I am now waiting for Gruber (daringfireball.net) to post another rant about how terrible EU regulation is. Zero-knowledge proofs are the way to go for this type of thing, I find it mind-boggling that the US lets itself be bamboozled into complete lack of privacy.
simonebrunozzi
Not surprisingly, Meta is possibly the worst "offender" behind funding of these campaigns.
Terr_
Oh look, the Heritage Foundation, the ones who wrote up the "Project 2025" agenda for most of the corruption and authoritarianism that has plagued America in the last year. The very last people you should trust when it comes to "protecting the children."
turbinemonkey
Compare this to what the EU built. The EU Digital Identity Wallet under eIDAS 2.0 is open-source, self-hostable, and uses zero-knowledge proofs. You can prove you're over 18 without revealing your birth date, your name, or anything else. No per-check fees, no proprietary SDKs, no data going to a vendor's cloud. The EU's Digital Services Act puts age verification obligations on Very Large Online Platforms (45M+ monthly users), not on operating systems. FOSS projects that don't act as intermediary services are explicitly outside scope. Micro and small enterprises get additional exemptions. The US bills assume every operating system is built by a corporation with the infrastructure and revenue to absorb these costs. The EU started from the opposite assumption and built accordingly. Just another reminder of how we need to protect what we have in the EU (not a guarantee, but at least a chance of fair dealing and a sustained commitment to civic values). Now that the mask has fully fallen, we have to take every step possible to root out American influence.
Chance-Device
TLDR: Meta want to push all the age verification requirements onto the OS makers (Apple, Google, everyone else gets caught in the crossfire) so that they don’t have to do anything AND they want it done in such a way that they can use it to profile people to push them targeted ads. Its like they want to keep being seen as the bad guys.
nobodyandproud
Jesus. As an American I can do my part, but it’s not much. $70 million is chump change for Meta, yet is far more money than I’ll ever have and does so much to influence state legislation.
close04
This truly is the best democracy money can buy. As long as money and/or favors change hands in exchange for getting favorable laws passed, it's just legalized bribery and buying off your own "democracy". And it snowballs, the more favorable laws someone buys, the more favorable their position, and the more they can buy in the future. The transition from "democratic facade" to "outright oligarchy" will be swift and seamless.
anymouse123456
Every single Linux kernel currently operating within the borders of any of these states should turn itself off and refuse to boot until an update is installed after these bills are rolled back. We should also update all FOSS license terms to explicitly exclude Meta or any affilites from using any software licensed under them.
b112
How much do you want to bet that Amutable, via its founder's control of the systemd codebase and ability to drive change, will be first-in-line to force a switch to its variant of systemd, along with a module for age verification? I don't see it as coincidence that with all these laws passing, suddenly he announces a secure, "controlled", "locked down" version of systemd. Why, RedHat and Ubuntu can simply drop in this new variant, pay a small fee, and be done with compliance.
d--b
The guy posted a Ask HN there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361235 https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings...
thiago_fm
America will just get behind even more as years pass behind Europe in terms of proper regulation of the digital economy, which benefits citizens instead of companies and rich billionaries. The reason is that europeans have nothing to win from those "winner-take-all" platforms the US has built in the past decades. Europe has built zero of them. It contributes very little to Europe's GDP or the overall being of the european. And in some cases, it eats Europe's GDP, moving economic activity back to the US. This is different than for Americans which big tech is a net-positive contributor to society in my POV, mainly because how much economic activity $ it generates. Big techs provide huge paychecks and made a lot of people rich in the US, and most of its GDP growth in the last decade. But it's a double-edged sword. They will make laws in favor of them in detriment of the average American, while minting more billionaries than Europe could ever dream of. Europe will take a long time to get the digital revolution the US already did, but it'll mostly come from regulations and government initiatives. And will be net-positive for humans living in Euope, not for owners of corporations.
bix6
O great more big money warping our lives for the worse. I’d write my senator but they won’t do shit. Is there anything that can seriously be done?
matheusmoreira
See? It was never about children. Never fails. Corporations literally buy the laws they want and Silicon Valley is the newest lobbying monster. Genuinely terrifying.
iamnothere
For a project attempting to track these and coordinate technical resistance, see: https://github.com/AntiSurv/oss-anti-surveillance These bills also need to be opposed on a legal/political level. Something I realized last night is that people who lie about their age to send false signals may inadvertently open themselves up to CFAA liability (a felony ). So this is a serious matter for users who want to maintain anonymity.
CarVac
The same sort of thing is happening for the 3d printer laws. Some company is trying to legislate its own software into ubiquity (guns first, then copyright enforcement) and then double-dip by charging both IP holders and printer manufacturers for their "services".
0xbadcafebee
I don't understand why nobody in the comments is freaked out about this. This isn't just "oh Google knows my age", or "oh politicians being corrupt again!" This is "the government made a law that every computer in the world must track every person's identity and send it to the cloud". No offline devices. Commercial vendors get your biometric data (and the equivalent of your driver's license / SSN). Every application on the OS can query your data. If you think it stops with one bill, after they get all the infrastructure for this in place? You're fooling yourself. The whole point of this is to identify you , on every web page you visit, every app you open, on every device you own. Once bills are passed, it's very hard to get them revoked or nullified. This is the most aggregious, authoritarian, Big Brother government surveillance system ever devised, and it's already law. I am fucking terrified. (Yes, the EU has a less horrifying version of this. But Google, Apple, and Microsoft still control most of the devices in the world, and they are US companies.)
flowerthoughts
When I moved from Sweden to Ireland and realized the Swedish central address registry makes moving fantastically easy, I started dreaming of a central registry where consumers and producers could meet. I can give my supplier access to exactly the information they need, and nothing else. I can revoke access when I feel like it. Like OAuth2 for personal data. They can subscribe to updates. It could be a federated protocol. Not saying I think it's a good idea to provide the year of birth to all sites, but (session ID, year of birth) is the only information they would need. The problem is proving who's behind the keyboard at the time of asking, which would require challenge-response, and is why I think this should be an online platform, not a hardware PKI gadget with keys inevitably tied to individuals.
DavidPiper
The idea that it might cost "someone" $2 every time a user opens and app AND it sends a bunch of private data to a 3rd party is completely dystopian, let alone everything else. And a serious question: with deepest respect to the author for their extraordinarily impressive time and effort in this investigation... Why was this not already flagged by political reporters or investigative journalists? I'm not American so maybe I don't understand the media structure over there but it feels like SOMEONE should have been all over this way before it's gotten to the point described in this post.
neya
Damn, had to scroll a couple of comments to find this: Anthropic donated $20 million to Public First Action, a PAC that promotes Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn and her sponsored Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill that will force everyone to scan their faces and IDs to use the internet under the guise of saving the children. The legislative angle taken by companies like Anthropic is that they will provide the censorship gatekeeping infrastructure to scan all user-generated content that gets posted online for "appropriateness", guaranteeing AI providers a constant firehose of novel content they can train on and get paid for the free training. AI companies will also get paid to train on videos of everyone's faces and IDs. As for why Blackburn supports KOSA: Asked what conservatives’ top priorities should be right now, Senator Blackburn answered, “protecting minor children from the transgender [sic] in this culture and that influence.” She then talked about how KOSA could address this problem, and named social media platforms as places “where children are being indoctrinated.” If Anthropic, the PACs it supports and Blackburn get their way with KOSA, the end result will be that anything posted on the internet will be able to be traced back to you. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/anthropic-gives-20-million-t...
NoImmatureAdHom
Where do I donate to oppose this bullshit? I want to open my wallet. It should be the top comment.
Related Discussions
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Discussion Highlights (20 comments)
jwr
I am now waiting for Gruber (daringfireball.net) to post another rant about how terrible EU regulation is. Zero-knowledge proofs are the way to go for this type of thing, I find it mind-boggling that the US lets itself be bamboozled into complete lack of privacy.
simonebrunozzi
Not surprisingly, Meta is possibly the worst "offender" behind funding of these campaigns.
Terr_
Oh look, the Heritage Foundation, the ones who wrote up the "Project 2025" agenda for most of the corruption and authoritarianism that has plagued America in the last year. The very last people you should trust when it comes to "protecting the children."
turbinemonkey
Compare this to what the EU built. The EU Digital Identity Wallet under eIDAS 2.0 is open-source, self-hostable, and uses zero-knowledge proofs. You can prove you're over 18 without revealing your birth date, your name, or anything else. No per-check fees, no proprietary SDKs, no data going to a vendor's cloud. The EU's Digital Services Act puts age verification obligations on Very Large Online Platforms (45M+ monthly users), not on operating systems. FOSS projects that don't act as intermediary services are explicitly outside scope. Micro and small enterprises get additional exemptions. The US bills assume every operating system is built by a corporation with the infrastructure and revenue to absorb these costs. The EU started from the opposite assumption and built accordingly. Just another reminder of how we need to protect what we have in the EU (not a guarantee, but at least a chance of fair dealing and a sustained commitment to civic values). Now that the mask has fully fallen, we have to take every step possible to root out American influence.
Chance-Device
TLDR: Meta want to push all the age verification requirements onto the OS makers (Apple, Google, everyone else gets caught in the crossfire) so that they don’t have to do anything AND they want it done in such a way that they can use it to profile people to push them targeted ads. Its like they want to keep being seen as the bad guys.
nobodyandproud
Jesus. As an American I can do my part, but it’s not much. $70 million is chump change for Meta, yet is far more money than I’ll ever have and does so much to influence state legislation.
close04
This truly is the best democracy money can buy. As long as money and/or favors change hands in exchange for getting favorable laws passed, it's just legalized bribery and buying off your own "democracy". And it snowballs, the more favorable laws someone buys, the more favorable their position, and the more they can buy in the future. The transition from "democratic facade" to "outright oligarchy" will be swift and seamless.
anymouse123456
Every single Linux kernel currently operating within the borders of any of these states should turn itself off and refuse to boot until an update is installed after these bills are rolled back. We should also update all FOSS license terms to explicitly exclude Meta or any affilites from using any software licensed under them.
b112
How much do you want to bet that Amutable, via its founder's control of the systemd codebase and ability to drive change, will be first-in-line to force a switch to its variant of systemd, along with a module for age verification? I don't see it as coincidence that with all these laws passing, suddenly he announces a secure, "controlled", "locked down" version of systemd. Why, RedHat and Ubuntu can simply drop in this new variant, pay a small fee, and be done with compliance.
d--b
The guy posted a Ask HN there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361235 https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings...
thiago_fm
America will just get behind even more as years pass behind Europe in terms of proper regulation of the digital economy, which benefits citizens instead of companies and rich billionaries. The reason is that europeans have nothing to win from those "winner-take-all" platforms the US has built in the past decades. Europe has built zero of them. It contributes very little to Europe's GDP or the overall being of the european. And in some cases, it eats Europe's GDP, moving economic activity back to the US. This is different than for Americans which big tech is a net-positive contributor to society in my POV, mainly because how much economic activity $ it generates. Big techs provide huge paychecks and made a lot of people rich in the US, and most of its GDP growth in the last decade. But it's a double-edged sword. They will make laws in favor of them in detriment of the average American, while minting more billionaries than Europe could ever dream of. Europe will take a long time to get the digital revolution the US already did, but it'll mostly come from regulations and government initiatives. And will be net-positive for humans living in Euope, not for owners of corporations.
bix6
O great more big money warping our lives for the worse. I’d write my senator but they won’t do shit. Is there anything that can seriously be done?
matheusmoreira
See? It was never about children. Never fails. Corporations literally buy the laws they want and Silicon Valley is the newest lobbying monster. Genuinely terrifying.
iamnothere
For a project attempting to track these and coordinate technical resistance, see: https://github.com/AntiSurv/oss-anti-surveillance These bills also need to be opposed on a legal/political level. Something I realized last night is that people who lie about their age to send false signals may inadvertently open themselves up to CFAA liability (a felony ). So this is a serious matter for users who want to maintain anonymity.
CarVac
The same sort of thing is happening for the 3d printer laws. Some company is trying to legislate its own software into ubiquity (guns first, then copyright enforcement) and then double-dip by charging both IP holders and printer manufacturers for their "services".
0xbadcafebee
I don't understand why nobody in the comments is freaked out about this. This isn't just "oh Google knows my age", or "oh politicians being corrupt again!" This is "the government made a law that every computer in the world must track every person's identity and send it to the cloud". No offline devices. Commercial vendors get your biometric data (and the equivalent of your driver's license / SSN). Every application on the OS can query your data. If you think it stops with one bill, after they get all the infrastructure for this in place? You're fooling yourself. The whole point of this is to identify you , on every web page you visit, every app you open, on every device you own. Once bills are passed, it's very hard to get them revoked or nullified. This is the most aggregious, authoritarian, Big Brother government surveillance system ever devised, and it's already law. I am fucking terrified. (Yes, the EU has a less horrifying version of this. But Google, Apple, and Microsoft still control most of the devices in the world, and they are US companies.)
flowerthoughts
When I moved from Sweden to Ireland and realized the Swedish central address registry makes moving fantastically easy, I started dreaming of a central registry where consumers and producers could meet. I can give my supplier access to exactly the information they need, and nothing else. I can revoke access when I feel like it. Like OAuth2 for personal data. They can subscribe to updates. It could be a federated protocol. Not saying I think it's a good idea to provide the year of birth to all sites, but (session ID, year of birth) is the only information they would need. The problem is proving who's behind the keyboard at the time of asking, which would require challenge-response, and is why I think this should be an online platform, not a hardware PKI gadget with keys inevitably tied to individuals.
DavidPiper
The idea that it might cost "someone" $2 every time a user opens and app AND it sends a bunch of private data to a 3rd party is completely dystopian, let alone everything else. And a serious question: with deepest respect to the author for their extraordinarily impressive time and effort in this investigation... Why was this not already flagged by political reporters or investigative journalists? I'm not American so maybe I don't understand the media structure over there but it feels like SOMEONE should have been all over this way before it's gotten to the point described in this post.
neya
Damn, had to scroll a couple of comments to find this: Anthropic donated $20 million to Public First Action, a PAC that promotes Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn and her sponsored Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill that will force everyone to scan their faces and IDs to use the internet under the guise of saving the children. The legislative angle taken by companies like Anthropic is that they will provide the censorship gatekeeping infrastructure to scan all user-generated content that gets posted online for "appropriateness", guaranteeing AI providers a constant firehose of novel content they can train on and get paid for the free training. AI companies will also get paid to train on videos of everyone's faces and IDs. As for why Blackburn supports KOSA: Asked what conservatives’ top priorities should be right now, Senator Blackburn answered, “protecting minor children from the transgender [sic] in this culture and that influence.” She then talked about how KOSA could address this problem, and named social media platforms as places “where children are being indoctrinated.” If Anthropic, the PACs it supports and Blackburn get their way with KOSA, the end result will be that anything posted on the internet will be able to be traced back to you. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/anthropic-gives-20-million-t...
NoImmatureAdHom
Where do I donate to oppose this bullshit? I want to open my wallet. It should be the top comment.