You've seen the news about various US states (and even a US-wide bill!) for operating systems to implement age checking - but exemptions could cause headaches.
Personally I take any ‘age check’ I can’t get around with a VPN and a browser ID string (or whatever the kids find next) as evidence of egregious enshittification, and my answer is to stop using that site.
But I’m in a privileged position where I don’t need to for work, never did facebook et. al., dropped reddit (and slashdot before it) except for niche, mostly read only stuff that I can drop in a heartbeat and am a non USian. The vasty majority of internet users are not.
The article is right, this is going to cause headaches at the least and breakage at the worst. Once 99% of the population has accepted this (95% of non phone users), they’ll come for linux, rewriting and refining the currently broken legislation. The politician class globally hates free speech and private communication, this is another big nail in the coffin.
I have some hope that the internet will treat de-anonymization like censorship and route around the damage, at least for quite a while. Sturgeon’s law also applies, at least 90% of the internet is crap, and the proportion is climbing fast with AI slop, but it’s also the greatest single step in freedom of access to (useful) information ever and I don’t want to lose that, and we shouldn’t have to pay for it with voluntary surveillance.
Remember, there’s a bunch of other choke points that can be used to the same effect as OS, ISPs, DNS, fingerprinting, search engine, the list goes on. It’s just that Microsoft, Apple, Google actually want this for the data harvesting potential so OS is easy.
At some point there will be a need for internet 2.0 built with anonymity and encryption baked into the bottom layers, perhaps it’s time to start building.
Personally I take any ‘age check’ I can’t get around with a VPN and a browser ID string (or whatever the kids find next) as evidence of egregious enshittification, and my answer is to stop using that site.
But I’m in a privileged position where I don’t need to for work, never did facebook et. al., dropped reddit (and slashdot before it) except for niche, mostly read only stuff that I can drop in a heartbeat and am a non USian. The vasty majority of internet users are not.
The article is right, this is going to cause headaches at the least and breakage at the worst. Once 99% of the population has accepted this (95% of non phone users), they’ll come for linux, rewriting and refining the currently broken legislation. The politician class globally hates free speech and private communication, this is another big nail in the coffin.
I have some hope that the internet will treat de-anonymization like censorship and route around the damage, at least for quite a while. Sturgeon’s law also applies, at least 90% of the internet is crap, and the proportion is climbing fast with AI slop, but it’s also the greatest single step in freedom of access to (useful) information ever and I don’t want to lose that, and we shouldn’t have to pay for it with voluntary surveillance.
Remember, there’s a bunch of other choke points that can be used to the same effect as OS, ISPs, DNS, fingerprinting, search engine, the list goes on. It’s just that Microsoft, Apple, Google actually want this for the data harvesting potential so OS is easy.
At some point there will be a need for internet 2.0 built with anonymity and encryption baked into the bottom layers, perhaps it’s time to start building.