Post #2105204

2026-04-18 07:13 UTC

Large parts of my timeline are now debating whether resisting the introduction of the &quot;birthdate&quot; column in the user database is part of a fascist takeover and should be resisted. It is a distraction from the fascist takeover. The walls will come up somewhere else. If it&#39;s not maintained by someone trusted by the government (i.e. an entrenched corporation), it *is* just a database column. Debating it wastes a lot of energy we would need elsewhere: there is a lot of pending legislation that everyone now treats as if it had already passed, and so the only thing left to do is take a heroic last stand, to at least not be complicit. We&#39;re not at this point yet. There are still things that can be done, but that means organizing against big tech, which means both political opposition, and building out alternate infrastructure if you&#39;re too exposed for direct political action. Even debating whether the people involved are willing collaborators or just politically ignorant is a waste of resources at this point. Their motivations do not matter, they aren&#39;t allies either way. These people aren&#39;t in a position to get the database column they created recognized as &quot;trustworthy.&quot; Their act was one of symbolic bootlicking, so publicly opposing it likewise only has symbolic meaning. The actual attestation framework that we will get is most likely some &quot;login with Microsoft/Google/Apple/Canonical/Facebook¹&quot; thing that integrates into the login process and requires no trustworthy components on the user&#39;s machine because all it does is forward a token received from one online service to another, and not presenting such a token locks you out from a lot of services, because the services themselves are at risk if they do not require such a token. *That* is where this is headed, and *that* is what we need to oppose. Of course open source will be left with local-only accounts. These just won&#39;t be able to connect to online fora. ¹ involvement of Facebook still unclear — no good reason for Microsoft and Google to let them have a seat at the table, really. Canonical will be there in the beginning to make it a bit less off-putting to Linux users, but at least their identity management will be merged into Google at some point.

Replies (1)

@leto_fregar@wehavecookies.social 2026-04-18 10:24

@GyrosGeier@hachyderm.io Imho the FOSS and general civil rights movement are missing a critical point, which puts them into a politically losing position. That is the fact that there are good arguments for _some_ services to be age restricted, and to enforce this age restriction, a robust age verification makes sense. So far, states have put out laws that require certain services to validate the age of their users (most prominent case: porn). A lot of those services ignore the actual requirements, and just add a "are you old enough yes/no" popup. Whenever one of those services was asked to change this, the most common defense was, "there is no common, simple to use solution, and if we implement something strict, users will migrate to the services that care even less about laws". Usually, they succeeded. That age restrictions are now extended to services, where the arguments to do so are far weaker is just an attention booster. Because on face level, the now affected large services are proposing what had been the theoretical solution to all the counter arguments: - the restricted service doesn't need to know your identity, it is enough if an "old enough" flag true/false is transmitted (this, by itself, is privacy friendly) - implementing this flag on a device user level makes it easy to implement for services, as it will be available for all Basically, from the point of political arguments, the supporters of this solution are on a "this is what you wanted, isn't it" line. And again, on face value, they do have a point. Fighting individual laws resulting from all this will be a never ending story (until we lose), if we cannot do either (or both) of the following: - _convincingly_ argue that there are no legitimate reasons to age restrict services with unidentified users (note: if it is e.g. a mail order service, at least an address is needed, and age verification can be done at handover, so these cases don't need to be considered). Possible, but at the very least challenging. - propose an age verification service, that is privacy friendly, hard to circumvent, and easy to implement on the service side. If we cannot do either, sooner or later there will be laws implemented that require something like this. And as you said, while we might still be able to have local FOSS software that doesn't implement any of this, it will probably lock us out from a lot of services on the net.

Open ##2628376