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Proton CEO warns global age verification push will mean "the death of anonymity online"
(www.techradar.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
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That makes no sense, when the age verification is being pushed to the OS and ISP levels.
Sure, you can connect to Lemmy, and not have to prove your identity to Lemmy, but Windows users will have to prove to microsoft, and also you'll have to prove it to Verizon, or Comcast, or whomever your ISP is.
So before you even turn on your computer, you've already proved your identity twice.
I don't have to worry about my OS because it's open source. Yours should be too. They can't actually enforce age verification on an open source OS because my OS can lie, and I can use its source code to make it lie if I have to (which I won't, because many other people will do it for me). For that matter they'll find ways to make Windows lie too, but you still shouldn't be using it, it's shit.
I don't have to worry about my ISP either because I live in a still-civilized country, but yeah, if they really lock it down at that level that's going to be tough, you'll probably have to identify someone for that if that's the next place where they go to. There are countermeasures and workarounds though. VPN, mesh networking, borrowing somebody else's wifi or mobile data hotspot, finding open networks. Maybe we'll get to the point where we need point to point links, pirate satellites, datajacking ourselves into communication lines, who knows.
But we're not there yet. We'll continue to develop more countermeasures as these sorts of hostile police surveillance state measures encroach on our freedom as it becomes necessary. You don't have to let your identity be associated with anything beyond your ISP if you're only using your ISP to get to somewhere you do trust with a VPN. If they block VPNs, then we will find other ways around the blocks. Are you familiar with I2P? If you aren't, maybe you should get familiar with it. We already have plenty of ways of sneaking information into and out of even more totalitarian of states like China, Russia, at least until there's an absolute shutdown like in Iran. You should also consider not living in a totalitarian country, and doing what you can to stop yours from becoming more totalitarian, because it's only going to get harder the longer you let them do this. Give them your ID in exchange for internet access for now if you absolutely have to and can't find any other option, but you might not absolutely have to, yet. And if you do have to, do it with caution: start learning and planning what you're going to have to do after that and how you're going to get very active in your resistance to being monitored and observed.
You sound like you've got a little bit of learned helplessness, but people in shitty, scary countries have been dealing with this for a long, long time. Yes, it sucks, but it's not the end of freedom. You have to learn how to fight it.
Ugh. That's disgusting on a thousand levels. Even proposing such a bill should be considered a jailable violation of the constitution, as an example to the rest of the authoritarian bastards.
I mean, I agree with you, but this isn't just a United States thing. China has had this since forever. They have something called a "social credit score".
So if you litter, and cameras catch you littering, your social credit goes down. And you best believe they track and monitor every single online interaction.
The UK the past year has been really slamming hard on online verification.
This is a global thing that is seeping into the united states, but it's by no means the only point of contention.
From what I understand, social credit score is mostly an invented bogeyman to demonize China in the west, and while many frightening "consequences" of low social credit score were imagined, none ever materialized and it was rarely even actually tracked. Yes, they could, in theory, but we imagine a massive level of administrative competence and effectiveness that I think serves both western interests and Chinese ones without necessarily being reality. As far as I can tell (granted, not very far as I'm not in China and haven't been for a very long time) it actually had very little real impact in China itself and has already been mostly forgotten. China's got lots of problems, but social credit score isn't really part of any of them. They don't need to have social credit score to genocide Uighurs. They didn't need social credit score to massacre Tienanmen square. They don't need social credit score to prepare the South China Sea for war and try to subvert Taiwan. They've got bigger fish to fry, and they're frying them, and social credit score is a silly distraction that nobody there is taking seriously and neither should we.
Oh yeah, 1000%.
It really sucks seeing supposed democratic nations having this forced on them. I really hate how little people understand the implications in practice.
China's "cameras up everyone's nose" approach should be a sign of failure and a caution to the world, not permission for other governments to "catch up". :(