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.

child predators are a real world problem

I cannot emphasize this enough - I absolutely do not care what your children do on the Internet.

It was literally never about the children

There is a lawyer's wet dream of evidence against thousands of real-world non-speculative child rapists and abusers with names, phones, emails, and literal video evidence and written admissions of guilt of systematic rape, torture, abuse, and child sex trafficking that are legally usable in court.

What has been done about it?

Not one. Single. Arrest. Because the guys implementing the tracking are the same ones raping and torturing children.

This is not a policy or tool to protect children.

This is a way for the exact same sadist pedophiles to track children's identities so that they can use that plus data broker data to figure out what kids are most vulternable and target them to be raped, tortured, and abused.

Nope. The stats show that most child predators are either someone known to the child already, or other minors who don't know better. 'Stranger danger' is a moral panic that is not rooted in reality.

Paraphrasing Karl Mark:

@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.

Everytime somebody posts something complacent like this telling us not to worry I remember a piece of speech by Arnim Zola in the Winter Soldier movie.

"Hydra was founded with on belief that humanity could not be trusted with it's own freedom.

What we did not realize is that if you try to take that freedom, they resist.

The war taught us much, humanity needed to surrender it's freedom willingly.

[...]

For 70 years, Hydra have been secretly feeding crisis, reaping war. And when history did not cooperate, history was changed.

Hydra created a world so chaotic that humanity is finally ready to sacrifice it's freedom, to gain it's security"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E486XjhYHh8

Right now? Nothing. Down the road, life in prison for terrorism. I’d suggest moving away from that jurisdiction

Call me a cynic, but I absolutely do not believe that companies "know that the days where they can just shrug off child predators using their products is coming to and end". I don't believe they give a fuck at all. In fact, if somehow a case made it to court and the court laid the blame at the foot of, say, Facebook, or whatever company, for a child being harmed, they still wouldn't care because the money they make simply existing as is so wildly outstrips any fine they could possibly be levied that it doesn't make economic sense to do anything differently.

There is real damage being done now and no one seems to care enough to stop it. Why go through all this negative PR about privacy violations if you can just keep doing the same thing?

Now, I can't claim to know what the "real reason" these laws are being passed is, but if I had to hazard a guess, it would be because it gives more accurate data on users to sell and it is cheaper to advertise to your users when they directly tell you their age. Now, you can freely show pornographic ads, gambling ads, whatever, to your adults without ever having to worry about buying user data to know who will receive it. If a kid sees porn, well, you shouldn't have let them on an adult account.

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.)

Well, that makes no sense because that means that using an unvetted machine is more beneficial for groomers and predators than a vetted one. Meaning they'll be incentivized to use that, instead of some perfect system where they'd be easily trackable and held accountable.