I’m asking for public policy ideas here. A lot of countries are enacting age verification now. But of course this is a privacy nightmare and is ripe for abuse. At the same time though, I also understand why people are concerned with how kids are using social media. These products are designed to be addictive and are known to cause body image issues and so forth. So what’s the middle ground? How can we protect kids from the harms of social media in a way that respects everyone’s privacy?


the age verification thing was “obviously” been associated with PALINITR trying to collect private info of potential politicla dissidents. besides DISCORD they almost all enacted the same policy at once. so palinitir is trying to get access to all the potential surveillance data, it has little to do with “privacy/protecting children”
I think this is a bit more conspiracy theorist than anything else. You’re see coincidences and attributing it to a single bad actor. The reality is obviously much more nuanced. There is more and more research showing the psychological damage things like internet porn and social media have on childrens health, thanks to an entire generation being a live test subject. Social media companies have been running unregulated experiments on kids for decades now, and people are seriously noticing the negative impacts. This has resulted in law makers grasping at straws to find a solution. The less tech savvy ones are being ignorant about it and throwing privacy away for the sake of security. But age verification can be done securely with zero knowledge proofs if we spend the time to actually implement in correctly.
Palantir doesn’t need our ID’s to track us anyway. They get way more information without it already.