IMEI is PII

Why is the government so obsessed with parenting and nannying the citizens?

I think it's because people from outside the traditional political families are getting popular votes.

For the established politicians, blaming "the internet" and building a supressing censorship machine is easier than looking in the mirror and seeing where the discontent comes from.

Is it tied to my real identity?
If not it seems to me that it should be sufficient as to serve as a security this phone is legit and not emulated/compromised.

To avoid people from simply copying the "age proof" and having others reuse it, a nonce/private key combo is needed. To protect that key a DRM style locked down device is necessary. Conveniently removing your ability to know what your device is doing, just a "trust us".

Seeing the EU doesn't make any popular hardware, their plan will always rely on either Asian or US manufacturers implementing the black-box "safety" chip.

You should read more international news if you think either the EU or US is "the worst place". Somalia for example has been in civil war since the 1980s.

And the EU for their stupid fucking censorship

This sounds like a misunderstanding of gdpr to me?

What's going on with Europe lately? You all really want GOOGLE of all mega corps in control of your identity?

You're going the opposite way, it should be your right to install an alternate OS on your phone. If anything they should be banning Google licensed Android.

I just wanted the EU to fork lineageOS and provide it as an alternative in major chains.

Yes it's tied to your identity. That's what PII is. It's also not tied at all to your OS.

I miss LineageOS so much, my last couple of phones haven't had a build of it and my asshole banking apps wont work on it now.

For my next phone i'm just not going to buy one unless it's already supported and if I have to skip online banking I'll do it.

Sure, but it has some good sides as well

It's just a shame that they aren't just made of the good sides

There is a bit of a conflict between the laws requiring certain companies to identify their clients and GDPR in basis, but there is something in GDPR that allows these companies to still collect the relevant data and use it or to verify the data and not store it depending on the use case.

The whole use case thing is even the reason why companies are allowed to collect data from you. You couldn't get anything delivered if this exception wasn't there, because they wouldn't be allowed to progress your address.

At least that's what I gathered from the Dutch implementation the AVG, when I last read it a couple years ago.

Doesn't harvest enough data.

Its not the populace, our politicians just like in the US have gone rogue. People are voting for the nutters due to anti immigration propaganda and so increasingly getting far right. Its happening across the entire western world and its bad news for everyone.

Fascism is making a comeback, and everyone's dumb enough to believe it's an America problem, instead of a global oligarchy, class war, problem.

Been wondering myself. It's certainly part of the general right-ward trend. Societies are becoming more illiberal. It's not just the right that is moving to the right.

Obscenity laws have always been about enforcing the "correct" sexuality. Protecting minors meant preventing them from becoming "confused"; ie becoming LGBTQ.

You also have growing nationalism. In Europe, people are saying we should enforce "our laws" and "our values" against meddling foreigners (ie Big Tech). It often sounds a lot like the rants against the "globalists" that have been a staple among the US far right for decades. Age verification is part of that.

For example, Germany has long enforced age verification within its borders. It's part of the whole over-regulation thing that makes competitive tech companies almost impossible in Europe. For some reason, Europeans have trouble accepting that. You can see it here on Lemmy. The solution must be to enshittify everything to level the playing field.

Gonna guess it's outside influence with money pushing their ideology. Just like the crap with Visa and steam, itch.io, etc.

one advantage of cards over banking apps

The legal precedent for gaining the ability to ban content under the guise of preventing the dissemination of "obscenity" allows the future banning of "obscene" political opinions and "obscene" dissent.

Once the "obscene" political content is banned, the language will change to "offensive".

After "offensive" content is banned, then the language will change to "inappropriate".

After "inappropriate", the language will change to "oppositional".

If you believe this is a "slippery slope" fallacy, then as a counterpoint, I would refer to the actual history of the term "politically correct":

In the early-to-mid 20th century, the phrase politically correct was used to describe strict adherence to a range of ideological orthodoxies within politics. In 1934, The New York Times reported that Nazi Germany was granting reporting permits "only to pure 'Aryans' whose opinions are politically correct".[5]

The term political correctness first appeared in Marxist–Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time, it was used to describe strict adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that is, the party line.[24] Later in the United States, the phrase came to be associated with accusations of dogmatism in debates between communists and socialists. According to American educator Herbert Kohl, writing about debates in New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The term "politically correct" was used disparagingly, to refer to someone whose loyalty to the CP line overrode compassion, and led to bad politics. It was used by Socialists against Communists, and was meant to separate out Socialists who believed in egalitarian moral ideas from dogmatic Communists who would advocate and defend party positions regardless of their moral substance.

— "Uncommon Differences", The Lion and the Unicorn[4]