Creating a registry of adults and what content they access is exactly the point of these laws. Always has been. "Protecting children" is just the easiest excuse to make it seem more urgent to violate people's rights. Just like removing trans healthcare started with children and is now targeting adults.

Wasn't there something about the effectiveness of the Australian law to restrict minors on social media? Ah...

Four in five under-16s in Australia using social media despite ban, study shows

Experts say law not enough to stop children accessing harmful content online and more ‘convincing strategy is required’ . More than 80% of under-16s in Australia said they were still using social media three months after legislation banning them from it came into force, research shows.

I think they expect the parent to secure their own account to make sure their child can't use it. And anyways, it shifts accountability. If the parent lets the child use their account, then the parent takes the blame. If the child gets addicted to social media, that becomes the parent's fault for giving the child unrestricted access.

Can't wait to become a shady dealer who sells pre 2026 computers with highly illegal software running on it (such as debian)

I fear that is the inevitable whimpered ending of the personal computing era. Cory Doctorow called it back in 2011.

They're gonna ban abacuss next, and then comes mental math, and suddenly 2+2=fish

Also fuck absolutely every politician who focuses on "supporting" incompetent parents... All this does is to allow them to become even more incompetent and then the government has to do even more parenting...

No. There is zero need for this shit, don't normalize it.

But then how are you supposed to surveil citizens?

It would only work if the law mandated that this token cannot be stored or tracked across the web.

It's a legit idea, and there's a thing like that, called Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKP).

IMO it's possible in theory. Like set up and managed in good faith, it can work mathematically, and you can prove it does.

My worry tho is that it wouldn't be in good faith. It'll be corrupted somehow. Or it turns out that enough other signals leak that it isn't very effective. Like fingerprinting and stylometry and w/e allow ID'ing despite the ZKP layer.

It’s all silly because computers are not paired with any specific body. You could toss your “18+ accessible phone” to your kid, etc.

Unless they do implants, which is nightmare land because we know they’ll want more than just your birthday.

I didn't like the age verification law either, but as it would be introduced everywhere, yes or yes, at least it's mandatory to search an privacy protecting methode, which isn'y not so easy, Because of this I asked Sketchapedia, which shows an zero knowledge system, the service provider only receive an OK or Not OK with it.

In problems which I can't avoid, I always prefer to search solutions or at least workarrounds to fix it.

I would love to be wrong about this, but I don't think it's likely. Why would a government voluntarily spend money on making the app work for a minority of people running a privacy OS that politicians associate with criminals and gangsters?

Also, it's not like the wallet app will actually be open source in the traditional sense where you can fork and compile it yourself, so I think getting any decent version of it seems like a long shot

1. The real explanation is that they want control. The children are a excuse.

2. No because you can go to jail for that, like the dude with his GrapheneOS in the US. They're probably working on that next.

The services themselves will probably be made to ask for verification and your devices will answer through the age verification app. Since custom mobile OSs (or desktop Linux) won't provide hardware attestation, the app won't work on them and the websites will treat you as underage. The types of services that require age verification aren't specific, they can change based on EU decisions so eventually people not using "approved" OSs may be locked out of most of the internet.

First of all,

I don’t understand where the restrictions are going to lie

Yes. That's exactly the question.

The point of the... excitement around this is exactly the uncertainty. We simply don't know what the EU or national governments of the EU will do with this.

The first problem is that the "hardware bound attestation" isn't just hardware bound, it's specifically Apple and Android's attestation and NOT the more open standard. That means the device that can do this thing, whatever it's going to be "necessary" for, MUST always be an Apple or Google device, with that bit intact. Tbh, I don't really know how much rooting affects this, but I would be surprised if it didn't.

The second problem is that once the infrastructure for blocking access to something and requiring this sort of authentication is in place, it's just a list of targets. It's very easy to add another platform, website, app or anything else behind it.

And the reason for this excitement happening now is that the specification that was given for all this to happen previously only said it should be "secure" somehow, but not detailing the "how". They think they can do it as an implementation detail and pretend it's not a big deal. So it's very clearly something those bastards have tried to be sneaky about.

Can you use rooted phones

No, whatever the point of their efforts is, they will make sure to not leave obvious loopholes like that open.