15/02/2026

alright, let's do this

Online age verification - the horrible, the criminal, and the.. tolerable?

yes sir, tolerable! i'm not 100% against it.. although 99%? yeah probably

due to the scope of this post, i've divided it into several subsections, so you can see my stance on each. i want to make my stance on this crystal clear without automatically resorting to the same talking points as every other brainless drone on the internet. my countless hours of stimming can attest to how much i've been stuck in those, but at last i'm out

What is it meant to do?

for the 5 people who haven't heard, governments around the world are now implementing age verification, to be required on.. all? sites before.. 2030 at least? this is, of course, to protect children against harmful content online, and they go to these lengths to ensure that absolutely nobody can discover that kind of content accidentally. definitions of terms aside, i'm willing to give at least some governments the benefit of the doubt that this is what they want (but not others, iykyk)

to their credit, the data technically doesn't lie. even in some parts of the present-day internet, it is waaaaaayyyyyy too easy to come across explicit content accidentally. i don't know if this blog counts, but if swearing like a sailor and wishing ruin upon my peers already constitutes that, then fair enough, but i digress. more concretely, elsagate is STILL a problem in the current year, and despite the files (sorta) coming out, active child predators are still having the time of their lives on our biggest social media platforms

conceptually, is age verification the correct solution to our problems? the answer is a resounding no. at best, age verification would safeguard the most innocent of children and stop the most obvious offenders dead in their tracks. however, we haven't lived in such a simple world since the rise of social media, and this problem is (theoretically) already solved

the true depth of the problem lies in social and algorithmic engineering. elsagate is still a problem because these content creators use child-friendly properties (or at least those that appeal to children) to fool the algorithm into putting hardcore b*** amp******* p*** (censored for the web crawlies) in the youtube kids feed. as for social engineering, all you need to get your hands on a victim is a profile that looks their age, an appropriate mindset, their trust, and a weapon in case it's a cop. you might think that we've all learned not to trust strangers on the internet, but each and every one of us still falls for the oldest trick in the book, myself included. this is the scope of our problems, not wandering toddlers

so it solves the wrong problem. oh well, at least the implementation couldn't hurt us... right?

What does it actually do?

the precise enforcement of age verification differs from site to site, but there are three common types that we see get implemented today. i will explain what each method does, piss on them and then provide the funniest bypass i can think of

let's start with the most extreme, submitting your id (e.g. passport, driver's license). the single most obvious risk for this is data leaks, which allows hackers to blackmail people at best and impersonate them at worst. now, if an organization is forced by any means necessary to treat personal data as a burn-after-reading affair, many nerds like myself know a smart enough system whereby this wouldn't be a problem. however, industry leaders practically beg to get poked by black-hat hackers, because they are gluttonous pigs when it comes to getting and selling personal data. if a leak happens (and believe me, it will) with data as sensitive as that, you're fucked until you renew your documents
bypass: i am mclovin

next, a face scan: show yourself, do a bunch of things and our faultless :D ai model will tell you how old you are. storage-wise, it carries the same risk as submitting your id, but it's a lot less severe. a leak of this sort will connect your face to your username, which becomes a problem if a thing you said is magically worthy of the death penalty, and all they needed was a face. however, this method is doubly bad, because the late bart de graaff could realistically fail the age verification. in fact, it's conceivable that everyone on earth could fail just as easily as they could pass. faces aren't foolproof
bypass: case in point, i've seen videos where people use gmod ragdolls to bypass this check. it fuckin works apparently

last and most intrusively, plenty of companies just guess your age from the data that they've collected. if you get assigned to either category without doing anything, then congratulations, you're in the humancentiPad. disable every setting that shares data with the company to prevent further damage, and if you've already done that, get out as fast as you can and don't look back
bypass(?): meh, you've already lost. if you ended up in the wrong one, something is not right in your head

i'm sure there are more, but these are the big three. all three needlessly put your privacy and personal safety at risk, and one of them is theoretically worthless for the task. it wouldn't be so bad if corporations weren't such data whores and first-world countries actually cared about your rights (iykyk). however, since this is the world that we live in now, the mainstream implementations are a guaranteed deal with the devil, and you get the raw end of it

if i had to hand-pick a solution in this niche without changing the whole internet, i'd say add a field for the date of birth, and then only use that as a toggle for the age switch. naïve kids such as my younger self would honor that setting. lazy parents would immediately take the hint and stop their kids accessing the site. rowdy kids who want to look at buxom ladies can go ahead and do it at their own risk. sure, it won't solve elsagate - not by a longshot - but then none of these implementations do anyway. the only "downside" is that you'll have less data to farm, so of course google won't bat an eye at it

so the implementation sucks too. now, as long as it doesn't affect me...

When is this a problem?

duh, when isn't it a problem? well, you may be surprised to learn that, in some cases, the universal hatred and boycott of age verification isn't entirely justified. in my view, there are two ways that age verification can be applied to a platform, and only one of them is cause for a riot

if and only if age verification is required for additional features that were not already accessible to standard users, then i can tolerate it. for instance, chatgpt's upcoming age verification lets users get freaky with the bot. if you fail the verification, pretty much nothing will change, because the content policy was already strict as hell. another example - and i can't believe i'm defending it here - roblox only lets you use voice chat and play 18+ games once you verify your age with id. if you tell that to someone playing roblox in even as late as 2018, they'll have an aneurysm, because what the fuck do you mean 18+ games on roblox? have the ODers won?!

sadly, in the vast majority of implementations, age verification will restrict basic features that were once freely accessible. this is already bad enough for a free service, but if you paid for it, what's stopping the vendor from saying you don't even own the product? some of the services guilty of this crime are discord and minecraft respectively.. so 90% of my online presence. discord locks a switch behind a guaranteed data leak, and minecraft is forced by corporate to ban all chat functionality for non-verified users. bullshit like this is where i draw the line, and the more you do it voluntarily, the more you make yourself out to be a crook

all of that becomes worse if the age check is unavoidable. it's one thing to have to verify for accessing certain features, it's outright criminal if using the service at all requires that you verify. now, i'm not a lawyer, but last time i checked, asking children under about 13 for anything personal online is a criminal offense in most western countries, and it's looked down on for anyone under 18. this might help discord along, but what about minecraft? will we start asking id from people who oughtn't even have it yet? granted, this is such an obvious crime that i don't think such a policy will last, but the fact that this is even thinkable is insane

naturally, there are a million different straw men you could assign to me from this. will i start lambasting hooghoudt because the bastards dare to ask for my birthday before i can even look at a bottle of berenburg? do certain cashiers deserve life in prison because they ask for my id when i buy something there? do i not care about child safety or the possible moral catastrophe that is children seeing "fuck" printed once on the screen? am i a good friend of jeffy, carrying on his legacy by recruiting as many children as "foot masseurs" as possible? to all those things, of course not

once again, the problem is implementation, and by extension intrusion. we should protect children, but it shouldn't come at the cost of adults on the internet, least of all anonymous adults. just like drugs or pirated movies, if people want "harmful" content, they'll find a way. providing a way by promising (with fingers crossed, of course) that your government data will be super duper safe with these tech startups is an anti-solution that doesn't protect children, actively compromises adults and lines the pockets of seedy tech billionaires. even worse if all that becomes a requirement for using the internet at all, as we now see with the scope of age verification

chat, are we cooked?

What can we do?

it's tempting to make everyone involved bleed, and bleed they must, because the road to actual legislation is not laid out for us. however, without good replacements, we're left with nothing, and we'll eventually relapse. if you care about your rights as a user of the internet, do as i say (and not as i do, or don't, i'm not your dad)

starting this weekend, i'm phasing out as many platforms as i can that fall under the category of "age verification for basic features". this most prominently includes discord, and i hope i can replace minecraft in due time as well. i will still be around, you can reach out to me in enough ways and i'll still have games to play, but i'm not doing anything new on there. that said, it still leaves the question of where i'll move to next

for messaging, i still need to look into my options, but i'd much like a decentralized network of small communities, preferably accessible through one client per platform, preferably one i can partially host myself. fluxer is making the rounds but it's not the best, i've seen element before and it looks decent for my discord experience, and someone i know insists on something in the xmpp standard. if you're considering moving, please email me if anything you see looks interesting enough to move to

for gaming, i hope to eventually make my own minecraft/blockland/roblox hybrid with blackjack and hookers. i'm not all that much of a gamer anyway, i spend most of my days playing solitaire and my granddad's favorite bubble shooter flash game. if i absolutely need to make something like the good old days, i have art programs and blockland

somewhat unrelated, i'm ditching youtube as well. not because they require me to verify my age (although they inevitably will), but because the algorithm has succeeded in giving me absolutely nothing to watch except propaganda. it's quite telling when the most random video the api can muster is some big-label indian music video, instead of the slice-of-life epic movie recreations from kids like the one i used to be. the age of funny videos on youtube is also over, and i might actually be okay leaving this unreplaced

at any rate, the key word is decentralization. the internet should be bottom-up rather than top-down. by using software that misguided legislators have trouble policing, and by forging communities with computer wizardry in the absence of practical skills, we can build a better world.. well not today, but definitely over the course of like a few months probably? we can protect our children better, keep our adults free, and shank those who wish to control us by any means necessary for nothing but profit. a decentralized internet is my ideal internet

that said, the law is the law. my integrity as an activist is close to nil, and if i missed something that somehow makes this entire ordeal reasonable, i'll back down. also don't take this as an excuse to groom children thanks