We need to pick our battles. I don’t see much difference in paying Google for a service than having a Spotify family plan like I do. I know spotify has its own problems and my money would be more ethically spent on some other service, but with everything else going on life I can’t be arsed to switch to anything right now. For me it gives enough value for the money spent and that’s good enough for now.

Said all bread tasted like dessert.

A friend of mine was couple times on a work trip in the USA back when Nokia was a dominant player on cellphones for a few months at a time. He often complained that his breakfast sugar could have used more juice/youghurt/bread/whatever. Also, while he was a bit on the heavy side and not a light eater by any stretch, the portion sizes around there were apparently just ridiculous everywhere and everything was covered in some form of grease. Either straight up deep fried or just buried in cheese/bacon/etc.

I don’t think situation has much improved in 20 or so years.

Age verification is one thing, but I routinely verify my id online. Banking, insurance, taxes, various other government things, car registrations, some of the kids school stuff and so on. We have pretty decent infrastructure in place here in Finland and the entities I identify myself online already has my info anyways. I can use either my banking app or mobile verification to securely prove I am who I claim to be and the systems have roughly the same user experience than MFA tokens.

Each of those are roughly zero-knowledge, the website I log in receives just “User with login token xxx is IsoKiero with SSN 123456789” and the tokens expire after a while. Also there’s restrictions in place that my insurance company can’t just sell my data to whomever unless I opt-in for their “marketing” program (not going to happen) and even then there’s some limitations on how they can use the data.

The same system could be adopted to age verification, but that’s a whole another can of worms.