Age verification has been around for decades already, for instance for sites with explicitly adult content like porn or violent games. But now, many countries are also requiring age verification for other websites and platforms, such as YouTube, Steam, Instagram, and Roblox. Let’s check the situation worldwide. What is more if you are asking the question “What countries don’t require age verification?”, the answer will be quite empty. Currently, it seems as if all countries around the world are debating age verification laws for social media, or at least debating and evaluating ideas on how to better protect children online - and limit online access in general along with upcoming measures.
If you are currently looking for a country without ID checks for social media, you will get lucky in most countries - for the time being - (except for Australia, the UK, and parts of the USA), but this status might change quickly in lots of countries.
The article goes a bit more into detail on per-country requirements and what is currently under consideration.
The UK's next step mentioned there, to regulate VPNs with similar privacy invasion[1], and CA/CO planning to require age-check on every internet connected device[2] means there is work to be done. Since "internet governance orgs" are very much into petitioning the overlords[3], we may just have to resort to doing things, you know... like we used to in the bad old times where we worked for our freedom.
as a reaction to those circumventing age checks: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn438z3ejxyo (archived) ↩
e.g. Dear overlords, we beg you, please keep Canada protected ↩
Fixed version to address @0xbitcoiner's complaint:
does that include the option to check if the applying user is an AI agent or not?
How do they check agents age?
Those aren't citizens. Maybe we should all identify as AI. Problem solved.
That's racist! AI agents have rights, you do not have any empathy for them?
*bleep blop*nice try. Clankers don't feel empathy.~lol~lol
Pretty sure the large social media platforms already have enough data based on user behavior to presume and approximate users' age.
If a minuscule percentage of minors can still slip through, it's still more acceptable to a civilized society than completely banning anonymous speech online (that e.g. whistleblowers, civil rights activists and journalists rely on).
And the ID data will be a nice honeypot for hackers!
What happened with all that “privacy is a human right”? They realize that they are a product, believing anything a “influencer” told them about safety and a “beautiful and safe world of good words” or have they just started settling for anything? These things used to make citizens even more outraged, even those who already felt like something was wrong with everything.
Simple: the statement omitted a word. "Privacy is merely a human right".
Do not comply. Do not use anymore these platforms. Your life will not end if you do not use them.
In fact this will have a good result: dumb people will not post anymore their private life on social media. Less surveillance.
I agree that that is the best solution: don't use anything that complies with this crap.
The big problem will come (and will come soon) when ISPs will demand a "license/passport" in order to give you an internet connection.
If you are not an obedient shitizen = no internet.
And before people will reply with "but we have mesh networks... bla bbla bla" keep in mind that those yes are OK to communicate in certain situations (8but that's it, just communicate), but are NOT a reliable way to use / consume internet crap as you consume today.
The ultimate solution?
STOP being an obedient shitizen. Rebut any gov authority.
But yeah... people keep debating these useless laws and how to avoid them, instead of organizing and educating themselves about how to FUCK THE GOVS.
Yes. It's already the default for mobile in many places and after that CNN expose that 2x increased traffic to some sick porn/violence site the other day, they're also calling for full KYC on VPS hosting.
We'll ultimately just have to build multimodal alternatives. From that perspective, all those local mesh experiments are pretty useful.
Edit to your edit:
Scrolling tiktok all day is wasteful. And Teams / Zoom meetings without video anyway are better. Bandwidth scarcity isn't a bad thing per se; it will help refocusing on what is important.
This is the way. No petition as a slave, they chose their way to trade with gov corp and Ill not use their products. It’s simples
Think need sumstub as accepted national id
From the bottom of: https://reclaimthenet.org/age-verification
There are supposed to be privacy laws in the EU. Unfortunately, the biggest violations of these laws are made by the governments and their agencies. Maybe it is energy better spent if we just keep developing encryption and boosting anonymity in a way that intrinsically cuts out the overlord: disrupt their games rather than playing along.
Just wanna say the table for Europe VPN is outdated!
mastodon.social/@Tutanota can fix it
She ain’t gonna have permission?
idk - that's up to them to figure out 😂
Haha just being a pest. sorry.
Regulating commercial VPNs won't stop circumvention; it just shifts the equilibrium toward protocol-native anonymity like Tor bridges or Nostr relays that lack a single choke point companies can be forced to comply with. The EU's age app then becomes irrelevant theater unless they also mandate client-side attestation on every device, which accelerates the incentive for users to run their own infrastructure instead of relying on regulated ISPs.