[mariusor]

It's likely that the websites need your actual government issued credentials are not your twitters and your hacker news, but government websites that actually need to link the web user to the citizen. As an example my country has a portal that you use as a citizen to book appointments to government institutions, keeps you updated about the status of your requests, allows you to securely upload scans for additional documents that your request might need, etc.

[arccy]

until your gov decides that websites need to age-check everyone with the equivalent of showing some ID...

[mindslight]

Or corpos decide the time is ripe to force users to do it, so they can better optimize their surveillance targeting. Google has been nagging me with a periodic Android popup for like a decade to "add my birthday to help them comply with the law". Eventually that tack of borderline misleading will turn into an outright demand.

[mariusor]

In the end we all are allowed to just not use a product... aren't we? Vote with your wallet is still possible.

[mindslight]

No? A few percent of people dissenting doesn't move the needle for the company analysts, all the "competitors" tend to move in lock step since their managements are all tuned into the same memestream, and using such systems has steadily become more de facto mandatory for many previously-unrelated tasks.

[mariusor]

I don't want to "move the needle", I just want to not support scummy companies. It sounded like you did too, but my mistake.

[mindslight]

I don't know what you mean? My first point was just about how our individual behavior is not going to affect companies' decisions. The subsequent points were about how it's becoming increasingly harder to avoid supporting any scummy companies.

And the more this behavior is normalized, the easier it is for governments to make it illegal for any site to not demand users' government-registered identities.

[mariusor]

From my perspective we can talk about that when it actually happens. No need to slide on that slippery slope just yet, or at least, not in my neighbourhood...