What law?

In the face of government hostility, at least we here can make more tools like Signal or at least choose not to feed customer data to the beast.

They wanted to ban hijab/burka, but that would be discrimination, so they banned all face covers: ski masks, balaclavas, "V" plastic masks, motorcycle helmets when not driving one, everything.

You can always say "I decline the photo verification", and they will check your license like back in the old days. This is what I have been doing for years now.

No. Tor is for the CIA. It won't work for them unless we use it as well. Criminals also find it useful.

It's easy to verify this. Tor was originally written by Paul Syverson, Michael G. Reed, and David Goldschlag. While all three were working at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

> A verification regime does not need your approval — it needs your participation

Ugh

AI coming along is another “great opportunity” to try and force these programs

Now we’re catching up and realizing how bad it is.

For a similar case, see tasers in Canada after a handcuffed immigrant was killed by one. The question came up “how were tasers certified safe for humans?”. The answer was “they weren’t. A private company just started selling them to police forces who just started using them.”

It happens at the national level too. I just did a simple Google search for "united nations committee to harmonize" [1] (no quotes in my search itself) and I count 5 or 6 committees explicitly dedicated to "harmonization" in the first ten results. And that's just the committees, you can count on each of them to have factions within (because politics, politics never changes) and outside forces competing and vying to get the "harmonizations" to favor them and disfavor their competitors. And as politics, politics never changes, paging Ron Perlman, these harmonization committees are unlikely to flinch away from "harmonizing" entirely new rules into existence... which, again, with not all that much searching you can easily find examples of them stating outright.

And the forces trying to influence those committees, are not all just sitting out in the public with some .org website with their true mission stated clearly above the fold. And I just use these UN committees, which are themselves literally the result of one search and a few seconds scrolling through the search page and anything but a complete list, as plain and obvious public examples operating in public for at least nominally good purposes. Nothing stops anyone from buying politicians in multiple countries at a time to push through something like age verification directly, without being open about who they are.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=united+nations+committ...

Only trust fund nepo kids from old money are allowed to have vanity social security numbers, multiple identities and scrubbed Wikipedia articles. The plebeians shall have only a single ID and use it to authenticate with every website.

I really want to know who else has a SSN starting with 1337.

"Why now" I think is pretty obvious -- the age limitations that exist currently are easily circumvented, but have given enough of a plausible deniability aspect that politicians have been able to skate by. There has been increasing research and media dedicated to the idea that there are aspects of the internet which we should be shielding children from. While many of this research is dubious, there's a rising moral panic around it.

The core of the problem is that there is no possible implementation of age verification that does not also require identity verification. In this I am in strong agreement with the article, but the use of paranoid and dramatic language as in this article only alienates people who find the conspiratorial tone to be reverse polarizing.

Because there are actors pushing for this. And they let money flow, so the lobbyists work.

People think lobbyists don't do this? Well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...

These lobbyists were dumb. You can be certain that some lobbyists are so efficient that detecting them reliably is very difficult. Even more so when private media is controlled by a few billionaires who are "in" on the system.

The most proximate domino was the Australian social media ban. Australia was already a country known to experiment with ways to deal with social media - see the news fee they imposed on platforms.

Behind that was the build up of negative outcomes from social media for kids, and adults.

The harms are not something I tend to find actively discussed on HN; I assume because more people are interested in building the next thing, not digging into the trust and safety details.

Customer safety and support are also not going to get anyone promoted in tech. These are cost centers and will often stand in the way of addictive design.

Meta executives were nailed precisely for greenlighting designs their own teams told them were harmful for teens.

At the same time, there is lobbying going on by these firms, to push the burden of verification to someone else.

However, the degree of harm being caused by social media meant we were always going to see voter backlash.

There are always claims that is a shadowy cabal of world leaders coordinating in secret or that a specific corporation is lobbying to do it all, but the fact is that ID checking is oddly popular in theory to a lot of people who haven’t thought through the consequences. Check any thread on this topic on Hacker News where the idea is discussed in a way that makes it feel like it’s only for kids or only for Facebook and there’s a huge outpouring of support for the idea.

The topic only becomes unpopular when the actual consequences become apparent. For the Hacker News audience the popularity of these ideas does a complete U-turn as soon as the concept of ID checking extends to platforms we might use, like Reddit, Discord, or YouTube. When commenters think it’s only going to impact Facebook and TikTok they welcome ID checking laws with enthusiastic support.

You probably have seen them if you live in the US, and had little idea about them.

Facebook was never allowed to let in kids under 13. It's now only being enforced.

I don't know why but governments, nearly worldwide, all teaming up on x continents to push the exact same narrative is recent but not totally new: remember the "masks do not work against SaRS-COV-2" to only then lock us all up and then force people to wear face masks?

Media all pushing the "if you believe it possibly can be a lab-leak, you're just as nuts as conspiracy theorists who believe the moon landing was faked" was honestly quite scary to witness too.

And the speed at which virtually everybody, including on HN, started to then push for that propaganda was quite scary too.

For the record, the report mandated (under Biden) by US Congress concludes that the virus has non-zootropic features and the biggest "expert" on the matter, Peter Daszak, has been debarred and cannot ever again receive funding from the US to work on gain-of-function research on viruses.

I stand my case: the "you're a conspiracy nut if you believe the virus could be man-made" was a coordinated setup.

You're asking why, now, they're teaming up to require face verification.

I'm asking why they all sang the same fake tunes about Covid-19 / SaRS-COV2: "Masks do not work" was repeated worldwide, to then forcing us to wear masks was a lie (one of the two was a complete lie).

And of course the incessant propaganda machine, hard at work, to explain everywhere that it couldn't possibly have leaked from a lab tied to Peter Daszak's research doing gain-of-function research on bat viruses, in the very FUCKING CITY, where it all started, was a gigantic lie.

The absolute worst in all of this is the people believing the lies even when the evidence is right in front of their eyes.

I kept posting here on HN back then about how it was folly to not open your eyes and make your mind work two seconds and I posted about that one independent journalist who found the Peter Daszak link very early on and fought for the truth. But the herds, worldwide, were way too pleased to buy the governments' lies.

Years after the fact we got proven the governments, worldwide, lied and teamed up to hide the truth.

"Despite congressional mandates requiring the declassification of COVID-origin intelligence under both the 2023 law and last year’s National Defense Authorization Act of 2026, substantial portions of the newly released records remain blacked out."

The CIA stated they now believe it's a lab leak.

Oh really?

https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19...

This, like Goebbels' propaganda technique in nazi Germany, should be studied for years and years: how Goebbels' techniques were used, worldwide, to try to hide the governments' responsibilities in the countless deaths resulting from the virus they funded.

It's the same, worldwide-coordinated, "think of the humans" propaganda they're using for face ID.

I enjoyed that. I will remember to opt out again.

In other words I think the people pushing these kinds of "identification" methods would love you for spreading their silent message of this being unavoidable knowingly or unknowingly.

Even if what you say is correct let's not make it easier for people wanting to enshittify the future, yeah?

They want to force all operating systems to require age sniffing. That's the main angle right now. I am curiously watching how systemd will add more implementation details to this; probably as a first step only for commercial linux distributions.

Need or want? We need very few of the services looking for our government ID. Also, this should not be the only way of pushing back. We can support the EFF and politicians who are actively fighting against this or candidates who vow to. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/rep-finke-was-right-ag...

Why? Why not just hold firm to your principles and sacrifice convenience for your personal sovereignty. When you don't, you make the situation worse for everyone else as well by normalizing this bullshit.

You don't need 50 million people to do that.

My passport currently has a broken chip and I’ve been traveling extensively, so I need to go into the border guard queue every time I enter. It’s very annoying. And they take the face scan each time and their computer compares it to past images of my entry.

But since I knew about it before traveling, I just said no photo please and it was pretty frictionless.

The people behind me did not even realize you could say no, and no one really wants to be late for their flight.

Make the sign bigger. Its not a good test in my view.

"Thanks to people with your mindset our streets and borders are not as safe as they should be."

This option is made freely available to passengers, but by choosing it you're signaling that you hate your country and public safety? It's no wonder people are scared to push back on invasive and discriminatory practices.

>Here kid, take my key, go get me some beer.

Everyone everywhere gets forced to deal with bullshit, then the people it is supposed to be protecting circumvent it directly.

Although, pointing out how actual age verification would work won't hurt. It helps to make it more clear that these pending laws are draconian.

We need privacy-respecting age verification. It's not rocket science, it's just a matter of implementation. The bad actors - which are mostly bad by virtue of being ignorant - will win the debate if we're throwing hissy fits and telling parents to fuck off instead of coming up with constructive criticism of this approach to age verification.

It's not great, but it's not what the original poster is against.

But suppose there was a rape gang epidemic - wouldn't that be a good reason to want to protect the children?

Google Ads is ghosting me too. I really could get behind legislation that requires companies to have a human point of contact in these cases, but I guess a private company has the right to ignore people they don’t want as customers.

It isn't that biometrics might never make sense but when it comes to Facebook? He's a black hat hacker who deserves prison

I signed on for Meta enhanced support for a month (nb, don't bother doing this, it's a waste of money) and had numerous voice calls with pandering support people who assured me it had nothing to do with identity and everything to do with vague "Community Standards violations" that can't be identified. FWIW the restrictions are indefinite and can't be appealed.

FB is set up like it's based on the film "Brazil" mated with Sartre's "No Exit."

They all prompt for the same information to do the same job.

You are required to make one of these “pages” to be able to advertise on any Meta property.

None of them work, and they have non-functional error handling. And if you keep trying, getting zero feedback about what’s wrong, you get the “scan your face and give us your biometric data” wall.

As such I cannot advertise on Instagram. Like, I can’t give them money, even when I try. It’s impossible that I’m the only one in the world, and it’s costing them money. Directly.

You would think that with their infinite AI resources they would be able to recognize problems, identify the source, and unfuck themselves… right?

In days, not years… right?

At least that’s what we’re told. But it seems reality doesn’t quite agree.

Caved, tried to sign up, asked for my face, then rejected me forever.

It is obvious something is broken but they are quite good at blocking you from accessing any possible avenue of support once the account is in this state.

On the off chance someone from Meta is reading: Please unban the account "rareboc" :-)

Maybe once we have the euro-wide digital wallet and make it compulsory to support it.

Though, if you have a passport or driver's license, its not like they don't already have your face...