The question is prompted by the age verification app that the EU has just presented.

Some EU countries want to ban social media for young people. If that were to happen, what then?

  • Q'z@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    9 hours ago

    They can try to force me adding that for my single user instance, but I don’t think they can:

    • Force the developers of GoToSocial to add this feature
    • And force me to add that to my instance (I don’t live in the EU no US)

    Do do this, they need to enforce cryptographically verifiable age verification everywhere. It would require forcing big instances to only cooperate with small instances that poof they do age verification and if you’re selfhosting then the hoster needed to verify you? Not really possible.

    Of course big applications and servers could choose to add age-verification freely to avoid scrutiny. Won’t be cheered on in the Fedi I’m sure.

    I’m more worried about the proposed OS-level verification, which will be harder to circumvent if you’re not using a FOSS OS. Especially since I can imagine a global effort on this by US, EU, China.

    Edit: hypotecially, if we ask how could it be added, a zero-knowledge proof that you’re >18, without revealing anything else, would be the way to go.