In terms of censorship, it is impossible to confirm that every hash in the database is what the database owner claims it to be.

Its also completely unacceptable for encrypted/private messages, according to some of the top experts on the subject, "Bugs in our Pockets: The Risks of Client-Side Scanning": https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.07450

There are attempts make it almost mandatory through mandatory age verification. Which would mean that you'd have to submit to privacy violations or be cut off from a sizeable portion of the internet.

That just puts the power to allow/ban rooting and operating systems in the hands of a different set of companies. Its still unacceptable.

They are also trying to shoehorn in age verification with it.

Why not explicitly forbid the German version of the eDIAS from being used for things like age verification then? That'd solve a ton of privacy issues with the implementation.

The German version of the eDIAS app should be completely banned from being used for age verification, if they wish to continue the project. Otherwise it effectively bans you from a sizeable portion of the internet, unless you accept unacceptable privacy violations.

In the UK, Apple recently restricted web browsers, private messaging, and other stuff on IOS devices unless you let them violate your privacy with age verification. They weren't required to do this by law in the UK, yet they did it anyways.

Basically the EU had voluntary scanning, but that wasn't enough for "child safety" idiots who wanted to spy on everyone, all the time. They got greedy and tried to go full authoritarian by targeting encrypted messaging. The resulting backlash has resulted in these wannabe authoritarians having nothing, which is pretty funny.

The issue though with "age indication" is that it creates an additional flag that can be used to fingerprint users. But it is infinitely preferable to any sort of age verification or age assurance.

I'm wondering if the EU is complicit in this somehow, despite claiming that they want to fight back against tech companies.

The EU Commission is currently pushing the shitty EU Identity Wallet for mandatory age verification, and it requires GooglePlay Services to be installed for "anti-tampering". That also means a ban on non official versions of Android like LineageOS and GrapheneOS.

The DMA team replied to me that they did not see any legal issues with Google enforcing mandatory ID for sideloading apps.

We need an urgent upgrade of the DMA v2.O, in the fast paced Omnibus package.

Feel free to post proposals here.

On the DMA, I have said that it does not go far enough, the Operating System (OS) market should be opened up, with a regulation in place so that alternative mobile and non-mobile OSes can be installed by the end user, notably by the mandatory registration and publication of technical hardware specifications, unlocking of bootloaders, etc...

30 years ago, the Linux community fought the pre-installed Windows tax and mostly lost that fight.