It's frustrating to see how shortsighted and tech-illiterate politicians are on these topics. This article from Norway today presents the attitude of the minister of digitization as simply "Social media companies are making billions and we expect them to adequately implement age verification systems with solutions that respect privacy and we will fine those who fail at doing this".

The fantastic irony is that in some weak attempt to protect against the "evil big tech companies" they directly facilitate increased mass surveillance and removal of individual rights, instead of choosing more scalable and robust answers such as funding and promoting the development of protocols and open standards that can be applied voluntarily and in a decentralized manner to help mitigate these problems.

I have computers side by side on my desktop running Linux, and it is amazing to me how I can call `wormhole send --message hello` and receive it on the machine next to me, knowing that only I can receive this message, without it running through an age approval mechanism, without it being client-side scanned, and without being logged in some government database.

This is the century of AI and robotics - technologies which can facilitate great concentration of power and wealth. Gradually introducing mechanisms that facilitate digital fascism seems like a really bad way to guard us against this.

https://www.nrk.no/norge/datatilsynet-bekymret-for-personver...