A better translation for “extremist” is “seditious”.

Extremism refers to activities which oppose our democratic constitutional state and its fundamental values, norms and rules. Extremists seek to overthrow the liberal democratic order and replace it with one in line with their own ideas. They often endorse, encourage or even use violence as a way to achieve their aims. Terrorism is the most aggressive and militant form of extremism.

https://www.bmi.bund.de/EN/topics/security/extremism/extremism-node.html

I think that may be a literary reference.

“How Much Land Does a Man Need?” is an 1886 short story by Leo Tolstoy about a greedy man.

I can think of a number, besides the one in the OP.

You could worry about freedom of information also for adults. Such systems interfere, by design, with receiving and imparting information. It also creates a system that can be easily abused for political censorship. Me, I worry a lot about the direction Europe is taking.

You could also worry about privacy in other definitions. Europeans, or Germans anyway, usually equate privacy with data protection, which is not actually correct. One American definition of privacy is as “the right to be let alone”. You’re certainly not being let alone with such a system. You might feel that it forces you and your family to abide by moral values that you may not share.

Then there’s the economic aspect. The people in a country with such laws will have to do extra work and use extra resources to implement and enforce this.

There is a maximum number of unsuspiciously requestable tokens and people can sell their unrequested ones. There will be a black market and no ability to investigate unless privacy is lifted.

Such a thing would work as with credit cards. An unusual pattern of use would flag the card as potentially compromised and cause it to be blocked, not the volume of requests in itself. It wouldn’t be quite so easy to avoid detection.

Making porn, alcohol, or other such things available to minors is a criminal offense. Being flagged multiple times would probably be enough for a conviction if one couldn’t provide an explanation.

An age verification service would need to determine your age. It’s not strictly necessary for them to keep your identity on file, but I think the likelihood is that it would be required precisely to prevent such abuse.

I don’t fully get the part about selling adult products directly.

Such a service would be illegal in itself. It would have to exist on the darknet beside offers for mail-order drugs, stolen passwords, and so on. Might as well offer mail-order alcohol or adult media downloads with no questions asked.

Since foreign services do not need to comply, porn will still be available. So a firewall is needed. But then, why not give children an age appropriate vpn for their devices and accounts and leave the internet to itself?

Good question. Part of the answer is that law-makers in Europe have no idea what they are doing. Why there is no one capable of giving them technical advice is something I simply don’t know. Some tech regulations are so absurd that you’d never believe me they are real.

How do you prevent people from selling access to children by calling the age verification service for them?

The high volume of requests would be detected pretty quickly. The verification service would not know what sites you visit, but it would know that you are making requests.

To succeed, that would need a fairly large number of stolen or fake identities. There’s really no point when you can just sell adult products, including pirated media, directly.

• You connect to an age-gated site.

• Your browser receives an age verification request that does not contain information about the site.

It would contain the time, a random number, and the query: Is user over 18/16/14/whatever?

• Your browser sends the request to a government-licensed service.

You identify yourself to that service in some way. The service could also be a program on your own device that uses a chip on your ID-card. If the service confirms the age, it digitally signs the request.

• Your browser returns the signed request to the age-gated site.

The site checks if the signature is valid and done. There’s never any connection between the age verification service and the site. If the request is more than a few seconds old, then it will be rejected to prevent sharing.

Of course, this assumes that sites will cooperate and implement such schemes at their own expense. Obviously(?) that will only be done by the larger sites, so it will be quite pointless. I don’t know why that is not a consideration. Understanding that doesn’t actually require any deep technical knowledge. But that’s typical for EU tech regulation.

Having to proof adultness cannot be done without creating a link between the identify of the adult and the account at the service.

It can be done.

Do you really have no other complaints?

The point of an age verification system is to make sure that certain classes of people cannot access certain categories of information.

Is there really no problem there?

This is some Orwellian shit right there. This kind of shit is part of the very big problem.

The hook is a scenario where someone gets doxed.

Years later, Lina was shocked to find her name and image circulating in far-right forums online.

There are some murky suggestion that connect this with “migration” or “profiling” but it’s unclear how that would make sense.

Lina tried to exercise her rights. She filed a data deletion request, but the company refused to comply. Turning to her country’s Data Protection Authority (DPA) for help, she expected a clear path to justice. Instead, she found herself trapped in a bureaucratic maze.

Indeed. A small forum outside the EU, as such far-right forums typically are, cannot be made to comply with EU law.

Technologically, scrubbing personal information from the internet is no different from scrubbing information about the Tiananmen Massacre. It can’t be done perfectly, and doing it imperfectly is totalitarian.

But what about EU primary law and the EHRC? Wouldn’t be the first time constitutional law is deemed incompatible with EU or international law.

Tricky. Protecting “morals” and the “moral development” of children is one thing that justifies a lot of limitations of rights.

Using that to suppress LGBTQ is not a distortion but has always been a point, maybe the main point, of obscenity laws. A few decades ago, such laws would have been A-OK. Maybe today, a court would rule that this goes too far.

Remember this when they call for “age verification laws” in your country.

Not true.

This is going to get interesting. Major culture clash.

I fear this will end with Sweden losing and being forced another step to the right.

Marine Le Pen isn’t the first prominent French politician to be disqualified from public office. Since it stopped being automatic, it has already affected big names such as like her father, Nicolas Sarkozy, Jacques Chirac, Charles Pasqua, and Bernard Tapie.

This isn’t exclusive to right-wing politicians; the disqualification penalty has been imposed by French justice on several dozens of elected officials and public representatives since 1992. It was in 1992 that the concept was introduced into French law. It was even applied automatically for a series of offences until a reform in 2010. Since then, it’s a standalone penalty that must be decided on by a judge. It can last up to 5 years for an offence and 10 years for a crime. Here is a small selection of well-known male and female politicians who have been sentenced to this penalty (listed alphabetically).

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/sarkozy-tapie-le-pen-famous-cases-of-ineligibility-in-france/ar-AA1C01vk

I mean, howany people are you really going “to get” with this?

Depends what you are looking for. They want to use this to find “child porn”, meaning any nudes of people under 18. How careful are horny teens going to be when they exchange nude selfies? Would a 13yo even know to be careful?

The EU has funded a bunch of such little portals for various things but no one uses them. There are also portals to share code made for/by some european governments, like France, Germany, Netherlands, and some others.

Here’s the press release by the anti-trust agency: https://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/en/press-release/targeted-advertising-autorite-de-la-concurrence-imposes-fine-eu150000000-apple

TLDR: Apple made it too complicated for third-party publishers to track users.

That’s a very artful headline. It’s really bouncing around in my head.