Your computer has, on a hardware level, sent unique identifiers to ISPs and websites since Pentium IIIs.

Source?

They also want a reliable way to differentiate between chatbots and real users, because advertising isn't very effective on chatbots.

But also, one benefit of ID laws for the government is that it makes court proceedings much faster and cheaper. Sure, they're tracking everyone online, but a lot of that information is locked behind procedure. By just requiring ID to log in they can sidestep the procedures, because they can just ask corporations nicely for ID information and they'll eagerly comply.

Let's say this is the official narrative. My argument:

1. Meta stands to consolidate power and revenue from further mapping devices to real people.
2. Meta was also originally backed by Peter Thiel, who trades in data mining for secret services, now much more energetically. Zuckerberg is a sexist idiot and his app had no more merit than MySpace. Thiel saw the potential of mapping real idenities to online behavior, and it is no accident Palantir was later implicated in Cambridge Analytica.
3. A redditor came up with concrete data that others have already posted, that show that Meta's dark money are all over this case. As for the fine you say that completely explains this, is a very modest for Meta, who is used to pay such fines as a cost of doing business.
4. Amongst the orgs taking Meta's money to push this are many conservative organizations, like Heritage but also others (anti-sex, anti-abortion, and anti-trans organizations), who know that these laws will effectively suppress speech. Much like the trans moral panics, the laws are not as stupid as they appear, but carefully designed to obliquely achieve their goals (e.g. police bodies with wombs, in line with the same orgs' anti-abortion positions).
5. Governments watch closely as the new corporatist technofascism undoes regulations and checks and balances. They stand to gain from the turmoil and increase their surveillance capabilities even more. Alternatively, some EU goverments might be thinking that this is a way to stick it to US tech monopolies that brainwash their constituents, but they are wrong.
6. In fact, the approach and outcomes hints toward government contractors in cahoots with surveillance agencies, that it would be surprising if there is no adjacency to Analytica personnel and/or the benefits for state actors and spooks are just an unplanned side-effect.

Conclusion: There is sufficient basis to consider that the official narrative is not the whole story.

It is in fact a government conspiracy to track you. Not necessarily to gather data on you, which can be purchased from brokers, but so that they can also control what you can access.

There’s no mechanism that the government currently has that can track you as effectively as these age verification laws can.

the main probrem isn't really what data is used for verification, but what data is made unavailable without it. if some conservative asshole decides that resources on sexual health (or alternate sexualities) are pornographic, then that information is effectively gone for everyone under 18 or without an account.

Even with the Zero Knowledge approach, you will still run an app on a phone (what if I don't have one) that will make some call to the government's servers, which will most likely know what website you're trying to access. We're moving the data mining from some third party to the government, which can be wrongly used later if some idiot comes into power. If it's not making a call to a government's servers, I would be surprised, since you could imagine someone just bypassing this to always return "Over 18".

Even funnier (read "sad"), this initiative will probably rely on Google and Apple to keep it robust, and will likely have no availability on rooted phones or non-Google Play Services ones. It's premature at best to deploy this in a meaningfully safe way.

I don't stand behind any of it. We shouldn't even give them an inch IMO.

The only system I'll accept. Not necessarily for pornography and a lot of "save the children" claims are just pretext for privacy violations, but there are services that legitimately need to check some info and a zero knowledge approach is the most privacy preserving way to do that.

Kill your fucking owners or you cannot have nice things.

We have too much tech. Capitalism and authoritarianism are no longer compatible with progress.

I agree with the logic you present for why the capitalist class wants policies like this, but the specific timing does come from coordinated efforts here. It’s class warfare and they have intense organization amongst themselves. The charge is being led by big tech firms and their lobbying groups making a unified push right now to consolidate their control over online speech, communication, and surveillance. But the reasoning you present is absolutely sound

Every single part of this is coordinated. The people do not want this but the governments are pushing it through top down.

The headline literally says that Macron is pushing for a coordinated approach with the rest of the EU. From the article; "The main goal is to ​act in ​a ⁠coordinated manner and push the European Commission, ​in the positive sense ​of ⁠the term, to move ahead at the same pace ⁠as ​member states." I'm not particularly sure why you're dismissing this as conspiratorial. It's just out in the open.

What’s coordinated about it is that it can’t possibly be so universal that people believe this is a good thing and it “saves the children”. I do believe this is good and even I can’t see a clear reason for why so many governments would suddenly be supporting it. Australia, who first implemented it at a national scale, has not yet proven the benefits of it.

But what you best believe is that there are lobbying groups backed by social media giants evil enough Zuckerberg that they would be throwing money at politicians across the western world to implement this.

This is not a “leak user’s ID” thing. That’s a byproduct of implementing this in a terrible way. This is a “social media giants don’t want the responsibility of what they’ve done to the generation of children they have mentally ruined but do want even more data and control” thing.

Think about this - Facebook has had a policy themselves since the beginning that under-13s are not allowed on their platform. Yet, as recently revealed in court documents from a case in California, Zuck himself pushed his engineering to create the platform to be more aggressively addictive towards under-13s. Why would he do that? Why not use all their AI chops to discover who the under-13s are and kick them off the platform? I imagine it would be fairly easy for them to do so.

But would it be profitable? No.

This age-gate is a two pronged approach - Facebook gets to steal even more data about you, and eventually gets to absolve themselves of the responsibility of destroying mental health in teens, because, “hey, it’s age-gated now!”