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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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Privacy
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Please explain... If I'm below the age of... Whatever they decide, what will or will not be accessible to me? Like, if I'm below a certain age, will some EU appointed DNS restrict what domains I can reach? Or, since this article is about hardware-bound attestation, are my devices going to prevent me from installing and using certain apps if I'm below the age? I don't understand where the restrictions are going to lie...
Bonus: can't I just buy, say, five phones right now, root them or install custom OSs before shit hits the fan and be happy?
The real explanation is that they want control. The children are a excuse.
No because you can go to jail for that, like the dude with his GrapheneOS in the US. They're probably working on that next.
no... you can not go to jail, in the EU or the US at least, for having a phone with a custom OS. They are facing charge for using a duress code which wiped their phone. It is very different.
The fact that children can be deprived of rights with only the vaguest unproven assertion of "safety" is a critical threat to the rights of everyone
Sorry, what is the story about guy in USA with GrapheneOS?
He had a duress password, and told it to a border agent (who had no warrant, but that is no longer legally required for border checks), which then wiped his phone.
He was targeted for being part of the Stop Cop City protest movement (and they were likely looking for contacts), and now the feds are claiming that because he could have had anything, he should be allowed to be charged with possession of whatever they can think of (I.e. they already tried to claim in a press conference that he may have had CSAM, because they couldn't search it to prove he didn't).
Someone else linked the story, but do note that he isn't in jail. Or wasn't last I looked a week ago. He IS facing criminal charges, which is very serious. It will most likely become a Big Important Case and could even get appealed up and up until it reaches SCOTUS.
Current SCOTUS is corrupt. But sometimes they have managed to make good rulings anyway, such as in Carpenter v. United States, and Chatrie v. United States, about GPS location privacy.
I say this b/c social media leads ppl to believe extreme versions of events. There were allegations in another lemmy thread that this GrapheneOS Guy was in prison. He is not. He was at his own home. But he is facing a very stressful future as a criminal defendant. He may, hopefully, be exonerated. But it remains to be seen, how it will go. Anything could happen.
TL;DR he used a "distress code" or something like that to wipe his local device.
Duress. And yeah, as OP mentioned kids are an excuse to have an easier time defaming anyone pushing against it. "You wouldn't steal a car" vibes. Suddenly everyone is a CSAM producer or thief unless proven otherwise, and I doubt there will ever come a time when an authoritarian figure has interest to prove someone they're pursuing is innocent.
But I must say you can install whatever OS you want. The reason they placed federal charges against that guy was because he allegedly deleted incriminatory evidence. They told him they were searching for child pornography, something that was completely made up as they had been tracking him because of his links with activists that were trying to protect a forest. He gave the wrong code (and could say he did so by mistake) and whoever had the misfortune of taking the phone from him wiped the phone's data when entering it.
NAL, but it may be important that there was no legal case pending at the time he gave the duress code. And like you said, he didn't even enter the code himself. But it's tricky since there's also some clause in the law about reasonable cause to believe there could soon be a case.
In the end, the case is purely politically motivated, and the allegations were made up out of nothing. Hopefully that makes the case fall apart once it reaches the courts. Which has happened in lots of other cases, like Reflecting Pool Olympian Guy. I hope the EFF will get some high powered legal rep spun up for this guy. Protip, donating to the EFF is good, so they can afford to do that for important civil rights cases.
I'm still NAL, but I'm hopeful that Graphene Guy will be exonerated by a jury. Ofc, it still sucks, b/c he has to spend his time and money dealing with this.
☞ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/23/cop-city-protester-phone or https://www.pcmag.com/news/grapheneos-defends-data-wiping-function-that-blocked-us-border-search
The services themselves will probably be made to ask for verification and your devices will answer through the age verification app. Since custom mobile OSs (or desktop Linux) won't provide hardware attestation, the app won't work on them and the websites will treat you as underage. The types of services that require age verification aren't specific, they can change based on EU decisions so eventually people not using "approved" OSs may be locked out of most of the internet.
Oh neat, they broke the Internet, since everything is hosted on Linux...
This wouldn't impact the backend of these services, the age checking stuff would run on the client, thus only breaking Linux (barring android) clients.
Agree 100%. I hope everyone realizes this! I have seen too many ppl who think, "It's OK, open source will save us". But open source can't. This is a legal and social prob, and needs a legal and social solution.
And you can be damn sure this will infest necessary government services and apps that won't allow you to contact the government in any other way.
First of all,
Yes. That's exactly the question.
The point of the... excitement around this is exactly the uncertainty. We simply don't know what the EU or national governments of the EU will do with this.
The first problem is that the "hardware bound attestation" isn't just hardware bound, it's specifically Apple and Android's attestation and NOT the more open standard. That means the device that can do this thing, whatever it's going to be "necessary" for, MUST always be an Apple or Google device, with that bit intact. Tbh, I don't really know how much rooting affects this, but I would be surprised if it didn't.
The second problem is that once the infrastructure for blocking access to something and requiring this sort of authentication is in place, it's just a list of targets. It's very easy to add another platform, website, app or anything else behind it.
And the reason for this excitement happening now is that the specification that was given for all this to happen previously only said it should be "secure" somehow, but not detailing the "how". They think they can do it as an implementation detail and pretend it's not a big deal. So it's very clearly something those bastards have tried to be sneaky about.
No, whatever the point of their efforts is, they will make sure to not leave obvious loopholes like that open.
Doesn't sound like an internet worth using