This whole premise is absurd. There is tons of research and empirical and historical evidence that living in a surveillance state stifled free expression and thus narrows the richness of human creation and experimentation.
How old are you that you think constant surveillance is any kind of way to live? It's a thin gruel of a life.
There appears to be no formidable organized resistance against the recent decades of surveillance boom.
With tech and many tech employees actively accelerating surveillance.
Horrible? yes. And extremely unlikely to be rolled back anytime soon. (Disagree? I'd love to believe you are right!)
Defeatist attitudes and throwing in the towel almost never makes sense, engaging at a lower degree of time commitment is sensible for some, the meta commentary about it being hopeless is one of the worst types of self defeating comments a person can make, especially if they aren't in opposition, whose time are you trying to optimize with the comment? To what point and purpose are you saying this except to further deflate sails on an already still day?
The zeitgeist isn't purely rational or stable, change is often non linear, I've seen small subcultures with "impossible" headwinds completely own the space within my lifetime, we're just at the heel turn now and it's not universally popular, many people don't speak up because they are just getting vpns or moving to other forms of non-violent non-compliance.
Anyway, it's a waste of time.
...
Or is it?
However, I'm not against the concept of age verification, and believe it can be done well.
How old are you, to make that last comment just because you need your ID to buy a beer?
You keep making this comparison, but it's not appropriate. The closest real-world analogy: in order to buy alcohol, you need to wear a tracking bracelet at all times, and be identified at every store you enter, even you you choose to purchase nothing. If our automated systems can't identify you with certainty, you'll be limited to only being able to do things a child could do.
And the real world has a huge gap between a child and an adult. If an 8-year old walked into Home Depot and bought a circular saw, there's no law against it, but the store might have questions. If a 14-year old did it, you might get a different result. At 17, they'd almost certainly let you.
The real world has people that are observing things and using judgement. Submitting to automated age checks online is not that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44801851
Just extremely clear that the implementation is an afterthought.
Why did you not tell the stranger on the internet how old you are?
> How old are you
You obviously didn’t miss the question. You saw it and threw it back at them.
Why did you do that instead of answering with your age when somebody asked for it?
Apropos of nothing I’m going to include a link in my post
I'm 44. It's not a secret, my name is on my 'about me', then a quick Google would find my age.
But it’s the only one they will ever know.