There's a fairly non-invasive way to do age verification: ID cards that connect to a smartphone app that only provide a boolean age verification to the requesting service. Requesting service can be anonymous to the ID app and the requesting service can only receive a bool.

That most implementation will try to collect far more data is the real concern.

There's an even easier one: When you buy a phone, the salesman checks your ID and sets the phone to child lock mode or unlocked mode.

Phones should have no locks unless the user installs them and holds the keys.

Why?

Because if we don't have the keys to the machine, then we don't actually own our computers. If we don't own our computers, then we have no freedom.

Because everything the word "hacker" ever stood for will be destroyed if this nonsense gets normalized. The day governments get to decide what software "your" computer can run is the day it's all over.

> Because if we don't have the keys to the machine, then we don't actually own our computers.

It is not self-evident to me that people under 18 should "own [their] computers" or have unrestricted "freedom".

Think about how the proposed idea would most likely be implemented. It would be used as justification for manufacturers to sell devices that the end use doesn't control. They already do that; this would give them legal justification.

In the modern world, this is like saying people under 18 shouldn't have the freedom to be able to read and write. We would be decades back into digital stone age if we had held onto such a preposterous idea in the 80's and 90's. Virtually everything we have now is basically built by people who were hacking on their computers in elementary school and exercising their freedom of speech in terms of writing code freely at the discretion of their own imagination.

Then their parents should own it. Not the corporations, and certainly not the government.

The salesman would give you the key if you're over 18

Parents can hold the keys for underaged?

That arrangement is OK. It exactly mirrors things like car keys. The problem is giving the keys to the corporations or the government.

The goal isn't child protection but surveillance and profits for kyc companies.

My German ID can do that already AFAIK.

So you are against paid services? Who manages the servers, updates apps, and distributes them?

I'm not sure about op, but as someone who agrees with their comment, yes, I absolutely am. I despise 99% of all digital """services""" that exist. Whether it's cloud, music/movies/series/whatever streaming, subscriptions of almost any kind... They're all extremely dystopian and anti-human. I sail the high seas for almost everything I consume digitally. When I want to support a creator I enjoy, I pay them directly (buy their merch, buy a physical copy of their album, purchase their game and dlcs, or simply directly donate).

In my opinion, corporations being allowed free reign and control over the internet and digital world in general without guardrails was *THE* biggest legislative mistake (although I believe it was done on purpose )in the past century, considering how the internet will most definitely be the defining factor of the era we're currently living in in future textbooks; if we make it that far at least.

I don't think most people understand the sheer magnitude of the damage that corporate slop, control, anti-competitiveness and pursuit of infinite growth at all costs has done to our technological capabilities and advancement.

Hardware is the only area of tech that continually gets better, whilst software continually regresses and gets worse. 90% of "new" code is web-based slop (and now AI generated web slop) that hogs memory and cpu usage, completely undermining all advances in hardware just because companies weren't willing to pay the extra buck to program a native solution that wouldn't force its users to purchase new machines.

If it wasn't for corporate (and many programmers') lazyness, computers from over a decade ago would still be fully functional, fully usable machines that could do the most bleeding-edge of tasks, safe for maybe the most graphically-demanding games and rendering.

And then maybe programmers could focus on actually advancing the science that is writing code, instead of building yet another fucking REST API and React UI. And don't forget to package it all in electron to fuck your users as much as possible, and dodge any need for real engineering.

Companies can just keep offloading costs unto the user, making users buy machines 10x as powerful as the ones they had 5 years ago, just to do the exact same tasks, but 20x slower. But at least they have a nice looking UI right?

What prevents you from using Debian and a FOSS stack?

Not much yet, that's pretty much what I do, although I run void linux and arch on my machines. But even Linux isn't safe; what if other countries adopt the OS-level age-verification laws that california is pursuing? very few distros will be safe. And then all they need to do (and you can bet that's exactly what they'd do) is keep squeezing, taking away freedom gradually until most linux distros require you to submit a digital ID on install. And chances are, the few distros and maintainers that go against that would be completely cut off from the mainstream tech ecosystem (which would make them barely usable in this day and age, at least as long as you live in a city with a job and rent and all).

This may sound like a slippery slope fallacy and it may indeed be that, but I can't think of any other possibility if we just let stuff like this keep happening. It may seem like we're just giving an inch now but in 5 years you'll suddenly realize they've taken a mile.