• Introduction
• Age Verification
• VPN Usage
• Google Playstore
  • Use Cases
• In Summary

§Introduction

There’s been much talk in recent days about the EU’s move to do three things related to the issue of privacy and age verification. Let’s be clear, it’s an issue for the EU, no-one else.

The three things are:

• Age Verification for those Under 18 to be online and using the Internet.
• The push to outlaw the use of VPN’s.
• The push to have all Google apps age verified, and to have Google cover their app store with their100% Play Integrity feature. These are the main ones. There are others too, but I don’t think too they’re far down the track in terms of getting a sign off. I’ll cover those later maybe.

§Age Verification

The EU can try to enforce this, but they may strike problems. The general consensus from tech experts would suggest that age verification is easy to write down on a piece of paper but harder to deploy in the real world. We have already seen the Australian Government deploy an under 16 social media ban which has backfired spectacularly. Tech savvy kids know how to get around modern day tech issues, so bypassing age verifications is nothing to them.

Not using Google services entirely is a start. Moving activity to non Web 2.0 ecosystems is another. There are a few decentralized Web 3.0 ecosystems which are very censorship-resistant. The fact that you’re reading this post on a Nostr app is proof of that.

§VPN Usage

Now, we all know that the Internet is an open platform which accommodates all sorts of technologies that are both modern and in some cases like email and telnet, very old.

The EU forgets that VPN’s are also an open technology and used by all manner of individuals, businesses and organisations right across the world. Cutting off VPNs for one or two demographics (like kids or privacy based individuals) is basically cutting it off for everybody. Like destroying an ant with an anvil. That could be a costly exercise for the EU, which could result in lawsuits down the track.

VPN’s are used to prevent financial hacking, protect theft of intellectual property, ability to move data across borders like nightly banking and crypto transactions, among other things. This would open the door to rampant online theft and fraud. Well, maybe that’s the reason why the EU are wanting to do it. So they can plunder data for themselves.

§Google Playstore

Over the last few years, Google has introduced the Play integrity feature on their app store. App developers would need to have their app creations run through an attestation program to ensure its legitimacy, rather than have the app store flooded with fake apps pretending to be the real thing.

At a glance, this is actually quite a good idea but it would only apply to the developers who upload to the Google Play Store. There are many developers who don’t, particularly if they are aligned to Degoogled phones and FOSS applications.

Now with Google, attending to round up all these fringe developers to lock in their apps into the Play Integrity program, this means developers and now users have come to the crossroad of decision making, and that is: whether to continue using Google or not.

§Use Cases

Here are three examples of what some people are going to do in light of the play integrity lockdown, judging from conversations I’ve seen:

• Move to a Linux laptop permanently, and conduct all phone contact on a dumb phone (like an old Nokia 3310).
• Buy a de-googled phone, with Graphene OS and run a phone with industry standard privacy and security, running mostly FOSS apps and decentralized VPN (dVPN).
• Running a fully decentralized protocol like Nostr with everything in private, while hooking out on a VPN, such as your standard Web 2.0 VPN (like Mullvad), or using a Tor Relay (like Orbot) or a dVPN (like Sentinel).

§In Summary

I’m sure there are a lot of legal tech people that will contest the EU’s position on this. Well, if there any European users worried about this, my suggestion to you is this:

Use your vote wisely in your local elections and vote for those who are going to advocate for your privacy and digital well-being.

Because most of the leftist Governments in place right now aren’t going to do that for you. Not unless you want to end up being like a citizen of Cuba and having to get your food via a ration book.

Act now, stay ahead of the curve, and stay frosty.