this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
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I saw an interesting video suggesting that the real motivation is to give megacorps like Google a new business acting as "banks" for identity, i.e. the Internet would get so inconvenient that people would just save their identity with Google (or Meta, etc) and then use them to log in to other websites.
I probably explained it badly, but the video I saw is here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAd-OOrdyMw
People in the comments pointed out that those companies would also have the ability to delete or suspend your identity verification if you did something they didn't like (or refused to do something they wanted). Reminds me of the SIN from Shadowrun .
Yeah, but the governments obviously want to know exactly what you're doing as well.
I think their only objection to Google et al having so much data is that they need to jump through hoops to get hold of it.
I suspect this will be in browser before too long. Mostly so they can automatically provide your full unique ID code to anyone who asks, so your government can keep track of you if you say "I support Palestine Action" anywhere, or so Google can look it up when you dare suggest AI is not our glorious future.
But also because there's only so many "let us check your ID" services you can use before you end up giving your details to somebody who is going to sell them directly. How long before a dodgy porn site does a "show us your face" check, before generating deepfakes starring yourself and demanding payment not to send them to a social media profile it's already detected based on your face?
I don't really want to be on an internet where instead of blackmist@feddit.uk, somebody can just click that and go "Oh, that's Jeff Timmons of 48 Badminton Way, Stoke-on-Trent. Ring Staffordshire police so they can go and grab him"
This is by far the most plausible theory.
The other part is that christofascists really want to ban "porn" (read: anything they don't like), and they know age verification will make their operation almost impossible. The fact that corporations like Google might get to validate people they advertise to is a positive side effect.
Indeed. Anybody but the biggies will have an impossible task trying to convince people to verify their ID, so all the smaller sites will switch to only allowing registration/sign-in through Google/Apple/MS's Oauth, and depreciate the username/password option. When "signing in with Google/whatever", Google will simply pass a flag "adult" along with authorizing. In the end, they become the gatekeepers for the whole web, collecting tremendous valuable data in the process and gaining even more power over your identity.
Always keep in mind that the small players will always take the easiest option, and the big players want more control.
Bingo. they'll just tack it on to what they currently have with most sites that have you sign in with your google/apple/meta account. mask it as the easier option instead of using another email/registering an account on your own.
And they won't just stop on websites. Google will also incorporate this with your phone. FRP will now require you have a valid ID with Google, same with account recovery OR simply signing into a new device with your existing Google Account.
Hell wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft roles out that you must have a valid ID simply to install windows. Already requires users to have a Microsoft account and be online to install it, what's to stop them from now requiring you provide a photo ID?
I don't have one. Obtanium, Fdroid and Aurora ftw.
Facebook are the same, been the same for years.
This isn't the motivation in Europe where there's a deep skepticism about those - all foreign - companies.
There is no need for conspiracy-type thinking. "Think of the children" has always been a powerful and real motivating force, not just a cover for nefarious other stuff. You need to recognise that, even if it's wrong-headed.
It being a real and powerful motivational force means it's one of the more useful covers.
Just because it motivates the voters/customers doesn't mean it's the genuine reason behind a decision.
I cannot think of a single recent "think of the children" based action that was intended to and actually helped the children in a meaningful way.
Can you?
Are you judging the motivation purely based on the effects? Otherwise, how are you working out what goes on inside people's heads?
I think given that we all agree that there are voters who think this will protect children makes it crazy to think that politicians must somehow know better. It is well-accepted online that politicians are out-of-touch when it comes to technology, so it's not like they understand the subject of this article.
A combination of the effects, the prior actions, reactions and consequences of the subject and others in similar categories/contexts (to the extent i actually know/pay attention).
I don't know of another way of performing predictive analysis.
Also that didn't answer the question.
I'm genuinely not sure what you are saying here, but i'll go line by line, tell me if I'm reading it incorrectly.
I don't know what this means, there are voters who genuinely believe this, yes, i think i follow that bit.
I'm not sure what you think is crazy here (i'm not disagreeing, i just don't understand) , do you mean to say the politicians do or don't know better ?
This i agree with, i can also anecdotally add first hand experience of the consequences of such lack of understanding.
Not sure how it ties in to the other sentence though.
I'll try to rephrase:
It makes more sense that politicians are simply like ordinary voters and are wrong and misguided when it comes to the internet (in this regard and others), and genuinely believe that the Online Safety Act is helpful for its stated purpose, than that they are using it as some nefarious way of helping out Google. The simple reason is that politicians are people too and just as susceptible to being wrong as voters are; we don't actually need to hunt for any greater reason than that.
Besides that, we constantly talk about how politicians catastrophically fail to understand technology (I believe the Online Safety Act makes mention of hypothetical encryption-backdooring technology that is simply impossible). For politicians to have a different true motive - i.e. their stated motive is false - we are essentially saying that they couldn't possibly have made got this wrong, there must be some corrupt reason for it - but we don't actually believe they couldn't have got it wrong because we're constantly complaining about how they very obviously do get it wrong.
I also mentioned (but you didn't mention being confused by it) that the UK government isn't really friendly to American big-tech firms, who are universally opposed to the Act as a whole because of its threat to end-to-end encryption.
Politicians are people too, sure.
Doing a bad job of implementing a self serving plan doesn't excuse the self serving plan.
That's some 'boys will be boys' nonsense.
Take brexit and Alexander as example, his intent was to do something shitty for self gain, he's not an idiot no matter how it seems.
There's no chance he believed that ridiculous tagline about the NHS funding and Europe, even if he did, someone at some point would have pointed it out to him.
He did it anyway, that's intent.
Regardless of the outcome, he did something he knew was shitty, for whatever reason he had.
These people might be idiots, but their intent is usually to do something shady, that they are incompetent and do a shitty job of it isn't the point.
Wrt to the America thing, I agree, I'm not saying the government is working with tech companies, im saying their intent usually isn't 'save the children', at that point we absolutely should be hunting for the reasons, because if it isn't the reason they have stated, what are they hiding?
But you haven't provided any reason to believe it's self-serving (other than it is actually quite popular, so it will probably help to get them re-elected)
I agree. In that case, the tagline was objectively false and it was printed anyway, so we can conclude pretty safely that the people in charge of making it were lying. That's not the case here; there is genuine disagreement about whether the Online Safety Act will be a success. It is quite popular with the public - a clear majority of people do believe it will be a success. Whether it will be is not a matter of objective fact - not only can we not see the future, there is also no objective way to balance the benefit of decreasing harm to children by preventing access to harmful content with the cost of preventing their access to useful information and the cost of increased friction and privacy breaches to everyone else. If there's a 0.01% chance of photographs of people's IDs being leaked online due to this, but a 90% chance that more than 100,000 children will be prevented from seeing content advocating suicide, is that OK? We don't know if those are the correct percentages and, even if we did, that is a moral question, not a factual one.
The situation is wholly different than the Brexit bus.
Citation needed.
People don't go into politics to line their pockets - not in the UK anyway. It's just not that lucrative. People go into politics mostly for the right reasons (that is, they want to change the country in a way they believe will be better - even if you disagree about that) and some of them are natural grifters who try and make a quick buck off it as well.
Again, nobody in this thread or elsewhere has provided any evidence that this is not their intent. The only argument put forward comes down to "it won't actually save the children, so that can't be their intent." But that is not how it works. People can disagree about things and on this particular matter most people disagree with you (and me.)
I can list examples of politicians promising things and then backtracking or making decisions that benefit them or their retinue directly but it's so entrenched in the zeitgeist I'd be genuinely shocked if you didn't know any examples yourself.
So we've established a baseline of possibility, we can work from here.
Yes, politicians are people too, there will be disagreements between them, most have no idea what they are talking about with regard to this so that discussion probably won't actually help anyone, but such is life.
Same with brexit, popular support isn't necessarily an indicator of a good idea.
Agreed
Indeed, and by that rationale there's no basis for saying this is a good idea with regard, specifically, to the protection of children.
Which is why many people say this isn't about the protection of children, because they have no way of proving it, or really even a vague idea of how to measure it , at all.
There is however precedent for this kind of attempt at control to be poorly implemented and abused in other areas, such that there is a provable downside.
So if there's no provable upside but there is a somewhat provable downside, which option should be used.
That's a different discussion, but yes, ethics, morals etc.
It's a different scenario yes, but it proves the possibility of that type of action, which it seems you were denying by saying "they're just idiots they couldn't possibly be doing bad things"
There is an example of action not based in incompetence.
Indeed, this is personal opinion/anecdote.
I can give you examples of shady politicians doing shady things but probably not enough to demonstrably push it over that 50% line.
In the same way you can't prove incompetence over intentional malice.
That level of naïveté is staggering ( and also conveniently skips over power as a motivator )
Even if we don't agree on the percentages i think we can agree that there is a level of political corruption, a quick buck doesn't even begin to cover it.
Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak from recent memory, i could probably dredge up some more.
That's why i stated it as me saying, not as an objective fact, though i see that might not be clear.
Also remember the predictive analysis based on previous actions.
I the absence of hard proof i'm pretty sure you'll agree that opinions can be formed using predictions based on past actions of the person and similar situations and scenarios.
as i said earlier(NOTE: this was actually in a different reply, but the point stands)
it's not:
so much as it is
"Previously, on multiple occasions they have proven to not be doing things for the stated reasons, it's perhaps reasonable to work under the idea that they may be doing this again".
No, no, the accusation is that politicians are lying.
Let's phrase this another way. Asking every single website in existence to implement and maintain an ID database and monitoring system is expensive, yes? So, why wouldn't private companies shift some of this responsibility off to a 3rd party who specializes specifically in this service?
If I were google, I would:
The only thing left to do is lobby. Politicians might not have this vision, but they do understand really expensive dinners.
In order to be lying, they must know better - that's my point. You can't have a nefarious plan without understanding the plan.
That is more of an uphill battle in an environment like Europe or the UK where politicians are deeply skeptical of American big tech companies.
The plan is that they like money, and they'll say whatever they have to to get more money. Or power, maybe.
I don't really need to know what their motives are, though, anyway. If they were saying that spilling gasoline over a fire would put out the fire, I know that they're either lying for some reason, or they're really fucking stupid. Kind of a distinction without a difference.
I could believe that people are. Especially after recent events. But... you really think your right wing isn't in bed with capital? Google was just an example, you know.
If the right wing were in bed with big tech, they would never have passed this Act, which all big tech companies hate because it imposes serious duties and costs on them.
Then you shouldn't pretend that you do.
It's perfectly reasonable to argue about how shit the law is, but it's not reasonable to advance without evidence the view that politicians made the law for some underhanded purpose. Have you trawled the MPs' Register of Interests to find whether its supporters were wined and dined by those companies? Do you have an explanation for why their request was supposedly "let us become age-verifiers" rather than "don't force us to moderate our products more"?
No; you and others don't have any of this because you haven't done that journalistic work (and because it probably doesn't exist). You're just pissing conspiracy theories into the pot.
By that rationale you world also need to prove that they are misunderstood upstanding citizens.
Because both interpretations are deviations from the stated intent and outcome, why would yours not also need journalistic rigour?
Just because yours is a slightly positive spin doesn't mean its not conjecture against the provided facts.
You've probably heard "never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence." This is an example of that.
They are not. Both are deviations from stated outcome, but not stated intent.
People on your side of this seem to think that, because politicians are saying that something will happen and you disagree with that, they must actually also believe that the outcome will be as you believe, but are lying about it.
Not only is this poor reasoning, it's really quite arrogant. When it comes to predicting outcomes, there is often genuine disagreement. I think you need a good reason to conclude that this can't possibly be a case of politicians disagreeing about the outcome and no-one has come up with such a good reason - no-one has said, "actually, the minister for DCMS was reported to have met with the bosses of Google, Microsoft and Facebook and a source in the department said they lobbied for age-verification". All anyone has given is the same argument I have been pointing out:
Can I walk you again through how this argument does not work?
That's fair, there is still an onus on proof of incompetence being the driver of the outcome rather than some other reason.
That's a bold and incorrect assumption, i do disagree with the act because it's stupid and doesn't do anything the might be even remotely constructive but i don't hold them to an imaginary belief system that adheres directly with my own, as stated in the first response, my predictive analysis of what i expect to happen is based on their prior history and the outcomes of their previous decisions.
It's not "I believe this thing so it must be true"
its
"Their recent (and somewhat mid-term) track record points to them making decisions based on deception and self gain, so i would guess that trend will continue".
If you think past behaviour as a partial basis for predicting future behaviour is poor reasoning, I'm not sure we're going to agree on much of anything here.
** gestures vaguely at recent historical decisions in general and multiple attempts at this type of control specifically **
I've specifically said i don't think big tech is the emphasis here, so I'm not going to provide proof of a position I'm not taking.
I've done no such thing, I've specifically been talking about the prediction that politicians are generally untrustworthy (and also incompetent at it) based on past behaviour.
If you want to spend time arguing a point i wasn't actually contesting, feel free.
I'm legitimately up for discussing this point instead, but I'm not sure it'll be worth anyone's time if we fundamentally disagree on what constitutes poor reasoning.