As the age verification technology would forcibly deanonymise all EU users, opening a huge new vein of behavioural surveillance data to the zuckerbots.

And multiplayer games, please, add multiplayer games....

I've been thinking about it and here's my proposal:

• total ban on hosting/streaming videos with kids below 16. Anyone uploading content with kids is immediately banned. Platforms hosting content with kids are prosecuted.
• treat mobile phones like cigarettes. Parents giving phones to children < 16 are fined. If you want to track your kid get him a smart watch.

Who's with me?

Of course they would. Not only would they get their hands on data users fully voluntarily give them by using their platform, but they'd get their hands on verified IDs and quite reliable family tie information. The potential loss of users is definately worth it for them (from their perspective).

In my opinion we would need an EU service that does the verification while sharing as little information as possible with facebooks services.

I think the EU service should only send back, if the person is allowed to use Facebook. A single yes or no. Which could mean both, that the person is either old enough or has their parents consent.

Fuck this

Which of course they wouldn't do

Oppression of one group is a skeleton key to everything else

No. I want freedom, not this BS

how would you ensure that this stays private? not just from facebook, but completely. as I see it, this would require some form of biometric authentication

I don’t want age verification for social media — I’d rather parents, who in 2025 probably grew up with connected devices, be responsible for it — but if they do force this, it should be part of the operating system. Sort of like Apple Pay and Google Pay where sites and apps can essentially put some boilerplate code in that’s easy to implement and all the sites/apps get back is a yes/no answer. Users only have to go through the process once. It protects privacy way more than giving your info to every “social media” site that comes along.

It’s not ideal but it’d be way more workable than having to provide ID to every site that has social media functions. I mean, you could classify any random forum or site with a comment section as “social media” if the definition is too broad. Things like Fediverse instances wouldn’t have to each write their own implementation. (Eventually, there would be trusted, mature libraries, obviously, but that could take awhile and presumably would need to be part of every browser/app language but also at least some code for every back-end language to store the data.)

a heavy handed approach, but I don't see one that is not heavy handed, private, and effective enough.

slight modification: mobile phone is ok if it only has a small screen like on old feature phones, no capabilities for mobile data but only calls (that's probably a software limitation), and no social media apps (or any installable apps).
perhaps wifi capability with a weak antenna, or a wifi interface that only supports low speeds.

private communications is a question though, because phone calls and SMS are anything but private.

hey people, this could work!

and its not like we need to ban kids from the internet, but to only allow them with the active supervision of a parent.

I thought that's exactly how the porn age check is going to work

Pagers. Kids under 21 can only get pagers.

They get within two meters of a smartphone, both kid, parents, and whoever owns the smartphone go straight to jail.

Anything else would be in flagrant violation of the GDPR (and this too, probably, though not as flagrantly).