This is the first part of a three-part series about age verification in the European Union. In this blog post, we give an overview of the political debate around age verification and explore the age verification proposal introduced by the European Commission, based on digital identities. Part two...

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child clearly expresses that minors have rights to freedom of expression and access to information online, as well as the right to privacy.

These rights would be steamrolled by age verification requirements.

  • kbal@fedia.io
    52·
    2 days ago

    If you know a way to do it without invading people’s privacy you’d better go tell the government of Spain about it, because they didn’t manage to find it when they designed their eIDAS scheme which they hoped would become the Europe-wide standard. Not sure if that’s still seen as likely but I haven’t heard about any other concrete proposals yet.

    • Ooops@feddit.orgEnglish
      31·
      2 days ago

      I’m talking about things you can do technically.

      Governments don’t plan completely idiotic ideas because they don’t know better but because their actual reason for choosing the system they chose is NOT creating a workable system that protects your privacy.

      That’s the whole point. Articles like this aren’t completely wrong. The systems planned are indeed a risk to privacy rights. But we need to stop pretending that it’s an accident and the government simply don’t know better or there is no better solution at all. Actual solutions exist and we need to talk about the fact that those are ignored intentionally because a working system that protects your privacy is simply not the goal here.