Proof of Identity

We seem to have wandered deep into George Orwell territory thanks to the zeal of successive governments for 'protecting' children from the evils of the internet, extremism and pornography.  Just today, I had Bluesky informing me that, as I'm in the UK, I now have to verify my age in order to see some types of content on their site.  Having opened the e-mail I was sent, I was confronted with a demand to verify my age via either a face scan or credit card details!  Well, as the first is a gross invasion of my privacy and the latter sounds remarkably like a phishing scam, the answer was 'fuck off'.  I don't care if I can't see some content, I'm not going to be part of this insanity.  The safety of children, online or elsewhere, is the responsibility of their parents, my freedoms shouldn't be impinged because the government seems to think that there are so many bad parents out there.   Besides, this particular form of verification is fatally flawed: you can't reliably tell someone's age from their facial characteristics and many people don't have a credit card, (I don't - I have a debit card as I'm grown up enough to have sufficient funds in my bank account to cover my expenses).  The government's mania for online age verification also assumes that kids have either never heard of VPNs or don't know how to use them.  Both false premises.  (Which means that their next move will be to try and ban the use of VPNs in the UK).  It also founders on the fact that most porn sites are based outside of the UK in some fairly dodgy states, so if they decide not to bother with age verification, there really are no legal sanctions the government can realistically threaten them with.  (Cue the implementation of a 'Great Firewall of Britain' and mass online censorship of what we can and can't see online  in the manner of China).

But it isn't just on social media that we now have to prove that we are who we say we are.  I've mentioned before the bizarre hoops I was expected to jump through a few years ago when trying to register with a teaching agency.  Despite providing them with every imaginable document and detail, including a birth certificate and my National Insurance number, they still insisted that this wasn't sufficient prove that I really was who I said I was or that, even if I was, that I had the right to work in the UK, (this, despite the fact that my birth certificate proves that I was born in the UK and therefore a British citizen and my work record involved me working in jobs where I had to have UK citizenship in order to do them).  No, I had also to provide them with photo ID: a passport or one of those driving licences with your photo on it.  (I'm not sure how either would prove that I'm who I say I am - as I pointed out to them, if I could forge stuff like birth certificates, educational and professional qualifications, a work history with references and a NI number, then forging a passport or a driving licence would surely be a breeze).  There was great consternation that I had neither a current passport nor a photo ID driving licence (mine is of the old type with no photo, as I've never had cause to replace it).  In exasperation, I pointed out that we don't live in a police state (yet) and that carrying ID is not compulsory.  I do have a voter ID document as a result of the fascistic voter suppression efforts of the last Tory government (shamefully, still not repealed by the current Labour government), which I offered as proof of ID.  But by then, we were both too fed up with the whole fiasco to bother.  Amusingly Kafka-esque though all of this might all seem, the truth is that this constant demand for us to provide more and more information about ourselves for poorly defined purposes is all rather sinister in an Orwellian way.  It certainly doesn't help protect children (the main pretext given) and it really needs to stop.  Enough is enough.