cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/45206293

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.