Somewhere in a government building in the UK: We did it, Patrick…
If they did this here, I’d just stop using bluesky. I’m 41. But I have no interest in verifying ages online. We’ve all seen how poorly companies handle intetnal security.
Just yesterday McDonalds had their entire database of applications compromised because someone tried the password 123456.
Bluesky would be dropped instantly.
This isn’t about age verification. It’s about getting your ID and tying your (probably illegal but yet to be proven) online activity to it. Much like the firewall of China.
All wrapped up nicely in the disguise of “age verification”
Good for them. Too many goddamn kids on the internet with dumbass ideas and shitty grammar and yolos and skibidy rizz, why back in my day we have to go uphill both ways to the internet cafe before we could argue with a strawman online
Pretty concerning that a “western democracy” is doing this, because it gives cover for the next one and the next one.
It’s easy to say “oh I’ll just stop using such and such a service” but what happens when there are no more legal services to switch to?
The UK has been in lock step with the US in terms of moronic voters and stupid leaders.
The UK is in Europe, but it’s closer to the morons in Texas than Switzerland.
Canadian Senate Bill S-209 aims to do the same in Canada. These idiots really want our data so bad.
Thanks for the information.
I found this specific clause very … porous.
Clarification — commercial purpose 6 For greater certainty, for the purpose of section 5, an organization that incidentally and not deliberately provides a service that is used to search for, transmit, download, store or access content on the Internet that is alleged to constitute pornographic material does not make available pornographic material on the Internet for commercial purposes.
So… I guess Bing will once again be my goto incidental indeliberate porn search engine. And reddit. And Lemmy.
https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/bill/S-209/first-reading
Surprisingly, a conservative senator had a fairly well reasoned, and cautious, (although still supportive), response speech.
https://sencanada.ca/en/content/sen/chamber/451/debates/008db_2025-06-10-e#66
It still has a long way to goto get through senate committee and house readings and committees and all that. Still, might be a good time to scrape all the porn.
Look at Bill S-210 from the last Parliament, it made it to 2nd reading in the House. There is cause for concern.
I appreciate your dive into the topic though. Michael Geist has more info on his website.
Where’s that federation?
And how would this fit in? Are they just going to build a bunch of excuses into the platform, and then claim it’s now impossible?
This is mandated by UK law. If you created a node so that UK users can bypass this, you would be doing something illegal. You’d probably get defederated.
I haven’t even verified my email with Blue. This would be more than a deal breaker.
