this is not at all what i’m seeing on discord, and I think it’s worthy of note that the article’s sample is Reddit posts in r/discordapp. Discord users who use Reddit in general have a systemic bias that’s close to ours, as opposed to the majority that is young Discord users.

https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui/blob/d3a6870f391a3942caf65b4c0bb65081a5b7c9e0/onboarding-feature/src/main/java/eu/europa/ec/onboardingfeature/interactor/DocumentIdentificationInteractor.kt
https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui/blob/d3a6870f391a3942caf65b4c0bb65081a5b7c9e0/issuance-feature/src/main/java/eu/europa/ec/issuancefeature/interactor/DocumentOfferInteractor.kt#L169
https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui/blob/d3a6870f391a3942caf65b4c0bb65081a5b7c9e0/core-logic/src/main/java/eu/europa/ec/corelogic/model/DocumentIdentifier.kt#L25-L45
https://ageverification.dev/Technical Specification/architecture-and-technical-specifications/?h=eu.europa.ec.av.1#412-attribute-set

Granted, the source code is not intuitively named, I’ll give you that. I wouldn’t have expected the repo links to be in https://ageverification.dev/Setup/ “Setup” either. But thanks to the fact that it is open source, anyone can check that they never send IDs to a server that requests age verification. The necessary information is scanned from the ID locally on the device.

Again, the EU age verification is not done by private companies. It’s open source, the specifications are out, and it’s run by the government. Companies that access the attestation only learn whether the user/shifting IP is above the age of majority. They cannot get your ID.

On what data? All age verification does is attest that an IP is over a certain age; the European solution collects no information other than the boolean “Is user over <age>?”, the expiry date, and the issuing authority. I don’t know what you can do with data simply saying that the user isn’t browsing the internet “illegally”, since with age gating every user on the Internet is over that age. In our present time of dynamic/private IPs, the operator behind the IP (and consequently their age) changes constantly anyways, meaning that little data is constantly invalidated.

Chat Control is “dormant”. It’s been amended, re-proposed, and then put back on the backburner for umpteenth times, including this time. It’s definitely a threat, I agree, but nothing about it has become more eager in 2025.

Chat Control has been haunting the chambers since 2021, and it’s in dormancy again as of November 2025. I don’t see how age checks benefit tech companies at all given they reduce their audience and the data for verification is required to be received by the government and denied to private entities. If you live in the EU, you’ve already given the government more information than that.

Besides starting to fine tech companies for violating the DMA, you also have the Digital Fairness Act proposal last year that we’ll soon see debating in Q3.

why don’t people remember the Digital Markets Act anymore… they charged Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft… and fined Apple and Meta half a billion right last year and people seem to be pretending that didn’t happen

Citation needed.

This is a New York Times article. By default, the New York Times is the citation, just like every other MSM. And even then, this specific article does attribute it:

To understand how this happened, The New York Times interviewed more than 40 current and former OpenAI employees — executives, safety engineers, researchers. Some of these people spoke with the company’s approval, and have been working to make ChatGPT safer. Others spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared losing their jobs.

Claude is trying to lick my ass clean every time I ask it a simple question

The article only said they made a test, not that they weren’t failing it, which happens to be what the linked paper says. This is not new as LLMs also always failed a certain intelligence test devised around that same time period until ~2024.

As soon as they found experts who were willing to say something else than “don’t make a chatbot”.

That’s 55%: https://humanfactors.jmir.org/2025/1/e71065