*France seeks to implement mass surveillance online by requesting age verification, but politicians wrap it in “we do it to protect the children” which is bullshit.
Protect your rights to privacy, stand up against such erosion of your rights.
Governments already have access to your data and can easily link you to your social media accounts
This is a rather defeatist take. It’s also wrong.
I don’t mean it to be. I’m trying to be a realist so that I can take appropriate steps to protect myself online. If you want to be anonymous on social media then you should only connect via a VPN. And if you’re using a VPN you can set your location to be somewhere that doesn’t have these requirements. There are other ways that these companies can track you as well and they will freely give this data to the authorities. Even if you’re protect yourself from all of those vectors, if you upload a photo of yourself or someone else tags you then there is a good chance you’re identifiable with tools like ClearView. People making the argument that this new restriction will allow governments to track citizens clearly have no clue about the current surveillance systems. I’m not pro these surveillance systems but this ignorance is dangerous. The biggest danger I see from these new rules are data leaks.
Whenever this comes up, it feels like a play to harvest people’s data and / or to slip additional laws into place under the guise of “protect the children”.
On one hand I don’t think it’s terrible to try to guide kids more. I think parents should be doing more parenting tbh. If a parent wants to put parental locks in place, they can. Even blocking specific sites from being accessed entirely. I think the bigger issue is people don’t understand how to use computers so they think there’s nothing they can do lol.
On the other I think it runs the risk of preventing kids from accessing information online, finding safe spaces online, and isolating kids more than they already can be. It also limits things like teaching kids about technology and how to use it safely.
If headlines were honest: France seeks to prohibit early teenagers from social interaction with peers unless they are good at doing it offline.
If I hadn’t had the Internet in the years before my 15th birthday, this would in my retrospective opinion have amounted to near torture.
Can we finally get politicians who grew up with the Internet into power? How many more years must people the age of Macron be allowed to make these kinds of decisions? 😟😡
This is the outcome when you continue voting the same old blokes into power
Wouldn’t this just wind up being a de facto ban on the platform we’re using right now? How could Lemmy implement an age verification system? If social media platforms that dont comply with age verification are banned, then by default there goes most of the fediverse.
