Here's the story of a guy who got flagged and "reported to the authorities" by an age verification company for using GrapheneOS.
Guy posted this on r/privacy:
When he contacted Yoti directly, they replied with this:
Due to past security concerns, Yoti automatically flags multiple verification attempts and any devices running GrapheneOS. These instances are automatically reported to both the authorities and our security team.
Sooner rather than later there is going to be the whitelisted internet and services and the rest of us. Probably gonna have to choose.
Refusing the age-gate protects you from the ID demand, but that is a different threat model from being reidentified after the fact. Even on GrapheneOS with no account, a model can infer location, employer, and writing style from public posts. A 2026 study matched 67% of forum users to their real profiles at 90% precision. Forced disclosure and silent inference are two problems, and hardening against one does little for the other.
The GrapheneOS rejection is the tell: age verification by facial estimation treats your face as a credential, so a device that resists fingerprinting reads as "suspicious" rather than "private." The deeper cost is the biometric honeypot the mandate builds, and a face, once collected, does not rotate like a password. Worth asking any age-gate vendor for their retention and breach model before the mandate makes it non-optional.
we'll have to start living double digital lives, one phone GrapheneOS full privacy maxi, one kyc'd to fuck android/apple simp phone
maybe, or perhaps there are two separate groups of people.
The privacy group will get found out via this captcha bullshit
Many posts on here recently have added this gatekeeper
What do you mean "found out"?
As in this captcha bs on more and more sites, it notices the bootloader is unlocked on GrapheneOS, Vanadium etc. And makes it more difficult for the user
Of course you can choose to not use any sites with captcha but as I say there are many sites using it
I think it's Vanadium how they detect it - I've been running fingerprinting on it.
The other day,
archive.today's re-captcha defaulted to QR-based Google. I guess the effessbee also want to know all the details of who is evading the NYT paywall.That's easy it's @denlillaapan 😂😂😂
OH NO, ODELL IS COMING FOR ME WITH HIS CLANKERS
I SHALL BE THE PAYWAY REMOVER!
What?
They may be referring to links @nitter sometimes posts which have a screening page which somehow checks your browser is not a bot?
eg-
Reddit mods removed it for being "a discussion of alternative ROMs"
Did I miss something? Doesn't seem like "discussion of alternate ROMs" is de facto not relevant to privacy.
That is what he deserves fot post in a stupid place.
https://www.theverge.com/news/780769/reddit-ai-google-new-deal
Ah, thanks! It seems like a strange rule/unnecessarily limiting.
~privacy totes worth the 500 sats.
considering that posting fee counts towards total
investedand so it means ~privacy posts are often de facto visible on the front page, the high posting fee usually ends up being worth it. but the point is taken.Yep. It works pretty well as a filter.
Are we all doomed to compliance and convenience ?
No. Choose the vanguards of open-source as your tribe. It sucks to be a normie anyway.
Time for someone to make a proxy that changed headers and makes it look like you on that old win7 machine 😬
I don’t know what I’m talking about but could somehow apps be spoofed to think that you’re using e.g. normie Android but in reality you’re using GrapheneOS? To bypass the blocks?
Just letting the thought out there in case someone knows? As a strategy to live in the gated normie web with your open-source tech?
I don't mind. I think it's inevitable. Who knows, Bitcoin might form the foundation of the freer, alternative web.
100% we will. Reminds me of when I tried to use PagerDuty on GrapheneOS for work. I opened a ticket with them and got no where. Ended up deleting the app and depending on SMS.
Clearly they just didn't want to deal with the edge case. That's a real factor in stuff like this. The convenient will be the end of us.
This sums it all up pretty well.
We lack deep meaning so pleasure and the convenient rule us. Couple that with Fiat skewing time preferences and we have Modernity
shit, what do I do with my library of PS4 digital games now? I used to buy digital until I became a bitcoiner. I will sell it.
This was about having to show a face... To play a videogame?
What's wrong with grapheneOS?
yeah, that struck me too. sad times that your playstation account requires age verification. sadder times that playstation has centralized accounts.
They didn't give any reason that I could tell why Graphene specifically was problematic to them.
I'm sure they mean legions of elementary schoolers use Graphene pretending to be 18, right?
The kids are crafty these days.
This is why shouldn't get attached to mass media. If you can't possess a fully-functioning copy and run it on hardware you control fully, there's a bargain being made. Save your money for developers who respect you as a sovereign individual and that world will grow.
I very rarely use a phone to access the internet but still worry that at some stage Linux OS use may be flagged or restricted.
Currently I can do almost everything I want online by using linux on laptop- but will that remain the case?
Age verification looks like a potential pretext for a more broad introduction of the surveillance state.