Tools: I'm Reluctant To Verify My Identity Or Age For Any Online Services

Identity verification and age verification is an increasinly common policy conversation at the moment, in numerous countries.

Often, this is in combination with proposals to ban children from varying concepts of “social media”, which generally means that everyone would have to prove that they were not a child.

Worse, the question that they are trying answer is rarely stated clearly and concisely.

And it is unusual to see any consideration of broader sociological issues, let alone an emphasis on this, with a focus instead on perceived “quick win” technosolutionism.

I was pondering last night for which services I, personally, would actually be willing to verify my age or identity.

I appreciate that I compute in an unusual way (when compared with most computer users), and that much of what I do online is about accessing my own services.

Some of those - my fedi server, my RSS server, my messaging services - are build around enjoying stuff from other people’s services.

Would I be willing to verify my identity or age to read someone’s RSS feed? No. While I enjoy the myriad blogs that I follow, none are crucial to me.

I occasionally watch videos (which started on YouTube, but which I download into my Jellyfin instance), and perhaps YouTube will be forced to do age verification. It would be a shame, but again, I’ll just not watch YouTube videos. Not a big loss. Mostly, I buy secondhand DVDs, rip them, and watch them from my Jellyfin instance. I haven’t been asked to verify my age for a DVD purchase (online or offline) in a very long time.

Friends have had to attempt to block access to their sites from the UK. While I can still access their sites via Tor, that’s what I tend to do. I feel sorry for them for the likely significant drop in visitors, likely affecting their enjoyment and in some cases their revenue, and, probably their incentive to continue to write / post / record stuff.

Source: HackerNews