As an Australian it's so irritating how enthusiastic people are to give up their privacy and freedom of speech, and also force everyone to hand over personal information to private companies, on the flimsiest of pretexts from our perpetually technologically incompetent government.

After the number of data breaches we've seen, they want to do this, and in the least privacy-preserving way possible.

Why not set up a government api where a site can get a yes/no answer about age using tokens, so the site itself gets no information but if the age is ok? Nope, we'll just pick a few sites and force everyone to give them their data, what could go wrong?

And if you actually look at the suicide statistics, there's no epidemic of suicides going on...

https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/populat...

It's just lazy parents who can't be bothered parenting looking for a quick fix. I want to hand my phone to little tommy and turn my brain off.

What's even more galling is that the quick fix with so many obvious negatives won't even fix anything. As a kid I had unlimited time to get around any blocks. It's so dumb.

4chan is perfectly fine, but reddit must be stopped! Just to be clear I don't think either should be blocked.

Make the entire internet 18+ only and put the parents who let kids on the net in jail, I don't care.

> Why not set up a government api where a site can get a yes/no answer about age using tokens, so the site itself gets no information but if the age is ok?

As I mentioned in yesterday's thread, an online API still allows the government to track and monitor residents, which is arguably worse. You no longer have plausible deniability when the government asks you to hand over your social media credentials because they now know that you have, or at least attempted to open, an account with that provider.

The better solution would be an offline, cryptographic "wallet" (similar to the EU Digital Identity Wallet) that only exposes the age information and nothing else, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.