Comment by KaiserPro

> That's not the problem governments are solving. They're solving the problem of convincing the public it's a good idea to end the anonymity of internet use.

I'm really sorry, but that's giving politicians far to much credit for being able to plan ahead.

Look at both the UK and the USA. The UK's just yeeted its PM because he had the personality of a block of cheese. The USA is currently inches away from shooting people if they mention the word green and water in DC. None of that screams "I am a master at planning ahead and manipulating public opinion in to doing x"

The politicians have no idea about how this all works, they see that "social media" is causing harm (its not the only source, we might get to that) The public, especially in the UK really do not like americanised media being forced in their faces and want "something to be done"

Again for the UK specifically the OSA specifically didn't layout a government mechanism for age verification. they left it to the end company to avoid the suggestion of tracking. Despite it being ripe for uberfraud and blackmail.

it would be much more private if ofcom had published an opensource gateway to anonymously authenticate against. (assuming the thing was built properly and verified)

But to the point you are hinting at

Google, meta, apple and $OS makers already track you. This is not an issue of privacy persay, its about who can track you and why. I'd much rather a list of times I access a site that required age verification being stored by the government, than every single fucking page I looked at tracked by google/meta.

The latter is already here.