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   GrapheneOS (grapheneos@grapheneos.social)'s status on Sunday, 29-Mar-2026 07:09:31 JST GrapheneOS

   Brazil's authoritarian age verification law became active this month. It won't be implemented by GrapheneOS. Complying would require integrating a mandatory process for each user where a third party service checks government identification and confirms a match using the camera.

   • Embed this notice
     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@snac.lx.oliva.nom.br)'s status on Sunday, 29-Mar-2026 15:56:11 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to

     • Iron Bug
     to be fair, there's no requirement of using a third-party service, but the long delay in regulating the procedures for age assessment made room for the "market" to come up with various bad ways to accomplish that. it sucks to be us.
     
     on the good side, the law is quite strict in that the information cannot be used for other purposes. I guess lawmakers didn't know about Cambridge Analytica, or didn't care, or something.
     
     what's worst, IMHO, is that the law pretty much rules out freedom-respecting software, and this is the case not only for minors, and though its supporters promise age verification isn't about identification, they don't seem to have considered that the law mandates parental supervision through online services, so identification is necessary to connect children with the parents/guardians, and parental supervision encompasses allowing communications with the minors, so everyone else must also be identified. it's terrible terrible terrible.
     
     on the upside, the rules for app stores that require parent approval for minors to install programs are so broad that they apply to websites that offer javascript code for download, so we should (if the law catches) see browsers shipping with javascript disabled, and web sites used by minors being refitted to work without javascript.
     
     I've been blog-posting a lot about it, in pt_BR:
     https://blog.lx.oliva.nom.br/tags/ECA-Digital
     
     CC: @GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social
     
   • Embed this notice
     Iron Bug (iron_bug@friendica.ironbug.org)'s status on Sunday, 29-Mar-2026 15:56:12 JST Iron Bug

     in reply to

     • Alexandre Oliva
     @GrapheneOS @lxo
     looks llike Brasilian government requirements to software are much worse than we expected.
     this is not just a breaking privacy for some third-party service, it's deanonimizing and tracking users by whatever sites and servers in an unknown circle.
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     GrapheneOS (grapheneos@grapheneos.social)'s status on Monday, 30-Mar-2026 13:22:54 JST GrapheneOS

     in reply to

     There aren't yet devices supporting GrapheneOS directly sold in South America. Brazil in particular has unusually high import duties/taxes which add up to around 100%. This has resulted in us not having a lot of users there but our Motorola partnership will start changing this.

     Steve's Place repeated this.
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     GrapheneOS (grapheneos@grapheneos.social)'s status on Monday, 30-Mar-2026 13:22:54 JST GrapheneOS

     in reply to

     People are going to have their personal info leaked by third party age verification services due to these laws. Children are going to be harmed by apps and websites changing their behavior to exploit them. It isn't going to stop minors finding pornography if they want to find it.

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     GrapheneOS (grapheneos@grapheneos.social)'s status on Monday, 30-Mar-2026 13:22:55 JST GrapheneOS

     in reply to

     We have a tiny VPS in São Paulo for our ns1 anycast DNS and a second for our website/network services. It probably isn't an issue and those can be removed if necessary. Santiago could be added for both instead but wouldn't work very well as a replacement for having São Paulo.

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     GrapheneOS (grapheneos@grapheneos.social)'s status on Monday, 30-Mar-2026 13:22:56 JST GrapheneOS

     in reply to

     GrapheneOS has no team members or operations in Brazil. São Paulo in Brazil is by far the biggest network hub within South America. Miami is also a major network hub for South America and is currently where our update server is for South America since it's dramatically cheaper.

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     GrapheneOS (grapheneos@grapheneos.social)'s status on Monday, 30-Mar-2026 13:22:57 JST GrapheneOS

     in reply to

     It doesn't stop there. It would require keeping data for auditing and providing a token for connecting age verification checks by apps and websites to the data. The law is a privacy disaster and exposes minors to being exploited by leaking their age bracket to apps and websites.