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UK to require ID or face scan before you can make social media accounts
- filup 5mo agoTime to build your own platforms I guess.
- Aerroon 5mo agoYou mean countries?
- nwhnwh 5mo agoWorld?
- HatchedLake721 5mo agoPlanet?
- nwhnwh 5mo agoElon, is that you?
- jjgreen 5mo agoIt's increasingly North Korean here, there is talk of mandatory bad haircuts late 2027 ...
- smalltorch 5mo agoThe moment this comes to America im deploying nanogram. https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/nanogram-pi https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/nanogram-pi
- jacknews 5mo ago[dead]
- themythfable 5mo agoFor all the noise about "EU consumer protections" this certainly seems quite the opposite. So, to be clear, I have to tiptoe around cookies but eu-users will simultaneously do this so they can share pictures of their ...
- thg 5mo agoThe UK left the EU years ago.
- 7tflutter7 5mo agoBut the entire EU is implementing stuff like this. Gov ID's, backdoors (swiss article 50a), etc.
- wrxd 5mo agoUK is no longer in the EU
- feurio 5mo agoArticle is doing a lot of supposing: "To enforce it, platforms must age-check their users. In practice that means anyone opening a new account will likely have to prove they're over 16 by uploading an ID or passing a facial age scan." > likely It could, of course, use a double-anonymous system like the French one. Probably not, but I'd rather that they didn't state their guess as fact in the title.
- choo-t 5mo ago> It could, of course, use a double-anonymous system like the French one. Which isn't really anonymous or privacy preserving, despite it's funny name : https://broken-by-design.fr/posts/proto-authz-porn/ https://broken-by-design.fr/posts/proto-authz-porn/
- feurio 5mo ago"like" It's not beyond the wit of humankind to build a working system.
- pmg101 5mo agoI am so tired of everyone assuming the worst possible implementation of age verification. Whatever happened to steel manning? It's supposed to be in the fabric of HN. Curious enquiry. Is it nice children are exposed to dreadful things? No. Could we, with tech, come up with a way to improve things? Probably! Let's discuss and think about how!
- feurio 5mo agoThis. Smart people could apply their skills and build a genuinely useful technology. But seems they would rather stick their finger in their ears and pretend that it's not happening. And they will be ignored. WHen did this learned helplessness become so in vogue?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- cjs_ac 5mo agoOf course, it'll be possible to circumvent this with a VPN or a proxy. So what this will achieve is it will reduce the number of British muggles on social media, thus bringing us a bit closer to the Good Old Days when only nerds were online. I'm fine with this. This comment was brought to you by the British Class System: Making Nanny Proud.
- agd 5mo agoI suspect there will be a leadership challenge to the prime minister before this, and the legislation will be dropped.
- curiousgal 5mo agoThe dude making the challenge is just as nuts. I am a Left person and it's astonishing how alienated I feel by Labour.
- fidotron 5mo agoCuriously all the opponents are in favour of it, or even think it doesn't go far enough.
- dadjoker 5mo ago[dead]
- AlexB138 5mo agoThis is, of course, the entire goal of the social media control for "children". And you can safely bet that this will creep from social media to essentially all content. Governments have been looking for a means to destroy the anonymous internet for years, and they're making significant progress lately.
- jotux 5mo agoEveryone needs to go transparent. Secrets are lies. Sharing is caring. Privacy is theft.
- bilekas 5mo agoUnless you're a politician, they're exempt.
- Molitor5901 5mo agoor use bluesky
- bhhaskin 5mo agoThey are quoting the book/movie the circle.
- bilekas 5mo agoOh that didn't click. Perfectly on point.
- bilekas 5mo agoI was under the impression that it was already required for any website in which you can communicate with someone else? And who's gonna stop them!? They're constantly unpopular, doesn't matter if they're individually voted out when all the party lines follow the same doctrine. Genuine question, but how does anyone see this all being shut down?
- Hizonner 5mo ago
- Someone1234 5mo agoWhat disappointments me even more than the UK having these authoritarian polices, is that so many people seemingly support this. Anonymity online is of course a double-edged sword, but we've seen the authorities, particularly but not exclusively, in the UK use intimidating tactics against those with unfavorable political views. Even when those views didn't break the law (e.g. no calls for violence). If you also look at how nearly all the existing "verification" systems work, it is just a giant data drag-net, that is absolutely used to associate your real-ID with their advertising analytics. It isn't subtle. Which is why "big tech" (e.g. Meta, Google, Palantir) aren't far behind many proposals.
- rich_sasha 5mo agoOne thing I saw receive very little attention is that social media seems to be a bit recruitment platform for the various thief gangs in the UK [1]. It suits everyone that kids do this, as they are gullible, cheap to hire, and have a more lenient penal code. Sure, as with everything, this ban ks circumventable. But more and more I don't see any social utility of these networks at all. It's the cigarettes or our time. They're not even particularly social any more. Most posting is done by professional influencers and disinformation bots. And criminals, it seems. [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/police-london-gangs-recruit-children-snapchat-phone-theft-b2921846.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/police-londo...
- Havoc 5mo agoThe UK gov's approach to internet regulation is absolutely cancerous. Fully expect pretty much all countries to follow suit though. The "think of the children" angle to force dystopian surveillance is just too neat of a trick to resist. It functionally can't be defeated. No politician is ever going to stand up against it because it risks "oh so you're in favour of harm to children". The strategy is equal parts brilliant and evil
- joduplessis 5mo agoIt is, of course, wild that people are saying "just use a VPN"... in the context of the UK.
- bilekas 5mo agoIt was never going to stop at just adult sites, and it won't stop with social media. I see s world where the ISP will be required to check your ID and "verify your age" because people were using vpn to circumvent these. Then it's not a stretch to see the government requiring all good citizens to "check in" with the government every month like someone out on parole. It would be exactly what they would love and like the frog that slowly boils, I believe they'll get it.
- bhhaskin 5mo agoI agree. I think the only reason it hasn't happened yet is they didn't really have away to do anything with the data. But now with AI they can process it into reports pretty easily at scale. That is what all of these data centers going up is really about.
- kevin_thibedeau 5mo agoYou'll just have to provide a continuous RDP stream from your telescreen. That shouldn't be a problem, citizen.
- josefritzishere 5mo ago1984
- wolpoli 5mo ago> 8. How will age verification work? We know that having a range of methods to prove age is important to ensure online spaces are accessible. > Ofcom will set out in the coming months different options for effective forms of age assurance for proving whether someone is over 16 that are accurate, robust, reliable, and fair. The fact sheet doesn't actually specify how age verification will be done so it the title is bit speculative. However, it's concerning that there's nothing in description about preserving privacy.
- sjducb 5mo agoThese laws exist because social media is extremely damaging to children, destroying their attention, exposing them to online bullying and extortion, and showing them horrific and traumatic content. Can anyone suggest a better way of protecting kids, other than age verification? People without teenagers often say that parents can restrict phone access and use parental controls. In reality most parents don’t do this because it’s very hard to get a teenager to accept something that is not “normal” in their friend group. In a trade off between child protection and online freedom child protection will win.
- jkbbwr 5mo agoWe focus on the evils of social media but never the positives and there ARE positives. Also society giving up the keys to privacy is not a solution here, the think of the children crowd would rather the state be the arbiter of morality and society than educate their kids properly.
- rpdillon 5mo agoThis is very true. I'm not a huge fan of social media, but all the discussions seem to cherry pick stats and lack nuance. Politics is the new religion.
- haunter 5mo ago> These laws exist because social media is extremely damaging My take: These laws exist because _everyone_ not just kids needs to be tracked by real ID. Make no mistake you won't be exempt from this when you have to prove you are over 16. Sure just don't use social media but that's just the first step. Next step will be games (already exist to some extent in China and South Korea) and then who knows what. Mind you sign your git commits and your emails with real ID?
- sjducb 5mo agoMost parents will take that over letting HS Tikky Tokky have access to their 14 year old boy.
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- kmfrk 5mo agoChildren aside, this is just an absurd amount of data to hand over. At least people will realize that age verification is something everyone will have to do to prove they're >16 - not just something <=16yo's will run into.
- Delphiza 5mo agoI had to do an age check in the UK recently. There were various options (credit card, face scan, etc). The one that I chose was email address. My email address has been around long enough to vote, so I am that old. It seems like a good heuristic. If your email address is, say, 10 years old, you are likely to be old enough to create an account. I will get downvoted by people suspicious of handing over a lot of personal data, but we do have GDPR laws, and they're not getting me to install a proctopod (tm). Giving someone my email address to verify my age is not a big deal. They're getting my email address to create an account anyway. The practicalities of implementing 'good enough' age verification, where the website can prove that they conformed to an acceptable approach, do not require giving up all or significant freedoms. Maybe we get to something similar to DNS verification where you need to create a dummy TXT record in an already verified account.
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- butz 5mo agoNext up: fake mustache and glasses e-shop requires ID or face scan.
- stranded22 5mo agoThe amount of propaganda attacks targeting the public, the social media companies have brought this on us themselves.