GoKawiilThey want your face. It will be called safety. Verification. Age assurance. A small step to protect children. But strip the language away and the demand is plain: before you may speak, post, or read, you must first prove who you are. And the only way they've figured out how to do it is with your government ID, or with your face held up to a camera that decides whether you are old enough to be trusted. This is the deal now being written into law on three continents, and you are meant to accept it quietly. Don't.
Fig. 1 — They are not asking your age. They are mapping your face.
It's always "won't someone think of the children?!". But this affects everyone.
No one disputes that the internet can hurt kids. That grief is real, but it's being exploited. Here is the trick: to confirm that a child is not present, a service has to check everybody. Every adult passes through the checkpoint. A law written about sixteen-year-olds quietly becomes an identity requirement for the entire internet. You are not carded because you are suspected of anything. You are carded because carding has become the price of admission to life on the web.
We run background checks on people who want to buy a gun, but we do not background check everyone at all times just in case. Yet that is exactly the design here. It's a permit check at the door of every conversation, applied to all, justified by the few.
It is not age verification. It is identity verification.
Watch the words drift. This whole system was sold as age assurance, which is a yes-or-no question, are you over eighteen? But almost none of these systems are built to answer only that. They are built to know who you are: your name, your date of birth, your document number, your face. This is not age verification at all. It is forced identity tracking. Your real-world identity captured by not only Meta, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, but shared broadly with every creepy agency you already worry about "having all your data".
Name the places now demanding "age verification," and see how many will accept a plain government document that says only that you are over eighteen — and nothing else. Almost none will. Because age was never the point.
We spent a generation teaching people the first rule of the internet: never give out your real identity to strangers. We have a word, doxxing, for inflicting that exposure on someone against their will. And now the same governments and platforms are asking every citizen to do it to themselves, voluntarily, as a condition of logging in.
You can change a password. You cannot change your face.
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