this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2026
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I know that we do need better regulations for protecting children online but I don't think we're ever going to get that. It seems like the government that we have now just wants to have full control over everyone. In fact, the FTC made a statement saying that they're basically giving companies a loophole that allows them to partially ignore COPPA, which is one of the best protections children had online. It's obvious that they have no interest in protecting children online, if they're making statements like that.
Just to reiterate I do not think this law is good and I would get rid of it in an instant but...
I don't really see this as a law to protect children. I see this as a law that focuses on the parents. The parents become liable under this law if they circumvent the system and their child is hurt. If developers decide to flaunt this law and ignore the signals then they would be liable.
So if you don't have children this law should effectively not affect you other than you might need to choose which age bracket you are in. Which sounds like such a small price to pay for making parents take responsibility over their children on the internet.
I mean, as long as they don't require an ID that's fine I guess, even though what they're proposing can be easily circumvented. But my biggest, and everyone else's, concern is that, as with what's been going on with age verification, it's possible that it'll just snowball into something worse. It doesn't help that there are people, like me, that currently can't get IDs. There are already several websites that I have to use through a VPN, so if these age verification laws keep getting worse, people like me might completely lose the ability to use the internet entirely, unless they make getting IDs easier.
I'm sorry that you have to deal with that. IDs should be as easy as reasonable to get. (fucking SAVE act).
You are right, this could be used as a stepping stone towards gathering IDs and the deanonymization of the internet. We (Cali residents) need to make sure that we contact our reps and are heard. Voice our concerns with this law in its current form and that we will be up in arms if they go any closer towards ID verification being required.
It depends on how the system is implemented. It is entirely possible that MS will implement it with ID verification or face scans, since the law does not forbid them from doing that. But that is why the open source community/linux foundation need to make sure that we put forward a reasonable solution rather than just "forcing" users in Cali to go back to using windows.