But have you read the EU standard? Anonymity is a requirement. There is no tracking. The age check does not refer back to you. Indeed, it cannot.

You can of course believe that the legal requirements aren’t adhered to and that the state is actually lying, but if you believe that the state already has a million ways to track you, including 99.9999% of us who carry our phones around with us and pay with credit cards in physical stores.

Where have you read that this is about checking everyone’s ID?

They are specifically building an anonymous system for verifying age required to buy to products and access media that we already check ID for (not anonymously, but distributed) in physical stores.

Most countries don’t have age gates for accessing social media and, under the EU system proposed for the EU, if they did, this system is exactly providing a method of verifying a user’s age without knowing who the user is. So it’s literally the opposite of what you claim it to be.

Most of what you’ve said is blatantly not true. Google (let’s use them instead of Apple here) can of course track your app use if the app uses Firebase or the Adds SDK - which clearly a verification should never do.

But Google doesn’t have the ability to see what you do inside of an app that aren’t voluntarily sending telemetry to Google. If you have proof that they do, please present it.

I don’t have to give up any rights for age gating to work anonymously and properly. Neither do you.

A cinema screening is not a physical good. Yet we still age gate it.

No definitely not. Smoking at 13 is obviously worse than watching a picture of a naked person. FWIW I grew up in the Nordics which very much has a culture of nakedness (children and old and young all shower in a shared space, all naked, for example). I don’t have a concern at all about nakedness and I agree finding a bag of damp porno mags in a shed is part and parcel of growing up in your teens. No concerns from me.

Having said that, I hope you also will agree that “a couple of titties” is not what most pornography online, today, actually displays. The vast amount of pornography degrades women, and a lot of it glosses over the very real power imbalances and subsequent abuses of a lot of vulnerable people. I haven’t got a single concern with what consenting adults choose to do together - if you’d like to dress in a plastic outfit and be spanked red, go for it! And seeing naked people in communal spaces (beaches, dressing rooms) is super helpful for your development and understanding of what “normal” is (beautiful, flabby, wrinkled, brown, pink, curly and all the wonderful sizes and shapes we all are). Count me in on nakedness!!

But I do have a concern with the adult industry as a whole and I seriously doubt that a 12 year old having unfettered access to what porn today actually portrays is helpful for that person’s development.

All that said, age gating and access to pornography is clearly not the same discussion.

Age gating is a discussion that fundamentally asks “ok, if we age gate products in the real world, like alcohol and tobacco and pornography, why don’t we also age gate it online?”.

If we decided not to age gate pornography - at least “soft pornography”(hard to define, but let’s pretend that we could), I’d be all up for not also age gating this online.

But if we, as a democratic society, decide that some things should be age gated, I’m all for also attempting - indeed ensuring - that these are age gated online.

Of course there a enormous risks of age gating online - I get that showing an ID to a shop keeper is a transaction that’s very hard to log and therefore track at large - that has to be adequately handled. Here, I believe the US proposal is atrocious and an enormous violation of privacy. But, genuinely, when you read the EU implementation, I do not have the same privacy concerns. Don’t forget the EU proposal is authored by the same bodies that forced GDPR onto the world (with ALL the good that this brought for ensuring our PII was protected). The EU isn’t perfect, but largely the EU is of, by and for the people, still, and our collective democracy, with all the faults that it has, is trying to balance all these concerns appropriately. I think the current implementation achieves the right balance and I am frustrated that many who are against the EU proposal haven’t actually read it, then equate it with the US proposal, which is fundamentally different, and equate the democratic EU with the plutocratic US. Like always in the US, almost everything degrades into “how can this make the rich richer”. That is, luckily, not yet the case in the EU.