Age verification becomes more common. Australia, France, etc. introduce such laws to ban children below 15 years from social media platforms, to protect them.
Will these laws also be relevant to fediverse/lemmy specifically?
Personally I think these laws will focus on the big platforms at first (facebook/meta, youtube, discord, instagramm), which will force younger users with technical skills onto smaller and niche sites. Over time focus on this question will increase for the fediverse.
I think we should find alternative ways, provided they don’t already exist, to ban predators and bad actors that doesn’t punish the entire userbase. Unfortunately, with initially ethical control comes state- and money- sponsored surveillance and oppression. It is seemingly impossible for the former to be free of the latter.
We’re already bombarded by services requiring users give up their age in order to be placed in data farming and advertising categories, with some banning those who cannot be farmed. Hell, every social media provider’s user age limit is 13 as per the EU GDPR – regulators only need to increase that age to 15/16 if they’re uncomfortable with its current level.
And no - I do not see a way to enforce age restriction without breaching basic rights to privacy. The only reason services demand your permission for cookies, device information, identifying data etc. is because the regulators mandate they cannot take your data without your permission. If they cannot find a way to sandbox the under-18 internet from the over-17 internet, then we should just keep the existing rules and expand support for victims. I dont believe there is an ethical solution for preventative measures.