[braiamp]

I love how every harm you listed, is a platform design problem, and your fix touches none of it. A kid bypassing VPN age checks can still doomscroll and Roblox all day on a school wifi with no VPN at all. The only thing you've actually accomplished is stripping privacy and security from every adult who isn't a child abuser, to feel like you did something about the ones who are.

[oliwarner]

I don't believe proving I'm an adult to Meta will deprived me of any further privacy than I've already surrendered. What security do you feel I'll lose?

These "platform design problems" are features for some adults. If they want to pour their life into being radicalised by a neverending, bias-confirming, slop-filled doom scroll, that's their choice, isn't it? Outright prohibition is far more fraught both politically and technically.

Blocking 100% of kids isn't required to prevent harm. The key is finding the optimum balance.

[braiamp]

You've already surrendered your privacy to Meta, sure, this has nothing to do with Meta. This is your VPN, the one thing you use because you don't trust your ISP or the wifi you're on, now wanting your real ID before it works. A kid doesn't even need a VPN to doomscroll on school wifi anyway. And "let adults radicalize themselves, their choice" is rich when those adults vote and raise kids and show up swinging at school board meetings. Congrats on the policy that needed my ID and did nothing to the kid two desks over.

[oliwarner]

You're lost. The whole basis of this discussion is that is that certain services (porn, social media) will have to AV. A kid having open network access doesn't help because they still have that interface to overcome.

Services that enable circumvention is a natural extension. Yes that means going through the same verification process you do with pornhub with your VPN host.

Completely by-the-by, your school networking experience is notably different from mine. Ours are locked down. Kids don't get access on their own devices. They whitelist domains, Google has educational filters, etc, etc. Could somebody red team their way through it? Maybe. Kids aren't.

[braiamp]

Pornhub checking my ID is pornhub's problem, not my ISP's, not my VPN's, not every other site I visit through it. A VPN isn't a porn bypass tool that happens to also do other things, it's infrastructure I run my whole connection through, and you want it gated because one of the things people use infrastructure for is something you don't like. That's not a natural extension, that's just deciding the tool itself is guilty by association.

And thanks for confirming kids can absolutely get around your locked down network, you're just betting they won't bother. So the actual plan is "trust kids not to circumvent it" for school wifi but "can't trust adults not to circumvent it" for VPNs. Pick a level of trust and stick with it.

[HDBaseT]

Sure, deep analysis of my usage, connection, browser user agent, browser fingerprinting, etc could reveal who I am and that information can all be correlated if requested by Government agencies although my privacy isn't completely surrendered on an alt/fake name account.

I have a Facebook account primarily for Market Place under a completely fake name. I very rarely comment on things on Facebook, but it feels good knowing that my real name is not being posted. From a glance, Meta cannot confirm this account is owed by Joe Blogs.