This initiative is just a smokescreen; it actually pushes things down the slippery slope.
Citizens must not be forced to identify themselves to access lawful online content or services unless strictly necessary, proportionate and provided by law. The legislation should require anonymous or pseudonymous proof-of-age, data minimisation, selective disclosure
Define “necessary”. Define “by law”. The pushers for proof-of-age already say it’s anonymous – but it can’t be.
I asked theses questions to the person in charge, and published the response, you can read both questions and answers here : https://lemmy.world/post/51227026/25554402
I find the person’s answer very disturbing and twisted:
The battle that can still be won is over whether using them stays a free choice.
Note how he/she is speaking as if EU was Russia. There’s a regime that governs on us; we can try to fight it. This is not democracy, where the goverment represents the people and the people’s will. Either – very likely – this person has simply accepted (and I don’t know how good such an attitude is) that EU is not a democracy; or they have unclear ideas about democracy.
“Unless strictly necessary, proportionate and provided by law”: this is not our invention and not undefined. It is the limitation test of Article 52(1) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the standard the Court of Justice applies to every restriction of fundamental rights.
Well they don’t write that in the initiative’s text. They just say “unless provided by law”. This means that if a law passes that mandates chat control, or age-verification for accessing all internet, then it’s OK with them – it’s provided by law now.I stand corrected, they specify “Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights” in the Annex. But I still think this is poorly written: why not explicitly mentioning the main message of those Articles in the main text? That “unless provided by law” in the main text is extremely ambiguous without the Annex.
Citizens must not be forced to identify themselves to access lawful online content or services unless strictly necessary, proportionate and provided by law.
Are you not aware of the Digital Services Act? This piece of legislation alone, provides all the incentives for service providers to do exactly that; unless they change their business-model, which is rather unlikely. By default, users should be treated as adults and therefore unrestricted in their access; rather than children unless proven otherwise.
If the EU would simply mandate operating systems sold within the jurisdiction, to allow specification of an optional ‘date of birth’ field, which is local and purely on a trust-basis (no external verification required); this should be more than sufficient for signaling an age-bracket to a service, which may then serve an “age-appropriate experience”.
A digital identity wallet should be strictly reserved for matters that already required personal identification. Using such heavy-handed measures for controlling access to adult content, or even social media, is complete and utter overkill. I’m not interested in more empty, technical, server-side “trust me, bro” promises, for something that is fundamentally disproportional.
Everyone don’t forget to Sign, Cross-post, Federate and Share everywhere you can !
Déanta ✍️
Fatto ✍️
Signed, but be careful, the website is shitty and does not let you out with the back button.
In the US, you have a lot of this stuff coming in via the lawsuits against Meta for which so many people here are cheering. For that matter, the EU is also seeing lawsuits of that type.
Signed!
