They wanted to scan my face, and in a moment of weakness, I performed the ritual. Thirty seconds later, they suspended my account due to violations of their terms of service: "this decision cannot be appealed". So now they have my face and I still can't use the marketplace.

I can only assume I'm suspended due to the behavior of somebody who tried to use my identity for something during the decade when I had no facebook account. Apparently not even my face is strong enough authentication for me to convince them that I'm not whoever it was that caused whatever the problem was.

This is why biometrics will never make sense. They're too immutable. Maintaining multiple accounts is not a bug, it's a debugging mechanism. Since I have only the face that I do, I can't even figure out why I'm banned.

We need to instead stop trusting people merely because they have an account. 10k upvotes/likes/5-star-reviews should mean nothing if I don't explicitly or transitively trust the upvoters/likers/reviewers. We have to build things that make decisions by traversing the trust graph so instead of being banned with no recourse, I can create a no-trust identity and elevate it back to personhood status by convincing my meatspace friends to trust it by having a conversation with them in meatspace.

And that is the real shame. Because I don't want to have to give my face or do age verification but I know when the time comes, and If I need to use a service now, I will give them whatever they want to get past the hurdle and use the service. It sucks, but I don't think a petition will help. Unless of course you get the 50 million to sign the petition AND stick to it.

The worst part is these are all stupid poorly thought out band-aid solutions to "protect the kids" from platforms that are also detrimental to adults.

Tor is not for criminals. It's for you and me. And happens to be good enough that criminals use it too. This is the two sided nature of technology.

Tor is a networks of peers across the globe volunteering their network bandwidth to support people under oppression by their government.

The amount of privacy that can be gained from tor is proportional to the amount of people using it. The more that people utilize the technology, the more that everyone looks the same, and protects the people that need it the most.

Tor enables me to say no to these things and carry on, without permission.

So some organization could release Yubikeys with a certain private key and distribute them in stores that allow only adult customers - like liquor stores or sex shops. Owning a key proves that one is adult without disclosing identity. Keys support USB and bluetooth and can be easily supported on any device.

Also, OS developers should implement simple parent mode - such that parents only need to flip a switch and set a password, and do not have to whitelist apps or websites - the OS should use government-provided lists. You might not like the government, but 99% of parents do not want to bother compiling white lists manually.

Somewhere on the IRS website I had found buried in an article that if they can't submit my refund via direct deposit after some period of time, they are supposed to mail me a physical check. Yet so far, nada.

And the other thing is, you can use a gun to murder people. If you try to use a porn site to murder someone, you're fundamentally hitting them with a laptop.

A major reason nobody can think clearly about this anymore is that there are people out there that genuinely believe porn sites and social media are as dangerous to human health as assault rifles and cigarettes. I'm almost as disturbed that people can't differentiate between harm risks as I am about horrible internet age checking laws.

Name the physical places that would accept a plain government document that says only that you are over eighteen and nothing else? None will, not because 'age was never the point', or because every bar or casino is stealing your face - but because a plain document doesn't offer any proof you are it's owner. Photo ID has been standard as age verification because it's the best way to prove the official ID actually links to the person holding it.

There are more concerns in a digital world with giving your ID / face, but the idea that the demand for photo ID proves it's all a big data grab not remotely about age is a conclusion looking for evidence.

(Plus they acknowledge some sites have done age verification where all they want is your face to confirm you look over 18 - which they then ignore, claiming it's all really a ploy to get your documents. So why isn't the site 'Never give them your documents'?)

So... is it part of the parable they're trying to tell that they're seeing who will go against the exact sort of advice they're giving? Or does this -just happen to be- the kind of shady data gathering that they're warning against?

to quote the site itself, "We spent a generation teaching people the first rule of the internet: never give out your real identity to strangers."

You're not bringing anything to the table other than teenage angst, ensuring nobody takes the _very valid and terrifying concerns_ seriously.

Instead, suggest a feasible alternative. Bonus points if it works better, cheaper, and safer.

The amount of people that let the TSA take a scan of their face when going through airport security - even when the signage clearly says you can opt out - proves that this effort, while noble, will fail.

I (and the family members I am with) always opt-out, but every time I look around, I am the only one doing it. If I had to guess, I'd put a compliance figure somewhere around 98%+.

Here is a good article on it: https://medium.com/womenintechnology/you-can-and-should-opt-...

I agree with the article, but the LLM-isms cheapen it by two orders of magnitude.

I personally don't use FaceID because I'm not thrilled about having my face scanned with utmost precision. BTW, I'm looking at my phone typing this and I know my phone has its face-scanning device pointed right at me. Is it sending "them" my face data all the time? Or sometimes? I can't tell. What if I'm showing something on my phone to another person? Is it going to scan their face too? Maybe, maybe not.

This doesn't have to be the case. https://www.w3.org/TR/digital-credentials/ seems a sensible system where you can have a single identity provider (hopefully someone you trust) who can then verify things like "is this person over 18?" without givin away any excessive information to a third party. Hopefully it gains some traction.

love the idea, but if you aren't from a Shengen country you can't get into Shengen countries without a fingerprint scan and a face photo at the airport:

https://travel-europe.europa.eu/ees/data-held-by-ees

No way to opt out of the scan.

Outsourcing this to random ass for profits is a problem though.

It seems that without legal obligation things will continue to go this route.

Once the camera was invented the die was cast.

"Technological determinism is the theory that a society's technology drives the development of its social structure, cultural values, and history."

At TSA checkpoints at the airport, you have to actively ask to opt-out.

I'm always worried that actively opting-out puts you on a government list and there could be later, much larger ramifications, so I passively opt-in to blend in with the masses.

I wonder how the author would explain that the ID and age systems we already have – cigarette dispensers, liquor stores, club entry, driver's license, to name a few – work "kind of fine" though.

That means my goverment already has my face, with all my details associated with it. Bit Orwellian but there we are.

In the united states, the first amendment (what this post is primarily concerned about) and the second amendment are equally important rights, and we should be just as judicious about applying restrictions to the second as the first.

Instead, you see attacks on the 2nd in the name of "safety, verification, age assurance. A small step to protect children". The exact same playbook used against civilian gun ownership will be rolled out against the first amendment, the 4th amendment, etc.

Civil rights and protections should be expanding, not contracting, and the primary focus point for the last 30 years (and the playbooks that will be used elsewhere) are being tested on the second amendment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45081323

EDIT: looks like it's gone now. Gonna count that as a win.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_age_verification_in_the...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooming_gangs_scandal

Hilariously, a commenter asked me for a citation for the epidemic. Commenter: you're not mr current events are you?

Not only that, almost everyone on this forum walks around with a device that shares their identity and location with unscrupulous companies (cell phone carriers) whose data is available en masse to the government. (N.B. I have an iPhone and appreciate and even _trust_ all the privacy work put into it; however, the cell phone tower thwarts location tracking, and participation in social networks thwarts face tracking.)

I've long thought that rather than try to limit the information about us, we ought to _flood_ the Internet with information about us. Make the data available untrustworthy.

Or, accept it. So long as it remains in the hands of corporations and not solely the government, it guts both ways — a senator can no longer be publicly opposed to same-sex equality legislation while engaging in a homosexual relationship themselves.

AI seems to be pushing us down the former road.

TSA does it, Customs does it when entering the USA after a trip too.

does it benefit you?

I guess I’m lucky to be in the cohort that avoids the face scans, and I feel a bit dirty about enabling this, but so far — even living in the UK — the privacy concerns have not manifested for me as I thought they might.

To me, the most disingenuous framing of the “protect the children” narrative is not “children can’t access the stuff,” but “adults can access the stuff, once they provide their biometrics.” The default is to deny access.

Now what?

You want to date your pic ends up on a server.

That’s just the way this works.

Can we actually think of the children? All the children? Their future?

When democracies forget that government is the greatest natural threat to freedom, they forget and undermine the reason we have democracies.

Technical solutions to zero-knowledge proofs of age-of-adulthood without loss of anonymity are recent but available now. The strongest argument for these is to take the wind out of alternatives.

Strangely, promoters of surveillance avoid these solutions.

Even stranger: the bizarre but prevalent counter argument that anonymity protecting solutions won't work, because the surreptitious goal of other solutions is precisely to strip anonymity. We apparently shouldn't do that, because the abusers won't like the wind being taken out of their "front" problems, with real but freedom-preserving solutions!

However, our government is very weak....

Very true. They are currently orchestrating the attack.

It is also why I call age sniffing age sniffing like that; "age verification" is the propaganda term. We need to look which actors are behind this push. I smell a trail of corruption money following these actors pushing for it. It is also fascinating to see how quickly democracies fall victim to this. Soon age sniffing will be mandatory everywhere. The free world wide web will be gone. Right now people think this is hyperpole. Well, we saw that with other technology too ...

All those Bilderberg and WEF forums and Peter Thiel's Dialog Club are not for nothing