Headlines like this really need to put the emphasis on the cause, e.g. "UK Government Forces Bluesky to Roll Out Age Verification"
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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to be fair they are forcing age verification on everything... can't see FB/Meta being clever enough to sort it out though
the KWS service they've chosen to use keeps far too much information
None of the age verification services respect privacy - that's baked into the whole push for it. Because it's not just about "verifying" people's ages at a specific point in time, especially in the US, it's about being able to prove you have in case anyone tries to sue you.
Good for them. Too many goddamn kids on the internet with dumbass ideas and shitty grammar and yolos and skibidy rizz, why back in my day we have to go uphill both ways to the internet cafe before we could argue with a strawman online
If they did this here, I'd just stop using bluesky. I'm 41. But I have no interest in verifying ages online. We've all seen how poorly companies handle intetnal security.
Just yesterday McDonalds had their entire database of applications compromised because someone tried the password 123456.
Bluesky would be dropped instantly.
you know that the new online safety act mandates age verification for pretty much anything don't you?
This isn't about age verification. It's about getting your ID and tying your (probably illegal but yet to be proven) online activity to it. Much like the firewall of China.
All wrapped up nicely in the disguise of "age verification"
If it works the way they claim it is indeed very private.
It doesn't.
According to whom?
Is the system opaque? Does someone else hold the private encryption keys? Could unencrypted data leak from the company and expose users?
If any of those answers are "yes", then assume it's already compromised by a government and unsafe.
There is no encryption involved. They just give you a token that verifies your age and you present the token to the site.
But you have to submit evidence of age to some site, right? So where does that evidence (your ID) get sent to or stored? Once it's sent, are you sure it's not stored? Is the token unique or traceable to you?
I honestly don't know, and when I don't know, I have to assume it's not staying private.
Your evidence is already stored with the gov, regardless of the any age verification systems. And the gov provides your token. If you honestly don't know, you should research instead of making assumptions.
Fair enough. Thanks for the info. 👍
According to your father ulrich.
Pretty concerning that a "western democracy" is doing this, because it gives cover for the next one and the next one.
It's easy to say "oh I'll just stop using such and such a service" but what happens when there are no more legal services to switch to?
The UK has been in lock step with the US in terms of moronic voters and stupid leaders.
The UK is in Europe, but it's closer to the morons in Texas than Switzerland.
"why has our userbase in the uk cratered but our userbase in germany skyrocketed?" - some bluesky dev looking at google analytics
Canadian Senate Bill S-209 aims to do the same in Canada. These idiots really want our data so bad.
Same in Australia. From memory the law has already passed, it’s just got a delay on it to give companies a chance to implement it.
I'm looking forward to having a good excuse to delete most of my accounts and move entirely to decentralised platforms.
Just hope they (Facebook and friends) give you the choice to delete OR verify those accounts and not require verification to delete it.
You would be surprised what you can active with spamming angry emails
Thanks for the information.
I found this specific clause very ... porous.
Clarification — commercial purpose 6 For greater certainty, for the purpose of section 5, an organization that incidentally and not deliberately provides a service that is used to search for, transmit, download, store or access content on the Internet that is alleged to constitute pornographic material does not make available pornographic material on the Internet for commercial purposes.
So... I guess Bing will once again be my goto incidental indeliberate porn search engine. And reddit. And Lemmy.
https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/bill/S-209/first-reading
Surprisingly, a conservative senator had a fairly well reasoned, and cautious, (although still supportive), response speech.
https://sencanada.ca/en/content/sen/chamber/451/debates/008db_2025-06-10-e#66
It still has a long way to goto get through senate committee and house readings and committees and all that. Still, might be a good time to scrape all the porn.
Look at Bill S-210 from the last Parliament, it made it to 2nd reading in the House. There is cause for concern.
I appreciate your dive into the topic though. Michael Geist has more info on his website.
This pisses me off, governments mandating control. Would this affect Lemmy or any fediverse software one day?
it already does it's the reason why lemmy.zip isn't accessible in the uk (though it still federates to other servers)
Not feasibly, no. If a centralized platform like bluesky refuses to abide by the laws in a given country, their platform can be made inaccessible in that country. Trying to do that to countless activitypub-compliant servers wouldn't be practical since you van just hop to another server.
Do you think they won't try? I mean both the Tory and previous Labour admins tried to ban encryption.
This is the UK we're talking about, absolutely no one in government knows how to block anything. Seriously every time they block something I just use one of those crappy free VPN plugins and get around it. Basically I'm only looking for magnet links anyway.
You don't even need to keep the VPN on to torrent the file. It's so stupid.
I have seen some people in UK (on reddit) complaining about ISP sending notices when torrenting w/o a VPN.
Where’s that federation?
And how would this fit in? Are they just going to build a bunch of excuses into the platform, and then claim it’s now impossible?
This is mandated by UK law. If you created a node so that UK users can bypass this, you would be doing something illegal. You'd probably get defederated.
I haven't even verified my email with Blue. This would be more than a deal breaker.
Fuck this shit