@PogoWasRight @masek @amvinfe @euroinfosec Where I get that statistic from is from the Hiscox annual Cyber Readiiness Report. They are a cyberinsurance provider and each year provide a country by country report. This year's report on Ireland showed that 70% of companies hit by extortion attacks paid a ransom to prevent sensitive data from being published, yet 29% had their data leaked anyway

https://www.hiscox.ie/crr2025

@EUCommission the only way to enforce age verification of minors is through total internet supervision of everybody. And it won't help with any of the problems on the internet, because facilitating and effectively rewarding terrible behaviour optimises the revenue of the main players.

If you want a better internet, step one is to ban behaviour-based profiling for advertising, with no "consent" loophole. It makes surveillance ("tracking cookies") immediately illegal (no "legitimate interest" excuse, GDPR does the rest). That trashes the direct "more bullying and hate leads to greater revenue" connection, which immediately removes the incentive to put active effort into more vicious online spaces. This applies to Google, Meta, X, Reddit, etc.

Note that the "consent is not an excuse" part is critical. "Ask me later" just means that people are worn down into clicking "yes" eventually, just to get it out of the way, you know yourself the dark patterns, you know yourself the cookie consent forms, where "none of them" is tedious and must be repeated on every visit, but "yes please" is simple and eternal. Try changing that decision later.

Ban the surveillance. Yes, it's many companies' entire business model. That's too bad for them, should have tried being socially positive. Yes, many services will have to start some sort of subscription or pay per use model instead of being fake-free. That's OK, they'll also be disincentivised to enshittify.

It'd make the internet better for everyone, including children, who could continue to find and create so many positive communities online, instead of being blanket-banned.