This simple policy then goes on to silence most individual publisher(/self-media) and consolidated the industry into the hands of the few, with no opportunity left for smaller entrepreneurs. This is arguably much worse than allowing children to watch porn online, because this will for sure effect people's whole life in a negative way.
Also, if EU really wants "VPN services to be restricted to adults only", they should just fine the children who uses it, or their parent for allowing it to happen. The same way you fine drivers for traffic violation, but not the road.
And if EU still think that's not enough, maybe they should just cut the cable, like what North Korea did.
1. First, year ~2015 legal framework was created under disguise of banning pirated media(specifically torrents.ru)(legislative push). State-wide DNS ban introduced. Very easy to circumvent via quering 8.8.8.8
2. Then, having legal basis, govt included extra stuff in banned list(casinos, terrorist orgs, etc)(executive push). IP bans introduced, applied very carefully.
3. Legal expanded allowing govt to ban specific media on very vague criterias(legislative push). IP blocks tried on some large websites. DPI hardware mandated to be installed by ISPs to filter by HTTPS SNI(executive push).
4. At ~2019 Roskomnadzor(RKN) created, special govt entity which enforces bans without court orders(legislative push).
5. ~2021 sites become banned if they are not filtering content by Russian laws by request of RKN(executive push). VPN services were obligated to also DPI-filter traffic(legislative push).
6. ~2023 Crackdown on VPN started(executive push). Popular commercial services were IP-banned, OpenVPN and IPSec connections selectively degraded by DPI.
7. ~2025 Heavy VPN filtering(vless, wireguard, etc) introduced(executive push). Performance of certain sites were degraded(youtube, twitter, etc).
Upd: are they able to use VPN when the Internet is in so-called "white-list mode" where only certain websites are available?
BTW I live in Turkiye where the government banned ALL the adult websites around 2008. Even as an adult you can't access them. This year they are banning VPNs, introduce age controls and ID verification COORDINATED with the rest of the world. Also banning some games, control social media, and basically make it legal to control and track everyone on the internet. What a coincidence that similar attempts are simultaneous in many independent countries.
And no, children have not been really protected in Turkiye since 2008.
No, you live in Turkey. That is what the country is named in the English language. People can render it in Turkish however they like, but in English it's "Turkey".
The United Nations agreed to their request, it’s a minor thing to let people spell it the way that was requested. You don’t have to, but others can. Languages evolve.
Others look at this recipe and can't help but notice its effectiveness. Eventually nobody is beneath pulling this kind of logic, even if they were the ones crucifying it just a few short years ago. The weaker the leader, the more likely that that they forget where they wrote down those principles of theirs and resort to this crap.
If this actually works then it should work in both directions, right?
Example: Many websites are malicious or adversarial, therefore anything enabling a service to discern whether the user is a vulnerable child is a boon to website-operating pedos and needs to be eliminated. The law should inhibit predatory services from being able to discern the user's age, to protect the children.
If only being associated with pedophilia and nazis was still something that had to be avoided because it would be career ending otherwise.
Indeed I do not remember this, nor can I find corroborating evidence that there was much of an effort to justify the requirement to the public at all. As far as I can tell, the government simply decided that they needed more control over the internet, so they made a law to give themselves more control over the internet. https://www.gov.cn/gongbao/content/2000/content_60531.htm It has no special provisions limited to children that only later got extended to adults. (Meanwhile, restrictions on how long children may play games continue to only apply to children, AFAIK.)
If they want to protect children, shouldn't they sterilize everyone?
Every child born, regardless of wealth will inevitably suffer injury, illness, and psychological setbacks. Therefore, the best way to protect them would be not allowing people to have children.
By the way, not having children is also more eco-friendly, because an infinite series simply converges.
I wonder if I’ll see this ridiculous scene in my lifetime.
This one isn't actually accurate. Younger people have longer time horizons (i.e. aren't expecting to be dead as soon) and are therefore more likely to support policies like electrifying transportation and generating power from lower CO2 sources, and policies get enacted when they have majority support, so causing the population to skew older by reducing the number of children is ecologically very bad.
These measures taken by the EU and other government entities has always been about surveillance, censorship, control, and eliminating freedom of speech and association. People need to keep calling out this continual deception and attempt to erode freedoms.
And then in a completely democratic mannner, Europeans said "that's who we want leading us".
"Rules for thee but not for me."
Of course, by using tax payers money.
And there you have it, the actual reason for this.
I'll make a similar comment I made on another thread: we saw a thread with many upvotes hating on the cyber-libertarians... We all know the EU institutions are ran by cyber-libertarians and that it's cyber-libertarians making such research and decisions right?
Pick your fight brothers. I don't think spending your time hating on the three John Galts of this world is a worthy fight. You may even turn out to be more morally aligned with the John Galt of this world than with the people running the EU institutions (and North Korea).
It has the ring of BS. Why would an authoritarian government in a country with no free press or free elections feel any need to justify a speech regulation with a fig leaf? They openly restrict speech.
I think you’re full of it.
People don't remember because it didn't happen and the license wasn't about protecting the children. But it's so convenient to just blantantly lie on the internet nowadays, isn't it?
Just like the title of this article blatantly lies about "EU" doing something.
> China had no such legislation until 1997. That year, China's sole legislative body – the National People's Congress (NPC) – passed CL97, a law that deals with cyber crimes, which it divided into two broad categories: crimes that target computer networks, and crimes carried out over computer networks. Behavior illegal under the latter category includes, among many things, the dissemination of pornographic material, and the usurping of "state secrets."
Needless to say, all freedom restricting laws are pushed under the flag of "protecting children" or "society", be it the US, China, or the EU.
And needsless to say, it has nothing do to with protecting children.
The problem with hyperbolic comparisons is they tend to shut down the conversation. Yes this law is stupid and should be stopped. No, the EU is nothing like NK.
I would like you to make that argument.
Governments getting involved absolutely, unequivocally will be used to clamp down on the free exchange of ideas.
You sure about that? )))
> Source: I’m a parent. My kids haven’t seen porn and can’t access the internet.
Are they above the age of 16? Because then you're either Amish or out of touch.
You're the one that needs to argue the presence of harm, given you're the one arguing we need to create a surveillance dragnet to shield certain age groups of humans from witnessing how their species procreates.
The default state is that humans procreate via sexual reproduction. You need to argue why we need to take action to hide this, especially given we let children witness other far more brutal activities from the human species like violence.
If your argument in favor of that is that watching porn isn't harmful to children, then I don't understand what all that superfluous waffling about china is doing in there.
Surely someone claiming it's arguable should be willing to make that argument.
For me it's not that it's reproduction. Film that shows sex is not an issue as I see it and I don't know anyone that has developed serious addictions to sex in Hollywood film. However I know several people, family members included, that have absolutely obliterated their childhoods and early adult years by becoming addicted to porn. They were groomed by adults online from a young age and, although their parents tried to stop it, kids are sneakier and they got around it, exposing themselves to some truly dark things. It is not easy for families to recover from having dealt with a child with serious addiction issues.
I think it's pretty silly to argue that systemic protections are ineffective and overreach whereas the efforts of one or two parents should be enough and are the correct level of enforcement for the protection of children. The parents of the people I know went to extremes to protect their children and they were mostly unsuccessful.
The EP paper appears to be highlighting the existence of a debate regarding VPN.
Relevant quote:
"Some argue that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be required for VPNs as well. In response, some VPN providers argue that they do not share information with third parties and state that their services are not intended for use by children in the first place. The Children's Commissioner for England has called for VPNs to be restricted to adult use only.
While privacy advocates argue that imposing age-verification requirements on VPNs would pose significant risk to anonymity and date protection, child-safety campaigners claim that their widespread use by minors requires a regulatory response. Pornhub and other large pornography platforms have reportedly lost web traffic following the enforcement of age-verification rules in the UK, while VPN apps have reached the top of download rankings."
Of course I'm not saying the EU won't regulate VPNs, but nowhere in this paper is "the EU" stating that VPNs need closing.
no, they want to pretend this is the issue, so that pervasive monitoring or permission and/or deanonymization is normalized. It is to serve the state apparatus, rather than any actual protection.
Maybe some want more control, but most certainly not everybody.
> so that pervasive monitoring
If you haven't gotten the memo, pervasive monitoring already exists. To sell ads.
> or permission and/or deanonymization is normalized
For age verification, it's possible to do it in a privacy-preserving manner. Now people spend their time complaining about the idea and claiming that all who disagree are extremists, so it doesn't help. But we could instead try to push for privacy-preserving age verification.
Last two times they tried to push other censorship/tracking laws (claiming as always "we have to, EU is making us") there were mass protests in every city and town.
In my own town of 5k people there were several hundred (500 people at least, probably more). And the previous govt backed down.
This topic seems to be coming back everytime certain countries (Denmark etc) hold the rotating EU presidency. Our current PM is certainly in the same EU clique that wants to push this so much, but it's an extremely unpopular position and he is already leading a weak minority coalition govt. It wouldn't take much to topple him, so he will not do anything like that (unless he is convicted people are distracted with some crisis, but that is where normal people come in. To keep watching what is being smuggled in).
I wonder why do voters in those countries that propose these laws tend to allow this to happen again and again.
To the EU regulators: we don't need another Stasi, we already have Google and Meta to worry about, thank you.
Also, to regulate in my native language is just a nice way to say the f word, if this conversation is about porn.
No matter what you (as population) say it will get implemented. If you don't, then they will put sanctions on Poland, withdraw financial partnerships, etc. Like with migrants, they are going to be sent there, even if Polish people vote against.
No matter if you are in favor or against, raising the topic will just make you socially be isolated or even legally punished in some places.
Sad for democracy and free speech.
EDIT: clarified about migrant policy and the decision of countries to choose or not
Kids don't have money and hardly ever manage to do crime without getting caught so they're profoundly uninteresting to surveil in this way, but adults are and here the interests of the state and corporations converge so they'll make a push for tyranny.
But how to make people accept it? Tell them they want to expose kids to gruesome tentacle porn, or else they'd support this. Few adults are willing to admit they even look at porn, let alone argue that this is an important activity that needs to be protected, which it is.
There is absolutely no need for new technology to track people, it's there already.
Also I feel like a big reason for age verification is social media. Many countries are trying to prevent kids from accessing social media (because we know it's bad for them), and age verification is the way to do that.
Badly implemented, age verification is bad. But there are ways to implement it in a privacy-preserving manner, which wouldn't make the current state of surveillance capitalism worse.
That, and the lack of real issues to solve.
The rise of authoritarianism? Inequality? Revival of geopolitical "realism"? Decrease in empathy and holistic thinking? Increasing willingness of the general population to engage in political adventurism? Accelerating resource consumption (and decelerating resource stocks).
And if you consider none of those "real" problems, I know some people seem to have forgotten about it, but what about climate change? Given the half-life of CO2 and methane, that's a problem as "real" as they get.
Did you grow up with free streaming platforms? Pretty sure many adolescents were accessing porn before those, though it was slightly less accessible.
I personally don't have a definitive opinion about porn (I feel like young kids obviously shouldn't have access to it, but it shouldn't be illegal to adults, but I don't know where the limit should be), but I feel like making it harder for kids to access social media makes sense.
You are right at pointing out that the paper is overall presenting the subject in a balanced manner, unfortunately it seems a bad choice was made when it came to that specific sentence, that gives a venue for it to be fed in the outrage machine.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/7826...
For this "story" to gain legs, someone must have pulled that sentence out of content without mentioning the source and then added some misleading context for the outrage.
In my view, it lends more authority to that statement over the other citations in that chapter.
I am inclined to take this as a honest editorial mistake: adding a ? at the end would have been the right choice.
I might be a bit lost on what you/we mean by context. For me, it’s the original pdf from the EU, no quotes.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/7826...
Bombing children is OK and we happily produce and deliver all the weapons needed for that.
Patterns of an ill society.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/7826...
Usually things like these are qualified like "the Department of Defense of the USA stated X".
> Of course I'm not saying the EU won't regulate VPNs
The word choice is quite revealing. You write "regulate VPNs". To me this is not "regulation" at all - it is restriction or factually forbidding it. It is newspeak language here if we dampen it via nicer-sounding words. It also distracts from the main question: why the sudden attack by EU lobbyists against VPNs?
Live sports, they’re already assaulting internet infrastructure in various EU member states (eg. La Liga forcing Spanish ISPs to block cloudflare IPs during matches). With this in mind it seems less a case of surveillance state and more a case of corporate state capture.
Yep... and to make it worse, nobody is trying to push them towards looking at privacy-preserving age verification: instead technologists try to convince them that they just shouldn't regulate anything. Which... may not work so well.
Registering a phone number with the official company registry is sure to get you a scam call within the hour. People will come up to your house later to sell you power contracts you don't need, phone numbers you never wanted, and they will lie through their teeth to forge your signature if you don't agree. If you're unlucky, you'll be fighting a handful of scam companies in court within the first year, charging you thousands every month, because B2B contracts don't have the kind of protections customers have.
The only way to live a somewhat safe life as a small business owner is to have a dedicated phone number you never answer and a dedicated post office address where nobody lives.
These kinds of requirements made a lot of sense thirty years ago, but nowadays, with billions of people able to abuse every bit of information you publish instantly from anywhere while you're asleep, it makes a lot less sense.
In theory this documentation can be used to prevent scams and crimes, but actual enforcement of people's identities has become a problem, and the criminals have plenty of unsuspecting family members, homeless people, or mentally handicapped adults they can pressure into signing papers.
It isn't a stretch to imagine that a small business owner literally doesn't have enough time in their life to maintain their own health and run their business. There are some pretty grim stories out there, I can tell one based on a friend of mine who was working ... I think 70 hour weeks. Sounded rough. It isn't actually crazy to say they may not have an hour free to figure out what form they need to fill out and where to file it, or that they'd be too sleep deprived to get it right. Assuming that this thing is the only thing they need to disclose and there aren't any other pieces of paperwork that need filing (which we all know there will be).
Sure if they have to they'll probably figure it out in most cases, maybe it is trivial. But the businesses where a straw broke the camel's back don't exist any more to point at as evidence. It is hard to know.
[0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation
Basically, you have no privacy if you start a small business under these kinds of rules.
Not one policy maker has ever seemingly cared about this. But VPNs! That'll fix the budget and demographic crises of European nations, for sure.
I'm curious to see how the EU will maneuver it's new long-term financial plan when none of the members can even pay the membership fee soon.
It isn't just governments.
This is also quietly being backed by some big corporations with money .
> big corporations with money
Is there a notable difference between these two in most places? There _should_ be but in practice it feels like more and more places function closer to an oligarchy than whatever form of “democracy” they espouse to practice.
Mandatory age verification online is a blight imho. It should be outlawed.
Parents should learn how to be parents; the government shouldn't force companies to do parenting instead.
Social media companies (e.g. Meta, Snap) are the first that should provide that but they don't.
Regulate the poison first, not the access to it. All this age verification nonsense is an admission that some platforms knowingly harm their users. And instead of fixing the issue by cracking down on the proverbial crack, governments make everybody's life worse.
I remain hopeful that one day, humans will regard the online advertising companies with the same scorn we do the tobacco industry and may they be ashamed and disgusted at our inaction.
(Not to mention all the other consent age laws.)
That said, VPN is a national security issue, children are only a pretext.
They’d just get an older sibling, or stranger to buy it. Or they’d have a fake ID. Or they’d just steal it from a family member.
But you know which kids did this the least? It was the ones where their parents / guardians took their responsibilities as a guardian properly.
What "national security" implications are there with VPNs?
:/
https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/ireland/corporate/tax-credits-a...
In case anyone wonders: this means the FANG companies don't pay tax in Ireland if they hire enough people in Ireland, which has famously high income tax. It is, in other words, effectively a massive tax increase on the employees while actually reducing total tax income in the EU compared to the "double dutch sandwich".
Note that Ireland signed at least 2 international treaties that they weren't going to do this (OECD minimum tax treaty, EU tax treaty). Of course, there are no consequences to this.
The response to is that EU is exploring company-tax-per-transaction which is so incredibly bad in the massive administrative burden it will generate. It's not final, but it will mean that for every transaction done companies will have to keep (PER transaction) pieces (plural) of evidence for what country they happened in. Every single transaction.
https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/projects-and-acti...
When I was a kid, child programming and commercials were heavily scrutinized. Now any kid can access porn, violence, and scams on the internet. That's a blight. Not age verification.
It was still the job of the parents to set the bed times etc, but at least this was something the parents could actually control.
And for pay-per-view stations with actual heavily violent or pornographic content: Yes, they were absolutely age-gated, usually via a PIN.
Before Internet they used paper.
That does not, of course, mean that age verification laws are the appropriate solution. You could even argue that it's not a problem that kids have access to all this stuff (though I don't think I would agree with that). But you can't just hand wave it away by saying "we looked at porn on paper when we were kids". The situations are not at all the same.
Maybe porn and violence is making today's teenager behave better than those 30 years ago after all!
Please stop thinking about the kids on the internet. But here's a brief list of things you must work on with higher urgency:
- taxing more large corporations,
- taxing more ultra-rich people,
- funding EU-made (open source) tech and infrastructure,
- let parents spend more time with their kids so they can actually protect their offspring and keep them safe from predators, more than any stupid law you think you can devise can do,
- more trains.
Why is age verification connected with identity verification?
I understand why the former is not possible with the latter, but my question is -
Whichever entity is responsible for the verification can just pass on the age verification confirmation without passing through any of the other details, right?
Am I mistaken here? Because if this was possible, I could still go ahead with using the VPN.
> The report highlights emerging approaches, such as “double-blind” verification systems used in France, where websites receive only confirmation that a user meets age requirements without learning the user's identity, while the verification provider does not see which websites the user visits.
With the EU's current approach, disconnecting the two is the exact point. There is no third party, the government ID you already have can be used to verify your age directly with an online service.
At least most complaints I see here are assuming that age verification means tracking.
Too bad, there could be interesting discussions about privacy-preserving age verification, if people just bothered getting informed before complaining.
There's no issuing party to collude with to deanonymize users, no hard requirement on owning a Google- or Apple-vetted smartphone, and generally no way to identify me besides my choice of random numbers.
You move past that, and people rightfully tell you that your scheme outright breaks privacy, or that it makes too many assumptions or is too complex to easily verify it actually preserves privacy.
Encryption is too complex to easily verify it actually protects your data. Still you use it all the time without even knowing it.
The EU digital wallet framework is built around those, and your suggested scenario is a first class citizen.
It is now moving from the academic/research world, to the political field, and feedback/pressure from both commercial groups and political agendas is muddling the field.
Here are some links to canonical docs, you can easily find high quality videos that explain this is shorter/simpler terms to get a grasp of it.
https://www.w3.org/TR/did-1.0/
https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model-2.0/
A note: it’s one of the healthy byproducts of the blockchain age, don’t get sidetracked by some hyped videos from crypto bros.
You can debate whether setting up such a system for things like social media is a necessity or desired in the first place, but being able to show someone a QR code that verifies my name and age without exposing all kinds of other details about me is extremely useful.
This is the foundational tool for 450 million EU citizens, so I think is very important.
We likely have different interests.
There should be a standardized government ID service/API that allows a person to let it disclose their age (or other user selected information) to a requesting site/service. That's all that is needed if the government ID service has appropriate 2FA and security.
Both the request and the response can be appropriately anonymized so that the government doesn't know the site, and the site doesn't know the person's identity.
Why isn't this a thing yet? As far as I know, no one has proposed it.
In theory, every EU state will have to support this soon so users can use it to verify age privately online. Still work to do to roll this out for real, but the technological part is very much already happening and I think the rollout plan is committed.
[0] https://www.personalausweisportal.de/Webs/PA/EN/government/t..., https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Themen/Oeffentliche-Verwaltung/El...
Yes that's how it's done in France for instance, and generally how it's being discussed in the EU.
Most European country already have one, some are still testing theirs. They're required by the EU to make one accessible to their citizens by the end of this year, in the context of the eID project [0].
[0] https://commission.europa.eu/topics/digital-economy-and-soci...
You're kidding right?
In Russia we have gosuslugi.ru (state services), which nowadays requires 2FA and hasn't been compromised in any major way so far.
Among other things they provide a way for a third party to use it as identification service and a user chooses which data about himself he wants to share. No anonymity, though, and I don't see how it can be implemented so that the verification provider doesn't know which service is requiring age verification.
Also, yea, no anonymity is the problem. Why would you want your government to be able to track every single website you've ever visited -- especially considering we're talking about an autocratic regime?
I'm astonished at the naivety on display on a community called "Hacker news."
Basically if you want to do any sort of remote work, I'm not saying you're necessarily using one right now, but the odds are good. Possibly the politician's own IT back-end might have ... opinions... on the ability of the executive to overly check the legislative too.
Beyond that I fully believe there are intelligence agencies, advertising agencies, military interests, IP control interests etc that are all working very diligently and in more targeted ways to each achieve their goals better by pushing for specific measures and helping to amplify moral panics to build the necessary political capital.
Unfortunately, now that it comes to the news cycle, it’s easy to get outraged around misleading headlines.
I encourage you to invest time in researching what the EU has done in the past decade around digital identities and their framing around privacy questions on this. I hope you will find, as I do, that it moved the needle in t he right direction.
This is not a misleading headline, this is a document from the European Parliamentary Research Service that calls out VPNs as a technology that may need to be moderated in order to enforce restrictions such as age verification.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/7826...
As you are calling me out - specifically answer how restricting access to VPNs would benefit the freedom of thought, communication, and information within Europe, and not be something that - together with other measures - can help facilitate digital fascism.
1. Context is “EU digital identity”. For a decade EU asked researcher how to have a way to verify age only, without extra data leaking. They have a working solution, and it’s the one rolling out to EU citizens.
2. This document talks about VPNs because they have been bought up recently as “how to skip age verification tools”. It is a legitimate concern. Every EU citizen has/will-have a privacy safe wallet to prove age, users from other nations will not, EU minors can just VPN to nation X, and skip age verification.
3. The org producing this doc outlines that yeah, the above is true. It’s actually a balanced doc. Each of us would have written a different one, sure. I likely would have liked “yours” better, since I think we feel we share common values. I’m just saying i don’t thing it is misrepresenting reality. The doc targets eu legislators, likely not tech savvy.
This is not about restricting access to VPNs, this is about outlining that they exists, that they have an impact on solutions proposed for age-verification. Did it not exists, it would reinforce that eu votes on shot without having any grasp on what is at stake.
I actually agree with you: I see civic liberties under attack way too often (and try to contribute as much as possible to upholding them).
But by large, the EU has done a good job at upholding those freedoms. Repeated attacks on those freedoms have been rejected when it was time to vote (in the EU parliament!!!). This makes me confident in the process.
Yes, of course, we can always have “better”, but at some point calling out as fascists some legislators trying to understand what’s the relationship between VPNs and age verification seems to me as the opposite of wanting them to be better educated.
To precisely answer the “restrict access to VPNs”, no of course that’s not “good”. But I like the fact that EU legislator get to read that document, instead/on-top of some partisan mumbo jumbo from whatever news outlet.
Feels like its state vs man nowdays, worldwide. Don't let them mislead you.
Now there is a time politicians control what websites we can access.
I'm not as bearish on all this as most people here. I don't see much use for age restriction, except maybe keeping preteens off social media. That said, the proposed verification tech is very private, as far as I can tell. My review was cursory, though. Also, each EU member is free to use a different technical solution. Of course they're free to not make age verification obligatory at all. This programme is meant to be a strong default legislative and technical framework: it can't make EU members do something.
Reporting on the EU tends to be quite bad, because people often don't really understand what it is or how it works (in particular there's a tendency to conflate what the commission wants to do with EU policy), but this is unusually careless reporting.
There is billions of research going into making children addicted through the window of their phone screen to watch apps, and now with AI this is getting even more dangerous.
It's not only children, also many elderly people are targeted. They are very lonely and then develop a Claude addiction.
As VPNs usually cost some money, which is already a barrier for minors.
How come being that corrupt pays off so well when you're a politician.
It reminds me the Mullvad pub campaign: https://mullvad.net/en/and-then/uk
For everything that's wrong in society the answer seems to be more and more regulations. The negative effects (such as the lack of European AI companies) are then waved away (it's because Europe spends their money on American AI instead of investing in EU AI).
It's honestly scary.
US, from its biggest companies to the whole of Silicon Valley culture has done the exact opposite.
Within the EU, multiple attempts at pushing changes in opposition to this have been proposed, debated, voted on (and rejected), as democracies do.
Not perfect, but when you come down to laws, EU bureaucrats gave EU citizens article 8, US gave them the CLOUD act.
If 51% of people want to do something wrong, they should do it to themselves and leave the other 49% alone. Democracy is not an excuse for doing the wrong thing and going "oh well, guess people want it".
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-...
>Almost seven in ten (69%) support age verification checks on platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, and pornography.
Sometimes the majority is going to make a decision that you do not like, oh well, that is the cost of living in a democracy. People in "terminally online" spaces like HN vastly underestimate the popularity of these laws.
I completely disagree with you, but at least we clearly know why.
GDPR does not protect you from governments snooping on you. The same way it does not stop governments from collecting data on you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
It sometimes even forces governments to collect more data on their own citizens like in Romania.
The only difference between the US and the EU is that the EU has somehow managed to convince a bunch of useful idiots (not saying that you are part of it) that it is better than the US when in reality its the same shit just with a different color and smell.
Obviously, it's not about the children. It was never about the children. If I had my way every one of these people would be taken to a gulag, because they are evil, have evil intentions, and blatantly lie to further their evil goals. I am tired of the intolerant being tolerated, and by allowing this to fester we are headed for a much worse totalitarian dystopia.
All of these ID laws are going to make it more dangerous for kids online IMO.
“Hi I’m a Roblox moderator. Your account was reported for X and you’ve been temp banned. Come to platform Y to appeal. Start by submitting all your personal info and a selfie.”
And it’ll be completely normalized by big tech. Seriously. WTF are they thinking?
That makes this fight so annoying, we have to fight age identification, while at the same time also promoting privacy-preserving age verification for the case it happens anyway.
Quoting an older post...
> In a benevolent dictatorship, sure, go for a zero-knowledge proof verification as your solution. In the reality of democracy, where politicians are corporate puppets who cloak surveillance laws in "think of the children" to rally support from the masses, we need to convince people to see through the lie and reject the proposals outright while reassuring them that they can protect the children themselves via parental controls. You will never be able to sufficiently inform 50.1% of the population of any country of what zero-knowledge proof even means, let alone convince them to support age verification laws but strictly conditional on ZKP requirements. That level of nuance is far too much to ask of millions of people who are not technically-informed, and idealism needs to give way to pragmatism if we wish to avoid the worst-case scenario.
That will only very rarely happen. Do you actually know people that will just give you their phone so you can watch porn? For more than one minute? People are so addicted to their phones.
> it's not about the children
It's also about the children, but there surely are parties which use the process to further their own goals.
> I am tired of the intolerant being tolerated
That's not the right quote for this case.
They don't ask for it, they take it when you're busy or sleeping. Teens certainly weren't asking for Dad's VHS tapes or magazines when I was a kid. I suppose this problem is solveable, too, though. Mandatory biometric locks on every device capable of accessing the internet, why not?
> That's not the right quote for this case.
It is. These people are fascists. Their goal is to create a society where the government has a permanent record of everything every person is doing, monitored 24/7 so nobody can defy it. The point about tolerating intolerance is that by abiding such people, you allow them to create an intolerant society, thus it is prudent even in a tolerant society to be intolerant specifically towards those whose goal is intolerance.
That will be quite noticeable. And tricky if it's face or fingerprint locked, something I see in all phones around me are. Daddy likes his privacy too.
For the rest: rant on, but it'll only reduce your audience. One thing we can learn from history: calling people fascists doesn't work.
Also, the EPRS did not argue that they are a loophole that needs closing.
From the actual paper:
> Some argue that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be required for VPNs as well. In response, some VPN providers argue that they do not share information with third parties and state that their services are not intended for use by children in the first place.
The "some argue" is a link; it turns out that 'some' here is the Children's Commissioner for England, a post with, AIUI, only an advisory role in the UK, and obviously not even that in the EU.
The plan is to replace the 99% with machines. It doesn't matter to the 1% if you survive their glorious, great filter.
The great filter is billionaires. It's a billionaire control problem, not a superintelligence control problem. You're livestock. There's a better ox and cart that just pulled down the gravel road.
It's just a pity they are destroying the internet while doing that. They should be attacking the companies making money from porn instead.
And by the way porn can damage your mind even after 18 so age verification is not a real solution anyway.
""" At the same time, regulators are beginning to address VPN use directly in legislation. Utah recently became the first US state to enact a law explicitly targeting VPN use in online age verification. The state’s SB 73 defines a user’s location based on physical presence rather than apparent IP address, even if VPNs or proxy services are used to mask it.
The EPRS suggests VPN providers may face increasing scrutiny as the EU revises cybersecurity and online safety legislation, noting that future updates to the EU Cybersecurity Act could introduce child-safety requirements aimed at preventing VPN misuse to bypass legal protections. """
People who believe they are addicted to porn view porn at approximately the same rate as other people: they just feel more guilty about it, due to being raised to believe that it is shameful.
One source on the topic: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-apes/202207/...
It's not.
It's supported by, AIUI, multiple peer-reviewed studies now.
Just because you don't like the idea doesn't make the science any less valid.
> A loophole that needs closing
[Some argue] that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be required for VPNs as well.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_AT...
VPN for the VPN with a back-up VPN for the VPN's VPN.
They need a referendum since it affects people's security and well being.
EU is a tyrrant.
You guys should know better, yet keep falling for the distraction every time. That’s exactly how they win.
Add better parental controls to devices, if Facebook sends my children porn on a phone that's "underage" than they get a big fat fine.
But I guess then there's no sending my ID to the world, think of the poor advertisers.
People pointed that out quite a while ago already. Age sniffing is a joint attack on the freedoms of people, which explains why these lobbyists also try to abolish VPNs. Their vision for the world wide web is one of authorization. Ultimately they will fail, but a few get rich here in the process.
Legislation must call real experts before making any *technical* decisions.
Then leave the rest of the world out of domestic failed parenting nonsense. However, policy would still likely fail given the cruelty youthful ignorance often brings, and persistent 1:100 child psychopath occurrence rates. =3
The EU was known to be a privacy rights nightmare for at least 10 years now.
The EU won't stop until it has access to all your data, all your messages, anything you read, save, send will be scrutinized by the the big great EU and it's little minions.
Hey, at least we get the freedom of movement right?
Most of the anti-privacy crap hasn't happened thanks to the EU. Particular countries and lobbying groups have been pushing this through the Commission and Council and most attempts have been rejected by the EP.
If we didn't have the EU, some countries would have long introduced this nonsense (like the UK). But in the EU that does not make much sense, since there is a single market, so you have to enforce it EU-wide.
The European Parliament + courts of justice/human rights are one of the last beacons of democracy/freedom worldwide that resist upcoming authoritarianism. We should support them and remind the Parliament over and over again that they should be continuing the good fight.
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By the way, nearly all your comments on HN are about politics and all trying to sow dissent on Western (and especially European) democracies.
Disclaimer first: I'm not trying to protect him and I'm not tied to him in any possible way. But since when constantly expressing your own opinion (that's what I assume given the age of the account; maybe I'm wrong, but this seems rather like a person than a bot) is a deliberately malicious activity (as implied by your "trying to sow dissent" expression)? If their opinion doesn't match yours, it doesn't mean that they're evil or something similar. It just means that your views are different.
Even on HN there is been a surge of users who instead of defending their arguments or positions on certain sensitive topics such as the EU prefer to simply smear the opposition.
I write about the EU a lot because I live there and I am especially interested in what the EU is doing regarding tech.
I am especially critical of policies that target my private life and it irks me to no end that some people will claim loud a and clear that I should simply be grateful for what the EU is doing when the EU's actions in a lot of matters that I care about have either been deceptive and/or completely went against the supposed principles that the EU is supposed to have.
Of course there is such a thing as EU wants X. The commission drafts laws and presents them to the MEPs who vote on them. The MEPs do not have the ability to propose their own laws. So all these bullshit laws that are voted on originate from the commission.
If I tell you that you can have a red balloon and you only choice is either to accept or reject the balloon, then you don't really have a choice do you? You can't say I want a blue balloon.
> Most of the anti-privacy crap hasn't happened thanks to the EU. Particular countries and lobbying groups have been pushing this through the Commission and Council and most attempts have been rejected by the EP.
Most attempts? And that should somehow reassure me?
Here is another law that was overturned after many years even though everyone knew it was illegal from the start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive. It only took something like 8 years.
When Romania protested that this was illegal under their constitution, the EU sued them and forced them to spy on their own citizens. So thank you but no thank you.
> If we didn't have the EU, some countries would have long introduced this nonsense (like the UK). But in the EU that does not make much sense, since there is a single market, so you have to enforce it EU-wide.
On the contrary, if we did not have the EU then it would not be such a problem because the same people who are pushing for this crap would have to repeat the same process 27 times, one in each country and they would have to convince/bribe their way into each government. Instead they can now push this stuff through the commission and it gets voted on and if approved gets applied to 450M people in one go.
That is the definition of single point of failure if I have ever seen one.
> The European Parliament + courts of justice/human rights are one of the last beacons of democracy/freedom worldwide that resist upcoming authoritarianism. We should support them and remind the Parliament over and over again that they should be continuing the good fight.
Do we now have to resort to this sort of emotional arguments? The EU as a whole is 27 countries, the world has more than 200 countries today. Are you claiming that most of them are hell-hole under some sort of tyrannical government? You can't be serious.
This is my problem with the EU supporters these days, you guys are so quick to shove in everyone throats the amazing stuff that the EU supposedly does for us every day but as soon as someone complains, you revert to using the same tactics as populists with the US vs Them rhetoric, the emotional manipulative language and what not.
Also your last paragraph is in complete contradiction with your previous statement. Somehow the EU/European parliament is the last bastion of democracy/freedom but it stills wants to access my private messages and emails (for my own good of course), and now it wants to force VPNs to record identifying information of its users (for our own good again).
If what you say is true then we wouldn't be having this conversation because anyone who proposes this sort of law should have been ostracized and kicked out of the commission in no time. Yet here we are.
> By the way, nearly all your comments on HN are about politics and all trying to sow dissent on Western (and especially European) democracies.
Ha, yes, you got me! I can see that when the push comes to shove it's easier to go for the subtle ad-hominem or character attacks.
God forbid someone in Europe could have any issues with the way things are going at the moment. Seems highly suspicious.
Should I send you a copy of my EU passports? Maybe that's whats going to be required in a few years time to post online if the all-mighty EU gets its way but I can understand if you want to start doing the policing early. After all we can never be too careful.
By the way, I love the new definition of democracy theses days: agree with us about everything or we will consider you a Chinese/Russian/Populist/evil (take your pick) troll.
Its perfectly fitting with the way the EU is trending down towards authoritarianism and subtle freedom of speech suppression.
In the past decade one of the favored arguments of ultra-right parties in EU was critisism of EU for lack of freedom. The same parties that are cooperating with and have support from dictatorships of China and Russia.