Apple now requires adults in Singapore and South Korea to hand over government IDs or financial credentials just to download apps they’ve been buying freely for years. […] Singaporean users [need] to confirm they’re 18 or older to download or purchase 18+ apps, using a credit card, a driving license, a National Registration Identity Card, or a Foreign Identification Number card. Passports, debit cards, and gift cards aren’t accepted.
This is extremely alarming, and I am coming to realize that there is very little pushback from regular people. Although the privacy community is undoubtedly growing, it is still very small, and often very concentrated in specific geographic areas. There is so much work to be done.
I do wonder why passports are not accepted, but driver’s licenses are?
They’re both government issued IDs.
In South Korea, Spotify and Google have faced similar measures in the past. Age verification law have been in s korea for some time, so there could be little backlash.
I don’t know about situations in Singapore, but age verification in South Korean has been normalized so much to the point that most people view age verification as “normal” and “default” behavior, so sadly there won’t be any major backlash.
Current state of censorship in South Korea is surprisingly bad for a “first world country”, probably due to old politicians that are illiterate about privacy, and extremist TERFs that are very vocal about anything remotely sexual.
ISPs are required to scan SNI field of every HTTPS request, so without workarounds like VPN, users cannot access any adult websites or “harmful” websites even when they are adult and age verified, which is just stupid.
Also KakaoTalk, which is a messenger/chat app that has monopoly on Korean market, is well known for lack of E2E encryption (It technically does have E2E option, but it is very hidden and limited to the point that nobody uses it), scanning chats for sexual photos or drawings, and cooperating with law enforcement and government intelligence agencies.
But no body is ditching KakaoTalk, and corporations and government services views KakaoTalk as an official standard messenger, as if they are digital postal service.
So, many of them are entirely ditching SMS for KakaoTalk, and nobody even knows or cares about RCS.
It is just really sad…
One thing that I don’t understand from this article is that I thought Korean users were already required to do age verification even before this update? Maybe Apple changed the way of handling age verification, but I’m quite sure Apple and Google account users had to do age verifications to download adult apps, even before this update.
As a workaround, at least it is easy to change region setting in Apple ID, for now…
Is there any way to challenge that? Because that’s what we must do, and frankly, it’s something I am very interested in. I am very interested in challenging the countries that have been used to digital but also national IDs. But I’m not sure what is the best way to do it. Because most countries have mandatory national IDs.
My fear is that when you challenge countries that have had it for generations, you come across as being pro illegal immigration, which is ridiculous. Firstly, non-mandatory ID exist in every country: driver’s license, passport, etc. So it’s not like you’re getting rid of IDs all together.
There is some backlash, mostly by younger generations, since some older generations in Korea don’t even have a concept of privacy, those people only care about crime, and whenever people talk about privacy their response is “What are you hiding”.
Current state of privacy in Korea is somewhat based on a cultural foundation of it, Confucianism (Ruism), which emphasizes things like communal effort and order.
While younger generations are less influenced by it, due to extremely low birth rate in South Korea, they are vastly out numbered in a political scene.
Speaking of national IDs, Korea does have mandatory ID called 주민등록증, and to create one, people have to scan ALL of their fingerprints on 10 fingers, since anyone can be criminal in the future! Those fingerprint data is then stored in Law enforcement database, forever.
As far as I know, Korea is one of the very few countries that does that.
There was an appeal to Constitutional Court of Korea that challenged this status quo, by some brave teenagers in 2020, claiming it is unconstitutional, but Constitutional Court of Korea rejected that appeal and claimed current status quo is in fact constitutional, which is depressing.
Here is an relevant article in Korean if anyone is interested in.