…so why are people so up in arms against bans and restrictions on children having access to social media, where they have even less oversight and can do so themselves?
…so why are people so up in arms against bans and restrictions on children having access to social media, where they have even less oversight and can do so themselves?
You don’t want the target site to have your identity (nor your age, only the information, that you are old enough). Though you also don’t want to tell the government, which age restricted sites you are using (imagine the government getting having a list of all your porn site usage).
There are ways to do this, though the implementations in most countries don’t adhere to these requirements (either by giving your identity to the target site or the government collecting your usage data).
I might remember that wrong, but I think I heard a proposal in germany, that would fit the requirements. Something about, that you can generate up to 30 cryptographically signed tokens (don’t know why the limit was included) from the government, that the target site can use to verify their age limit. No communication between the government and the site. Though I don’t know, if that proposal got any track.
We will probably also see, that nearly all websites will need age verification, since there is a lot, that is not suitable for very young children. A bit older children and teenagers will also have to use that verification workflow quite often. Adults way more often. That is a lot of friction easily avoided with a VPN.
And of course the governments would also need to block every site, that does not comply to the local regulations. Different worldviews make this impossible. A small blog about queer education in europe would need to implement age verification, because the US and russia hate queer people.
It’s a big clusterfuck