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There is a leaked document of the proposal related to EU KIDS Act , which proposes requiring age verification for all online games. Also note that this proposal is not anywhere near to pass. But it exists and is going to be dicussed
Stop Killing the Internet initiative
If you're EU citizen sign this petition: https://eci.ec.europa.eu/066/public/
Whenever I see things like this I can't help but think of the parents that constantly bemoan about kids having short attention spans when first of all THEY made the slop machines they're addicted to and are so lazy/neglectful they are either indifferent to or actively in favor of the government babysitting their children and siphoning off their personal information.
Govt funded workshops for internet safety and investment into OS-level traditional parental control systems could curb so much of this but the world seems to actively hate the idea of kids having something that remotely looks like choice.
the world seems to actively hate the idea of kids having something that remotely looks like choice.
Yeah, to these losers anything can be deemed dangerous and in need of government meddling if it interferes at all with the child-to-student-to-taxpaying-employee pipeline.
Are we back to the video games make mass murderers thing again?
No, this is MUCH worse. This is "You buy a offline singleplayer game; the publisher decides to stop selling the game; if you continue playing your purchased copy offline you're a criminal" type bullshit. This is so much worse than "video games make mass murderers" that, if this goes thru as-is, it would make selling video games inside the EU really hard and possibly so prohibitively expensive that only big publishers like EA could even afford doing so.
I think the YouTuber Mugthief put it best: This is like if Christopher Nolan made a movie, and he personally had to check every movie-goer's gov ID, and the cost of doing so would also be on him.
As a child John Wayne Gacy went diamond in League of Legends.
Please do not comply with this. If you really want to access services that require ID/face verification, I'd recommend checking for ways to create fake identification documents and spoof facial scans.
Yes I know this is illegal. Do what you do at your own risk.
It is possible to do that. The best solution is to simply not interact with any service that asks, but I know that's not feasible for all.
Is it illegal to spoof this for games?
Almost certainly yes.
Fabricating ID is what is going to be illegal in literally any country, though if you fabricated the ID type of another country, your home country may or may not consider this illegal.
Bypassing biometric scan will be illegal in the jurisdiction that the law is enforced if its done with the purposes of bypassing a national law.
Depending on how archaic your legal system is, it may even be prosecutable if only because you violated the policy of a business in your same nation.
Because we live in a dystopian hell hole you'll also need to at least consider legal alliances between countries or organizations such as Interpol.
This is all a bit of a mix of what the proposed laws are looking like, and some cautious approximation, and some good ol' sense.
I'm going to do it anyway if I need to use a service that requires it, even if it breaks local laws.
Using a trusted VPN (Mullvad for instance) alongside fake credentials would better protect you but your games are also tied to your personal accounts unless you've created new ones on a VPN (or Tor).
You would then need to ensure you never log into that account without the VPN, and should use an OS without overreaching telemetry, and use a single-use burner email always with VPN and a payment method not traceable to you such as a prepaid card or gift card purchased in a place without clear cameras and with cash that's been shuffled around a little bit, rather than from your bank.
And even still, I'm missing a ton of other identifying factors, and nothing is guaranteed, and many Tor nodes are compromised, and VPN laws could change and buildings could be raided and even with no logs in theory your data could be extracted from frozen RAM.
Basically what I'm saying is if you want to hide from the law, you'd better do it right. Or you'd better do it to stand by your principles, knowing the risk. Or you'd better comply - that last one is what they want you to do. OR... you never interact with any service that requires these systems, because that's the only way to kill them before they become even worse.
Enjoy the gaming!
EU KIDS Act will require age verification for all online and perhaps offline games to "Create a Database for Pedophiles" to make shopping easier.
Let me ask you this: you're a 10- to 18-year-old kid, maybe younger. You live with your parents, you have some kind of game console, or perhaps a computer your parents bought for you or use themselves. One day, you tell your parents, "I want to play Grand Theft Auto."
Your parents essentially have to purchase the game for you, because a retailer isn't going to sell a mature-rated game directly to a child. If you're buying it digitally through Steam or another online store, you generally need a payment method, which again means your parents are involved in the transaction.
So what exactly is age verification at the game or operating-system level supposed to accomplish?
The purchasing process is already, by its nature, an age-gated process. If a parent is willing to purchase a mature-rated game for their child and allow that child to play it, then the parent has already made that decision. If the parent is irresponsible enough to allow their child to play violent or otherwise age-restricted games without supervision, that is a separate parenting issue. I don't see how forcing developers, publishers, distributors, or operating-system manufacturers to verify the child's age meaningfully addresses that problem.
That's what I don't understand about these laws: what is the actual benefit?
From a political perspective, I don't see an obvious constituency demanding this. I don't see how it provides a significant benefit to corporations, either. It doesn't seem particularly popular or politically consequential because the issue is so niche. So what is actually driving this?
I'm not saying there has to be some grand conspiracy behind it. But if there is a rational explanation for why governments keep pursuing increasingly complicated age-verification requirements, I'd genuinely like to understand what it is. Is this primarily about liability? Political signaling? Pressure from advocacy groups? Regulatory precedent? Or is the government simply trying to establish a broader principle that online services should be responsible for determining the age of their users?
Then there's the technological problem.
The infrastructure simply isn't designed around reliable age verification. Take operating systems as an example. A law can require an operating system to verify the age of its users, but that doesn't mean the operating system actually has reliable access to that information. Windows and macOS may be able to integrate age verification through accounts or other identity systems, but what happens on Linux? What mechanism is the operating system supposed to use to determine whether the person sitting at the keyboard is 12, 22, or 52?
And even if you solve that problem, you haven't necessarily solved the underlying problem. A child can use a parent's account, a shared computer, a friend's device, or any number of other arrangements. You can build increasingly elaborate verification systems, but ultimately you still run into the fact that parents control the devices, accounts, and purchases in the home.
So I keep coming back to the same question: what problem is this actually solving that existing parental control systems and the purchasing process don't already address?
I'm not opposed to reasonable protections for children online. I'm questioning whether mandatory age verification actually provides enough additional protection to justify the enormous technological and regulatory infrastructure required to implement it.
Because if the practical result is simply that the government requires companies to verify something that parents are already responsible for controlling, then I'm having a difficult time seeing what meaningful benefit we're getting in exchange for all of this additional regulation.
Your scenario is like 10-20 years out of date.
Actual scenario: You are a kid with a phone or computer, you download one of the literally thousands of wildly popular free to play games on your device like Fortnite, and you begin playing immediately.
With F2P there is no payment barrier, which is why this sort of thing is coming up now. The constituency asking for it is parents who are having a difficult time telling their kid that they can’t be playing the popular thing that all their friends are playing.
Whether you agree with this approach or not is a separate issue, I’m not saying this is a good thing or well thought out. But the scenario and motivation are clear. The various industry rating systems worked when that was the only way to release a game, not so much when the most popular and high budget games are free.
I second the call of “bullshit”. As a parent of a teenager the last thing I fucking want is some pedo billionaire asking for my kids ID.
There are so many things wrong with that. Soooooo many things.
The constituency asking for it is parents who are having a difficult time telling their kid that they can’t be playing the popular thing that all their friends are playing.
Bullshit, the constituency asking for this is the tech sector, probably primarily advertisers, and governments wanting to keep tabs on their citizens.
Two things:
This is the EU, not the US. The forces you’re talking about don’t have nearly as much power there, American tech companies hate EU regulation and if they had as much power there as you presume, they would have killed DMA or GDPR first.
You might try actually talking to a parent trying to raise kids in this day and age before dismissing my comment out of hand. I assure you the demographic I’m talking about absolutely does exist.
I'm sure the parents exist, but my point is that they aren't the driving force. There's no way this age verification stuff starts popping up all over the world at about the same time with all these governments seriously considering it at the behest of parents. The parents aren't coordinated enough to drive international change like that, and it's not a high enough priority for them to all independently and coincidentally push for it, not to the level seen around the world. The only things that universally move governments like that are moneyed interests and power, and while I'll admit I may be wrong about the exact forces driving it, I don't see much chance at all this is organically driven by parents.
Yea you hadn't have to write an entire scenario to say that this proposal is technically undoable, unsustainable, surveilling, cures the consequence instead of cause, and is surveillance proposal packaged as child safety
Well sir... This is definitely a much more succinct way of saying everything that I said. ☹️
A better option would to require gaming companies to moderate their servers. I’ve been reporting Nazis and trolls for 20 years and the only time anything is actually done is when its a community server.
I think obligating multi-billion companies to moderate their shit, to make the space more safe is the best solution.
"You have been permanently banned and your game code delisted because of your use of profanity."
Anything but better parenting, because this is just another excuse to mass surveillance.
“Won’t someone think of the children”
As far as I remember the german national ID already has a function to do age verification anonymous (zero-knowledge proof). have to say I am kinda okay with that solution.
Are the children really the greatest risk right now? I think the bigger danger is elderly voters globally that are living on Facebook and accessing misinformation. There needs to be a ban for the gullible out of touch at the other end of the age bracket also.
its a cover for mass surveillance.
None of this is about protecting anybody
The gullible out of touch at the other end of the age bracket are the ones making the laws.
I genuinely think that there has to be some kinda bracket for voting on age-restriction topics in EU parliament. Because those old people in parliament are so out of touch with the technology and how children behave nowadays, but they still vote for degenerate and retarded shit like chat control, believing that it is worth to surveil 400 million people, just to result major outflow of cybercriminals to other communication channels.
I dont like conspiracies, but what if eventually their goal is to just send all criminals into free and open solutions, then ban these solutions , because they're used by criminals.
Facebook spreads so much conspiracies and shit, that my elderly mother just cant believe otherwise. She's on facebook since 2010 i think. It is actually sad to see that my mother is also spreading conspiracies and russian propaganda :(
My mom's FB account being hacked was the best thing to happen to her mental health in decades.
But as soon as you're 18 – boom – all the fake info and conspiracy theories you've never built mental defenses for. Smart, EU, really.
I just imagine that kid who gets to college having never partied or anything in high school, and they're just swept up by it all. You've never experienced a good old murder rampage in a video game, and now you can't get enough of it.
I think video games should be mandatory!
I played GTA as a kid, I don’t murder that many people, don’t know what their problem is
Same, plus Carmageddon. I'm actually a pretty decent driver with very few Hit&Runs.
Both games had age requirements upon release, but where I live there was no legal framework of enforcement so anyone could buy any game until mid 2000-s or thereabouts
I played GTA as a kid
This is supposed to be not legal because GTA is (usually) rated for 18 or older
Usually ratings systems are merely in place to restrict who can buy certain games, not who can play them after they're purchased.
Highlighting just how useless a lot of these laws are. Easily can be bypassed but makes everything more complicated and expensive.
Time to teach my toddler how to pirate games
GTA 6 in shambles
Because Trump and Epstein did all of their grooming and raping in Call of Duty servers.
Massive EU L.
EU is such a shit hole 😂😂😂😂
🦅🦅🦅🦅
Sigh. I mean, what more is there to say.
As an internet user, you have to accept that at some point you'll lose access to online services you've been using if you don't become the kind of mouthbreather who verifies their identity.