Okay, wow. Thanks to everyone for responding, I appreciate it. To be honest, I wasn't expecting it to be quite so negative about the whole thing. I don't know why I wasn't expecting that, considering that we are a group of people that moved from a pro-privacy platform because it wasn't pro-privacy enough. But anyway.
I think that... Honestly, this being commonplace is going to be inevitable. The global mindset around this is changing, and even though we may fight against it, it feels to me to be an inevitability. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong. But I'm not optimistic.
I mean, I hate it and it sucks, but honestly at this point I'd probably go through with this kind of verification. Assuming I could trust the sites or third party authentication or whatever. I guess my fear of loosing access beats my desire for privacy... And besides, I already pay for stuff on Patreon, so my identity isn't exactly secret.
One way of doing this privately I did see people suggest (and I think was being looked at by my government?) was the following:
- You buy a card with a code from an IRL shop (who does the age checks with a driving license or whatever), which is valid for 24 hours.
- You make an account with an identity provider using this code (maybe they'll also want other information as well, because of course they will).
- With this account, you can then generate any number of random single use codes to give to adult sites to log in. They won't be able to see any of your account details, but they can use it to verify only that you are over 18.
(Of course, I know this isn't exactly perfect but it's hopefully good enough)
Hopefully a standard like that can arise, but I assume most third party identity providers will probably just use images of IDs and photographs. At least they promise to delete them afterwards, and I (perhaps naively) trust that most of them will.
Still, on the upside, if Telegram and Discord do go through with this and use proper third party identity services, they can hopefully allow you to share that with servers you're in, which means they don't have to do their own verification (which they'll do sloppily).
Personally, I hope Mastodon and Lemmy integrate support for these third party age verification services rather than pulling out of certain countries on principle.
Anyway, enough devils advocate and hoping that everything will be fine and work out in the end. Downvote away!
... Yeah, I'm really scared and terrified at what the government will require. Especially when it comes to social media services like Discord and others (which it has in its sights). Hopefully nothing will come of it and the internet can go back to what it used to be...
Fuck I'm messed up psychologically. ;_;