Okay you are ready to take a stand for freedom!
You are going to use an OS that isn’t going to bend the knee and comply with age verification laws. I solute you, comrade!
Here are the likely consequences of your choice:
The Feds aren’t coming after you. You aren’t going to be out on a watch list.
What will likely happen is that if you try to log into your Facebook account you will get a message that says “Your Operating System is not currently supported. Your user experience will be limited to Groups labeled “Everyone”.”
That’s basically it. Your personal user experience will be limited to “kid friendly” areas of the Internet. (Same with apps and games.)
That’s the real driver of these laws. Facebook and other app producers know that the days where they can just shrug off child predators using their products is coming to and end. Regardless of your opinion on age verification is as a solution, child predators are a real world problem and it’s not just the parents fault. The platforms have some responsibility too.
Which is exactly what Facebook and the others specifically don’t want -responsibility for their own platforms. That’s why they are pushing for these laws that off load their responsibility onto the OS makers. Then they can just say “Oh, we don’t have any responsibility for this child being abused in our platform. We asked the OS what the user’s age was and the OS reported 18+. What else could we have done?”
So, that’s the consequence of you choose to use an OS that refuses to comply. You’ll just be relegated to the kid friendly version of website, games, and applications.
Paraphrasing Karl Mark:
original quote
child predators are a real world problem
I cannot emphasize this enough - I absolutely do not care what your children do on the Internet.
@1dalm@lemmy.today @linux@lemmy.ml
The country I exist in (Brazil) passed an age verification law “Lei 15.211/2025” which, to a certain extent, is even more dystopian than Californian one. Because, at least, the Californian “allows” self-declared age, while Brazilian don’t. This means systems must employ mechanisms such as ID’ing, age estimation by selfie or behavioral analysis.
When UK passed their law, threatening and, to certain extent, effectively sanctioning even even non-UK “disobedient”, something happened: many sites and platforms started to geoblock UK. Many Fediverse instances geoblocked UK.
Brazil has a similar history of legal outreach, we had court decisions trying to enforce and rule over non-Brazilians. Something similar is expected to happen when it comes to this age verification law. So I’d expect a similar widespread reaction of sites and platforms geoblocking Brazil.
In fact, it’s already happening: in mere two days since the law became effective, MidnightBSD geoblocked Brazil, Arch Linux 32-bits (not the mainstream Arch Linux) geoblocked Brazil, and others are expected to follow, both distros and websites as well. Including the Fediverse.
This kind of law will hardly stay in the countries and USian states where they’ve been implemented. It’ll spread, because the narrative it’s wrapped with is too alluring and compelling (from emotional appealing “Think about the children!?” all the way to the strawman “If you disagree with age checking laws, you’re literally a pdf file”). So expect more countries embracing this dystopia. This means fewer and fewer places where it’s not a thing. It reeks of a coordinated agenda, especially because it achieves similar things that intended by projects such as Chat Control, PIPA/SOPA, among many other previous authoritarian attempts. The authoritarian found the correct recipe: wrap 1984 in a cute “children protection” wrapping, rinse and repeat.
Therefore, some Fediverse instances, especially those sitting under the hurricane’s eye (e.g. Lemmy Brasil) may end up implementing age checking, or stopping altogether if they can’t afford the additional costs of age checking (it won’t be a free thing for platforms to do; a trivial cost for giants such as Meta, Google and Microsoft, but unfeasible for, say, Fediverse instances and FOSS projects).
Now, regarding the “kid friendly” limitation: if the Web gets limited to “non-adult content”… what’s “adult content” to begin with? Is it just porn, or it may end up covering several non-pornographic things?
It turns out, and here I’m risking getting too off-topic, many things would end up beneath this purposefully vague terminology “adult content”, content from many vulnerable groups: LGBTQIA+ (check out what happened during the recent itch.io and Steam crusade against “adult games”), women, pagans/occultists, political dissidents and whistleblowers, among others. This is what age verification laws are about: silencing everything deemed non-normative.
I diagree. Look at Privacy Policies and ToS. They are extremely invasive. Basically they say more or less “we will do whatever we want”. Why? Because no one reads them or cares, and they want to CYA in any and all situations. Now picture you want to navigate to a website, but the website creator is afraid that, one way or another, some adult content may find it’s way their website, so what do they do? Age-gate it. And now they’ve shirked any responsibility for such content. Every god damn website, the entire internet, will be age-gated. Not just Facebook and Reddit. Children and privacy-concerned adults will not be able to access the internet. And no one will care. That’s where we’re headed.
I’m not sure what you are disagreeing with. That’s generally what I said. If you use a non-compliant OS, your experience will be “age-gated”.
Though I don’t think they will completely block access entirely. Collecting data on kids is extremely valuable to these companies, because kids grow up to be consumers. They will happily continue to let you in, but you won’t be able to go to the 18+ areas.
That’s basically it. Your personal user experience will be limited to “kid friendly” areas of the Internet.
I’m disagreeing with this. I’m saying there will be no “kid-friendly” areas of the internet, outside of areas that are explicitly for children.
I don’t understand. There will still be porn sites for people.
The way it will work is that when you tell your browser to go to a porn site, the site will ask your Bowser for your verified age. Your browser will then ask your OS for your verified age. Your OS will respond “18+” to your browser. Your browser will tell the porn site “the OS says 18+”. Then the porn site will say “Cool, here’s the porn.” That’s it.
If you use a non-compliant OS, then your browser will say to the porn site “I asked the OS and the OS says ‘null’.” Then the porn site will say, “Well sorry. Then your OS isn’t supported. Come back when you are using a supported OS.”
That’s it.
I don’t understand.
That’s obvious.
The browsers sooner or later will always respond “18+” and do not ask the OS.
… And if a kid using that browser was abused because the browser lied to the website about the users’ age, then the browser’s creators should bare some consequences for lying to the website that otherwise would have put up protections. Right?
No, absoluetly not. Because the whole thing is notnto protect the children, but to gather more data.
Do you also believe that the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church also have no responsibility to protect kids, because doing to would similarly require collecting data on people?
(I would disagree with you if you said yes, but I’ll respect your position for being consistent.)
Right now? Nothing. Down the road, life in prison for terrorism. I’d suggest moving away from that jurisdiction
If their goal is to find an excuse to declare you a terrorist then there are much easier ways to do that that are already available to them. This really isn’t an efficient way to do that.
And, as best as I’m aware, no age verification laws anywhere threaten any consequences for the user. The consequences are only for the OS makers.
(Granted, the California law, at least, could be read to say that it’s the entity installing the OS to confirm ages, not necessarily the OS maker. So for most Linux distros that would shift the user age verification responsibility completely to the user installing the OS, but I’m not sure how that would work out in courts or whether websites and applications would recognize that. It will probably never actually be an issue that is adjudicated.)
