Identity verification and age verification is an increasinly common policy conversation at the moment, in numerous countries.
Often, this is in combination with proposals to ban children from varying concepts of “social media”, which generally means that everyone would have to prove that they were not a child.
I have yet to see a well-considered proposal.
Worse, the question that they are trying answer is rarely stated clearly and concisely.
And it is unusual to see any consideration of broader sociological issues, let alone an emphasis on this, with a focus instead on perceived “quick win” technosolutionism.
But anyway…
I was pondering last night for which services I, personally, would actually be willing to verify my age or identity.
And… the answer is “none”.
At least, none that I can think of at the moment.
I appreciate that I compute in an unusual way (when compared with most computer users), and that much of what I do online is about accessing my own services.
Some of those - my fedi server, my RSS server, my messaging services - are build around enjoying stuff from other people’s services.
Would I be willing to verify my identity or age to read someone’s RSS feed? No. While I enjoy the myriad blogs that I follow, none are crucial to me.
I occasionally watch videos (which started on YouTube, but which I download into my Jellyfin instance), and perhaps YouTube will be forced to do age verification. It would be a shame, but again, I’ll just not watch YouTube videos. Not a big loss. Mostly, I buy secondhand DVDs, rip them, and watch them from my Jellyfin instance. I haven’t been asked to verify my age for a DVD purchase (online or offline) in a very long time.
Friends have had to attempt to block access to their sites from the UK. While I can still access their sites via Tor, that’s what I tend to do. I feel sorry for them for the likely significant drop in visitors, likely affecting their enjoyment and in some cases their revenue, and, probably their incentive to continue to write / post / record stuff.
I don’t use any individual forums any more (their demise is a shame; I’d prefer this over centralised discussion sites), nor do I use Reddit. I occasionally look at the comments on HN if one of my posts is surfaced there, but if HN forced identify or age verification, I’d just stop doing it. No big deal for me.
Websites with comments sections? I don’t want to see the comments anyway, so I block those, which makes for a very pleasant browsing experience. I don’t comment myself.
Code forges / places to contribute to FOSS? Most of my FOSS contributions are non-code, but even so, I use some organisation’s GitLab repos, and occasionally I contribute to projects on other forges. I doubt that my contributions are meaningful in themselves, and it may not be an option to switch infrastructure in any case (that might ont make the requirement go away), but since I am not a massive, or particularly valuable contributor, I’d feel less bad about simply stepping away.
For Wikipedia, I’d probably rebuild my Kiwix instance and use that instead. Yes, articles would not be quite so up to date, but I rarely access Wikipedia for rapidly-changing information. In any case, there are tradeoffs, and personally I would prefer my privacy, the security of my personal data, and, well, just not being part of this kind of censorship.
Signal? That would be a pain. I don’t have a workaround for that. I’m happily using XMPP, but as a complement to Signal, not an alternative.
Teams/Zoom? I don’t have accounts on those services, but I do join, via my browser, when a client sends me a link. If I was faced with a choice of having to verify my identity/age for these services, then I’d have to consider the position carefully. Realistically, I am not in a position to say “no, I will not use Teams”, as some long-term clients are not going to change their corporate approach just because Neil doesn’t like something, and I’d rather not lose them as clients. So that could be a pain, if those services were within scope.
I’ll still object to these measures - “I’m okay, Jack” would be a selfish stance - but, in practice, yes, I’d be surprised if they impacted me.
Self-imposed (or, at least, self-controlled) digital isolationism, perhaps.
Or perhaps, in the future, some service will pop up that I will really, really want to use, despite it requiring identity / age verification.