I agree the EU has shown a higher human rights interest. But if the temptation is too high, like with a digital ID everyone is habituated to using daily, they’ll likely falter eventually. That seems to be Cory Doctorow’s angle as well. Edit: shortened.

I don’t think arguing “a fascist government can easily force now separate institutions to connect in the future” is a misunderstanding. My apologies if I didn’t read your point right, however.

Still worth reminding them some of us will vote them out unless they walk this age check nonsense back. If thousands of people do so, it can be relevant.

Read here why anonymous age verification isn’t a thing: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/#wont-someone-think-of-the-cryptographers

The mastodon.social is in the EU though, where this also seems to be coming next year: https://leminal.space/post/25089051/17854998 (Unless we all call up our EU representatives and get this reversed or something.)

It’s not only likely, it seems like it already happened and the EU appears to have actually announced a copy of the UK Online Safety Act for 2026 already: https://leminal.space/post/25089051/17854998

If you didn’t know, it seems like the EU has actually announced a copy of the UK Online Safety Act for 2026 too, as far as I can tell: https://leminal.space/post/25089051/17854998

It’s sadly led to the EU has actually announced a copy of the UK Online Safety Act for 2026, as far as I can tell: https://leminal.space/post/25089051/17854998 It’s received less press coverage than the whole Chat Control thing.

For those here who didn’t know specifics, as far as I know the EU has announced in July 2025 guidelines, set to come into effect until 2026, that seem to basically be the same as the UK online safety act:

https://www.eunews.it/en/2025/07/14/the-eu-launches-an-online-age-verification-app-pilot-project-in-five-member-states-including-italy/

https://www.mlex.com/mlex/articles/2368265/online-services-get-up-to-12-months-to-apply-age-verification-eu-guidelines-say

https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/118226

These guidelines say, among other things, check the last link: “Where the provider of the online platform has identified medium risks to minors on their platform as established in its risk review […] and those risks cannot be mitigated by less restrictive measures. The Commission considers this will be the case where the risk is not high enough to require access restriction based on age verification but not low enough that it would be appropriate to not have any access restriction […]” And “Self-declaration is not considered to be an appropriate age-assurance measure as further explained below.”

If you don’t want the Online Safety Act in the EU, call or e-mail your representative now. If you enter your country here, it shows a list: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/#delegates As far as I can tell, unless it’s reversed this will be coming soon. The clock is ticking.

I think most people would argue 1-3% of datacenter use is still a significant global pollution factor that is a problem.

Often it is respected, but the resulting problem is platforms conflate things with the questionable AI scraping crawlers to blackmail websites into participating in feeding AI.

For example, Googlebot if enabled won’t just list you for search, but will also scrape your contents for Google’s AI. Edit: see https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/cloudflare-wants-google-to-change-its-ai-search-crawling-google-likely-wont/ as source. I imagine LinkedinBot, given it’s microsoft, will feed some other AI of theirs as well on top of the previews.

Until regulation steps in to require AI bots to separately ask for crawling permission, or to actually get a proper license for reuse of the contents, this situation isn’t going to improve.