Okay you are ready to take a stand for freedom!
You are going to use an OS that isn’t going to bend the knee and comply with age verification laws. I solute you, comrade!
Here are the likely consequences of your choice:
The Feds aren’t coming after you. You aren’t going to be out on a watch list.
What will likely happen is that if you try to log into your Facebook account you will get a message that says “Your Operating System is not currently supported. Your user experience will be limited to Groups labeled “Everyone”.”
That’s basically it. Your personal user experience will be limited to “kid friendly” areas of the Internet. (Same with apps and games.)
That’s the real driver of these laws. Facebook and other app producers know that the days where they can just shrug off child predators using their products is coming to and end. Regardless of your opinion on age verification is as a solution, child predators are a real world problem and it’s not just the parents fault. The platforms have some responsibility too.
Which is exactly what Facebook and the others specifically don’t want -responsibility for their own platforms. That’s why they are pushing for these laws that off load their responsibility onto the OS makers. Then they can just say “Oh, we don’t have any responsibility for this child being abused in our platform. We asked the OS what the user’s age was and the OS reported 18+. What else could we have done?”
So, that’s the consequence if you choose to use an OS that refuses to comply. You’ll just be relegated to the kid friendly version of website, games, and applications.
(On the other hand, if your OS chooses to falsely report to a website or an app an age for a child that is abused, then the OS should also be held responsible. But at that point you can go ahead and blame the parents too for letting their child use an OS that isn’t safe for them to use.)
That is a completely different premise. A) putting “Catholic church” and “protect children” in the same sentence is already a bold move B) if I place my child in the boy scouts I do have some expectations on them to protect the child, correct. But that’s not the all or nothing situation you mentioned in your example
My point is the same as with DNS Blocking: It is proposed under the umbrella of “think about the kids”, but it doesn’t work for what they propose it and it is a first step in creating the base of a censorship infrastructure. The govements (and by that I mean all of them not just the US) should hold the platform’s accountable for shit they mess up now and don’t accept “Sorry we can’t do that at scale” as an answer. Google and meta should act much harder on reports by the community. interestingly, they CAN act fast and hard for copyright stuff or other things which would reduce their earnings. As long as the governments won’t act based on existing measures, I can’t take any new ones serious