US national level OS-level age verification bill proposed

Ultimately, they seem to have realised that they can't stop adult content from being shared, so the easiest way to get there was to mark anything even vaguely possible of being adult, and require age verification -- which comes with a lot of political cover vs. just deleting it.

Of course, if you stoke up the right people, you end up with lots of support from the puritanical brigades, and label all naysayers as putting children in harm's way.

I guess they figure if they keep trying they'll eventually get it passed - which is probably true.

The collaboration between tech billionaires and state surveillance is also thoroughly documented. Silicon Valley venture capitalists and tech founders—such as Peter Thiel (Palantir) and Palmer Luckey (Anduril)—have aggressively integrated themselves into the military-industrial complex. By leveraging their immense wealth and political access, they have secured billions in taxpayer-funded contracts with the Department of Defense, ICE, and local police departments. Palantir, for example, got its start with seed funding and direct guidance from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, and now provides the digital infrastructure that enables federal agents to track and arrest individuals en masse.

Data monetization and the elimination of anonymity are the financial engines of this model. The modern digital economy operates on "surveillance capitalism," offering supposedly free services to harvest user data, craft highly detailed profiles, and monetize every click and interaction while entirely deemphasizing user privacy. In the political sphere, dark money networks have poured millions into their own high-tech data firms (such as i360) to assemble meticulously detailed, de-anonymized profiles on over 190 million active voters and 250 million consumers, enabling precision targeting and psychological manipulation.

Mass surveillance justified by "safety" is precisely how these technologies are deployed against the public. The software systems sold by tech companies to law enforcement agencies explicitly ingest commercial license plate reader (LPR) data, providing authorities with access to over 5 billion data points used to continuously and physically track vehicles and individuals across the country. This geographic tracking is fused with other aggressive domestic surveillance methods like digital dragnets, "Stingray" cell phone interceptors, facial recognition, and fake social media profiles—often using photos of attractive young women—to trick youths as young as twelve into accepting friend requests. Authorities use this access to map out social networks and establish guilt by association, heavily surveilling minority youth without any concrete evidence of criminal behavior.

Ultimately, these technologies fulfill the state's historical obsession with "legibility"—the utopian, often tyrannical desire of authorities to categorize, monitor, map, and standardize every aspect of human life so that the population becomes a closed, predictable, and easily manipulated system. By merging state power with Silicon Valley's data-harvesting capabilities, this infrastructure enforces control by turning human sociality and everyday life into an endless series of trackable, monetizable data points.

One example of this was last year when high-profile apps like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans were found to have privacy policies on their websites restricting users to 13+ so they could track and advertise more while their Android and iOS apps were designated for all ages so they could get more downloads.

This is likely because of Zuck's testimony in the very recent court case where he testified exactly that the "best place" to do "age verification" was in the operating system.

This was but a few weeks before all these, largely very identical sounding bills, suddenly started appearing in state houses across the USA.

Because meta will not have to spend real $ to add/support age verification, plus they get to point the finger at someone else for age issues.

Or is there another one?

Even if they stack the courts with muppets who ignore the obvious first amendment angle to get this passed, I will never comply with this and I will happily help others defy it.

Source:

Is that what this bill requires? If it’s just remote attenuation for social media, done by the OS, I think that’s fine.

Maybe add in automatic voter registration to sweeten the pot?

There's a reason this idea is pushed solely by Republicans with the explicit goal of reducing the number of people who can vote, because fewer people voting is better for Republicans.

Most negative US health outcome factors can be traced to suburbanization, which is also where the vast majority of the gun violence is, and systemic racial wealth disparity. We have a pretty good healthcare system, we just need to subsidize it for people who can't afford it.

Requiring commercial services to adhere to certain guidelines is constitutional, even though the Texas law is a bad one and I think a different court may have slapped down the law. Mandating speech (code is speech) is clearly not, especially for noncommercial projects.

I think the key would be getting the right person to explain how this would be like requiring all authors to include a certain sentence in their novel.

So if the legislation leans that way it would be interesting to discuss that part in particular.

Not me individually, no, but I hope that by speaking up I am doing a very small part to encourage others to speak up. If enough of us speak up, it can make a difference. The alternative (keeping my mouth shut) is complying in advance, IMO.

> Some people refuse to fly, judging security checks at airport dystopian. Business goes on.

Funny you should mention that. I fly frequently (at least 3 times, sometimes up to 8-10 times a year), and I have literally never gone through the body scanning machines at a US airport, because I opt out and get groped by the TSA officer every time. I believe in small acts of resistance, and I think at the very least I'm consistent in that.

AIPAC money, PAC money, and gold bar bribe takers are definitely corrupt and need to be in prison.