EU age verification app to ban any Android system not licensed by Google
EU age verification app to ban any Android system not licensed by Google
www.reddit.com /r/degoogle/comments/1mau7yl/eu_age_verification_app_to_ban_any_android_system/
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What's going on with Europe lately? You all really want GOOGLE of all mega corps in control of your identity?
You're going the opposite way, it should be your right to install an alternate OS on your phone. If anything they should be banning Google licensed Android.
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Its not the populace, our politicians just like in the US have gone rogue. People are voting for the nutters due to anti immigration propaganda and so increasingly getting far right. Its happening across the entire western world and its bad news for everyone.
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Except this isn't even the right wing nutters doing it. These are mainstream politicians executing their power grabbing neolib agenda, with very little democratic oversight or public debate.
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had a hope for europe to actually be socialists, at least no one ever confuses america for being left
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At least in the UK it has been the Labor party doing it, they all want control.
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I just wanted the EU to fork lineageOS and provide it as an alternative in major chains.
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They get their tech advice for laws from big tech.
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We dont want it. VdL is one of the most corrupt people in policits and unfortunately has a lot of influence
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VdL = Ursula von der Leyen to the uninitiated. Conservative politician, but the more boring kind, not the Orbán-style post-fascism kind.
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to hear it from any non-Americans on lemmy they're better than America.
looks like they're just as susceptible to this fascist bullshit to me though...
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We invented this bullshit, of course we're susceptible.
Still better than America, though ;P XD
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We're sneaky. I call it effective authoritarianism, it's a sugar coated baton
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Hey Google, where was the origin of fascism?
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Yeah no. Requiring anything Google for something as basic as this violates the GDPR. If they go through with this, it's one legal case until they have to revise it.
Edit: German eID works on any Android btw., flawless actually. I sure hope I can use that for verification
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Edit: German eID works on any Android btw., flawless actually. I sure hope I can use that for verification
Same in Italy... I mean, I can pay taxes with that application but I cannot be verified for my age ? Seriously EU ?
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Yes and the PC app you connect the Android app to also works on Linux. It's even on flathub. Pretty nice, can't complain.
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That Flathub app is unofficial afaik, which is why I don't use it. Normally I wouldn't care, but this seems important enough to not use a repackaged version
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EID and equivalents are great for a lot of things, but do you want your porn site to know who you are? The new app is supposed to verify your age but not give out your PII. Not sure eID can do that?
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violates the GDPR.
I wouldn't be too sure. Data protection mainly binds private actors. Any data processing demanded by law is legal. You'd really have to know the finer points of the law to judge if this is ok.
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The GDPR also applies to public institutions as far as I'm aware - but most importantly the concern here is Google and data collected by Google. This data collection is in no way necessary to provide the age verification service. Most of it is not even related to it. The state legally cannot force you to agree to some corporations (i.e. Google's) terms, even if we completely ignore the GDPR.
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What is it with everyone being obsessed with porn censorship suddenly? Why is this a trend?
At first I thought it's about control and data gathering, but this seems like too much of a genuine attempt at such a system. Why is the government so obsessed with parenting and nannying the citizens?
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Fascism is making a comeback, and everyone's dumb enough to believe it's an America problem, instead of a global oligarchy, class war, problem.
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The legal precedent for gaining the ability to ban content under the guise of preventing the dissemination of "obscenity" allows the future banning of "obscene" political opinions and "obscene" dissent.
Once the "obscene" political content is banned, the language will change to "offensive".
After "offensive" content is banned, then the language will change to "inappropriate".
After "inappropriate", the language will change to "oppositional".
If you believe this is a "slippery slope" fallacy, then as a counterpoint, I would refer to the actual history of the term "politically correct":
In the early-to-mid 20th century, the phrase politically correct was used to describe strict adherence to a range of ideological orthodoxies within politics. In 1934, The New York Times reported that Nazi Germany was granting reporting permits "only to pure 'Aryans' whose opinions are politically correct".[5]
The term political correctness first appeared in Marxist–Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time, it was used to describe strict adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that is, the party line.[24] Later in the United States, the phrase came to be associated with accusations of dogmatism in debates between communists and socialists. According to American educator Herbert Kohl, writing about debates in New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The term "politically correct" was used disparagingly, to refer to someone whose loyalty to the CP line overrode compassion, and led to bad politics. It was used by Socialists against Communists, and was meant to separate out Socialists who believed in egalitarian moral ideas from dogmatic Communists who would advocate and defend party positions regardless of their moral substance.
— "Uncommon Differences", The Lion and the Unicorn[4]
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You're right but the example you gave seems to illustrate a different effect that's almost opposite — let me explain.
The phrase "politically correct" is language which meant something very specific, that was then hijacked by the far-right into the culture war where its meaning could be hollowed out/watered down to just mean basically "polite", then used interchangeably in a motte-and-bailey style between the two meanings whenever useful, basically a weaponized fallacy designed to scare and confuse people — and you know that's exactly what it's doing by because no right-winger can define what this boogeyman really means. This has been done before with things like: Critical Race Theory, DEI, cancel culture, woke, cultural Marxism, cultural bolshevism/judeo bolshevism (if you go back far enough), "Great Replacement", "illegals", the list goes on.
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- Govt. want to control access to everything
- People are not too happy about this
- Govt. say "to protect children, you have to install this app, under these conditions"
- You want to protect childrens, so you do so
- Govt. say "to protect this or that, we have to impose approved gates on many websites, based on the app you installed before"
- You want to protect this or that, so you accept it
- Govt. say "fuck you, you whatever is not in line with the fucking biggot at the helm of your country/federation/whatever, now we know what you do, we control what's allowed, and anything to get around the blocks is illegal and will land you in jail. Fuck you again, fucker."
- You're a happy little plant in a pot.
Basically, it's not about porn. It's not about protecting kids. It's not about helping "victims of abuse". If anything, it's putting all these in more danger, along with everyone else.
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Why is the government so obsessed with parenting and nannying the citizens?
I think it's because people from outside the traditional political families are getting popular votes.
For the established politicians, blaming "the internet" and building a supressing censorship machine is easier than looking in the mirror and seeing where the discontent comes from.
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Been wondering myself. It's certainly part of the general right-ward trend. Societies are becoming more illiberal. It's not just the right that is moving to the right.
Obscenity laws have always been about enforcing the "correct" sexuality. Protecting minors meant preventing them from becoming "confused"; ie becoming LGBTQ.
You also have growing nationalism. In Europe, people are saying we should enforce "our laws" and "our values" against meddling foreigners (ie Big Tech). It often sounds a lot like the rants against the "globalists" that have been a staple among the US far right for decades. Age verification is part of that.
For example, Germany has long enforced age verification within its borders. It's part of the whole over-regulation thing that makes competitive tech companies almost impossible in Europe. For some reason, Europeans have trouble accepting that. You can see it here on Lemmy. The solution must be to enshittify everything to level the playing field.
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It's not about porn. It's about tracking your every move online.
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This is just my speculation, so take it as you will. The EU has been pushing for digital ID cards for quite a while, and this is just another attempt. The last serious attempt was the Covid vaccination passport, but so many people still opted for paper certs, and the rest deleted the app when vaccination was no longer mandatory, that it failed again. So, now the authorities are becoming smart and trying to go through the vector that has a proven record of driving technological change: porn.
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Gonna guess it's outside influence with money pushing their ideology. Just like the crap with Visa and steam, itch.io, etc.
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FYI: Most of the world actually restricts, and some outright bans, porn.
Its only western countries that have unrestricted access to porn.
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Most western governments look at the ability of some of the more authoritarian places ability to just snap there fingers and make the entire internet go away with great envy.
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This has been discussed a while back, at least here in NL as far as I know it started because of legalising online gambling for which you need to be identified. Also, due to GDPR, businesses aren't allowed to make copies of ID's/passports/driving licences any more which is required for certain businesses (notaries, accountants, etc). In my office we currently use some kind of identification software, but it isn't anonyms because well we wouldn't be able to do our job.
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Too many bots online :D I'd like to know if I'm talking to a real sockpuppet when I'm online :D...but just for that and only share data from my "wallet id" on a strict need to know basis.
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European Digital identity
looks inside:
Hosted on GitHub in the US 👏
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That's ironic
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So, darkweb sites it is.
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And then EU politicians will be surprised Pikachu, when CSAM (actual CSAM) will be popular...
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The US might have shot itself in the foot by electing Trump, but the EU is really going to shoot itself in the head if that continue in the same trajectory.
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Sorry to horrify you but we are definitely worse.
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You should read more international news if you think either the EU or US is "the worst place". Somalia for example has been in civil war since the 1980s.
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So VPN on the router permanently set to Singapore it is.
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Wut?!?!
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They killed the old net and are in the middle of murdering the new one too.
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It hurt itself in its confusion!
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Google Pain Services
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Well, I hope they'll pay for my "EU age verification" phone, since my own won't work. I'll gladly buy one and not use it either.
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How long before that extends to PCs and non-Windows OSes are blocked? Also, add non-Chrome browsers to that as well (that includes Edge, Chromium, Brave, etc. as well as Firefox and its forks).
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Just like the bank app etc.
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As usual, it's the implementation that matters.
Someone jumped at me for comparing EU and MAGA to Stalin's and Hitler's regimes, quote, "arguing in newspapers whose worker class has been liberated more". Like they are not equal at all and all such.
Please don't link to Reddit. Context below:
The EU is currently developing a whitelabel app to perform privacy-preserving (at least in theory) age verification to be adopted and personalized in the coming months by member states. The app is open source and available here: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui.
Problem is, the app is planning to include remote attestation feature to verify the integrity of the app: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui?tab=readme-ov-file#disclaimer. This is supposed to provide assurance to the age verification service that the app being used is authentic and running on a genuine operating system. Genuine in the case of Android means:
While there is value to verify device security, this strongly ties the app to many Google properties and services, because those checks won't pass on an aftermarket Android OS, even those which increase security significantly like GrapheneOS, because the app plans to use Google "Play Integrity", which only allows Google licensed systems instead of the standard Android attestation feature to verify systems.
This also means that even though you can compile the app, you won't be able to use it, because it won't come from the Play Store and thus the age verification service will reject it.
The issue has been raised here https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui/issues/10 but no response from team members as of now.
So is there a way to apply pressure on the EU to think this through first? Surely they could have different ways that doesn't lock them in to google services.
According to the users in that issue, the mere application of the API is illegal, as is the dependency. Sooo I dunno what kind of PACs there are in the EU but I would be leaning on and contributing to those.
To avoid people from simply copying the "age proof" and having others reuse it, a nonce/private key combo is needed. To protect that key a DRM style locked down device is necessary. Conveniently removing your ability to know what your device is doing, just a "trust us".
Seeing the EU doesn't make any popular hardware, their plan will always rely on either Asian or US manufacturers implementing the black-box "safety" chip.
Wouldnt it be enough to verify through IMEI to make sure the OS isnt emulated?
IMEI is PII