Reddit has begun rolling out mandatory age verification for any NSFW content, as well as for some social media functions, if the AI determines you might be under a certain age.
Another good day to be on Lemmy… until the surveillance capitalist tech overlords lobby enough to get their great firewall of the West, anyway.
Further reading:
- https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/50368431806484-European-Union-Digital-Services-Act-DSA
- https://cybernews.com/security/eu-age-verification-app-hack/
- https://piunikaweb.com/2026/02/19/persona-age-verification-surveillance-allegations/
- https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/23595536875796-Digital-Services-Act-DSA-Information-for-EU-users
fuck giving your GOVERNMENT ID to a private fucking company. Holy shit, is this 1984 or what?
Although I didn’t use it often, I would use facebook, mostly to look at my special interests. Not really to chat with people or whatever. Anyway, when my country brought in ID for social media, I just haven’t been back. I’m not giving my FUCKING GOVERNMENT ID TO A FUCKING PRIVATE SPYWARE COMPANY. Fucking hell.
Yeah. If it can’t be safely done directly by an official public system, there shouldn’t be age verification at all.
I would definitely feel much more comfortable if it was through the government directly but even then for some reason parents don’t want to accept they have to actually….parent, and monitor their children in this day and age. So they want the government/corpo to do it for them. It’s fucking pathetic.
Apple literally introduced a massive update to parental controls in iOS 27. It’s insanely easy and you have so much control. I plan on doing that with my own son. I’m not gonna give out my ID to these random ass websites because people wanna be lazy shitheads.