired of fighting with our governments to do any of the important helpful things they need to, and then also having to fight with them to not do shitty things that destroy good or worthwhile stuff
It gets fuckin old man
KIDS ACT= mass surveillance, fishing out political dissidents.
KIDS ACT = Kill Internet Dissent and Speech And Criminalize Thought. These bills should be seen as they are: Free Speech and Free Expression Destruction bills.
That’s why political dissident has to happen in the real world with people we know in real life, protests are great places to meet people like that, so are all sorts of activist things like volunteer work or community organizing
Make sure to bring your personal location tracker to the meet up
The irony of linking to an article about forced identification that requires you to login and pay to read it without trackers or a giant banner that covers the article.
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A proposal for mass surveillance of all Internet users named the "KIDS ACT" huh. What a clever name for such a thing. Did the Americans write it, or did the same people who write bills for the Americans write it?
This kind of thing has much less tradition in the EU than the US. First of all, European Union legislative texts are actually properly called "directives" or "regulations" (this in particular is a proposed regulation), putting "Act" in their titles is a very recent trend. And then, naming laws with these kinds of acronyms has so far not been common in the EU at all, that is clearly an imitation of US bills.
The US isn't the only place with evil politicians that cowtow to big business.
you be surprised who pushes these legislation in EU. META, google, MS is likely the ones writing it,.
I bet that it will be such a mess that they won't dare to enforce it.
They would easily dare to enforce it against smaller entities who can't fight back, is the point.
also allows them to silence criticism, and censor material that they dont like, current hot topic anti-zionism.
¡Exactly!
Now, what are good options, I dunno. But I've always considered that it's important for platforms with strong presence of social resistance to have adjacent hosting in something like extrajudicial waters, or at least in countries that can safely ignore things like the DMCA.
I hope we can elect politicians who don't hate the Internet at some point, so that we don't have to hope it will be unenforceable.
I've been a very regular user of the Internet for more than 20 years, and 20 years ago I thought that surely in 20 years, the Internet will have become established and governments will no longer be trying to attack it, instead we will be living in a utopia of free international communication. That has turned out to be false. :(
People should have thought about electing decent politicians decades ago, but far too many have fallen for electing 'the lesser evil' instead.
Idk if it's really possible to have government supported internet that isn't a government controlled internet.
Governance in general relies a lot on the spiral of silence, and a free internet tends to disrupt it.
It is unclear which servers are covered. The draft adopts the definition of a social network from the Digital Markets Act. Its Recital 11 clarifies that it concerns “information society services,” which EU law defines as services generally provided for remuneration. Whether a private, non-commercial hobby server falls under this depends on the legal classification of the specific offering. The statement that every instance without exception is covered is therefore an overstatement.
I don't like any of this but losing social media including Lemmy just isn't that big of a deal to me.
The European fediverse may be at risk, but the rest of the fediverse will tell them to go fuck right off.
For now, age verification laws are being passed all over the world though
In that case, the fediverse better learn to run on tor onion domains and i2p eepsites for federation and access.
I have been saying for a long time that the CuckNet was going to go insane, and the only ways to get real information would be on I2P and Tor anyway.
We must remember that EU is a democracy (not): therefore this is what the majority of EU citizens want.
Rule by the lowest common denominator? Democracy without checks and balances is mob rule, minority discrimination, and decisions forced by the least informed.
The fact you're posting this means it’ll pass.
If European users logged off, and directly acted on these neo Nazis, this law would have never even been drafted.
But since Europe is going Axis again, I don't think they care about the net.
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