It's irrational. I'm basically an irritable nine year old with a grudge who routinely connects through a VPN because I once wrote a novel about surveillance and never got over it. (But literally everyone should use VPNs for everything, clear their caches and obfuscate as much as possible.)
VPNs went from being cutting-edge privacy research in the 90s crypto wars to "how many of us commute to work" in the 00s, to "how we watch country-restricted videos" in the 10s, to "bah, we actually need to protect privacy again" in the 20s.
If that was Karla's Choice, I just discovered the other day that it exists, and am currently reading it :-) But verification on Bsky isn't super-important, unless you get attacked by scammers with fake account names similar to yours.
:) It was Gnomon. But no, the verification thing is a UK age verification law which requires me to prove I’m not twelve to get DMs. It’s… mildly absurd and I’m being childish about it.
Oh, right, that one. Yes, that's annoying and you might need to do it, at least if Bsky's cooperating.
Well, strictly speaking I should but I don’t have to. Bsky’s implementation is, erm, unenthusiastic. It’s easily circumvented. But if I’m doing it for Fortnite, it’s the same service. It makes my tantrum a bit more overtly pointless :)
(Because we are mapped SO MUCH and it isn't good for us at all.)
see when I was an extremely stupid teenager I got given a free USB stick at a Fashion Week event held by the CHINESE EMBASSY and I used it for years, so I feel very relaxed about probably millions of people having access to every single thing I've ever done online
It all depends a bit on your threat model. My concern comes out of the war on terror years and the trend for UK governments to suppress protest and police opinion, plus now the shift in the British right towards open authoritarianism. There's a lot of lists I'd rather not be on in 2030.
oh yeah that's entirely fair, I was mostly being daft - I do think that ultimately, though, unless you're really deciding to be Very Offline there's just going to be a level of info out about you that you can't do much about, so eg age verification on here isn't the end of the world
Yeah, you're not wrong, I just obfuscate habitually - I get the weirdest collection of accurate and bonkers online ads - and as I say: I have an irrational annoyance about this specific thing which I'm obviously going to put aside BUT SULK LOUDLY ABOUT :)