It ends with "The platforms need you far more than you need them".
And I think this is the misconception. No, they don't. The amount of people who will sign this, is a fraction of a fraction of a "platform"'s users. They will not care if they lose 50,000 users out of 2 Billion. A drop in the ocean. Not the target audience anyway.
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.
You are correct that your data isn't particularly impactful for these platforms - but you're also overestimating the value that many of these services have. A fair few of them have competitors with better features and privacy offerings so the only reason you need them is purely for the network effect of everyone else using them.
And increasingly, everyone isn’t using them, even if they’re on them.
I’m on Insta and WhatsApp and I use them a few times per year. I’m on Messenger and have seen a dramatic dropoff in messages. I’m on FB frequently and notice only a small fraction of my friends bother anymore and it’s become an interest platform to make up the lack, so I’m trending toward less time there. I’m on Twitter/X but check in maybe once a month.
I may not be a typical user, but I’m probably not unique either.
No, I don't think you're unique at all. I think this all tracks and applies to more and more of the general population.
These mainstream services no longer provide what people signed up for: life updates, pictures of kids and dogs, etc. These value-add posts are becoming less frequent because of/and are being replaced by streams of posts from people _you should follow_ or content they're pretty sure will rile you up about ... whatever. Generally, the people who are still active and whose posts slip through (because it's their only outlet) are effectively monkeys slinging shit (e.g. uncles posting AI slop memes about Barack Obama's suits).
It seems like younger generations have moved on to more silo'd experiences. I don't use TikTok but it's my understanding that it's more about connecting with people who share common interests (more akin to HN or Reddit) and not as much about connecting with your high school Spanish teacher who has gone full MAGA and whose posts you don't care to see and/or who you don't want seeing your posts and trolling you in the comments. This same cohort also seems to be spending much more time in private group chats and, for the most part, the platform doesn't seem to matter; it's just a message broker.
I'm very much like you. There are several apps that I use to communicate with a handful (or less) of people in the world. I see people on travel sites saying "Just use WhatsApp" and I'm more or less, yes it's installed on my phone and I use it with a couple people but it's certainly not something that most people I know use.
Probably something of a demographic (geography/age) thing.
If there is a substitute and I am not time constrained 100% i'm switching. But I've been in a situation already where a platform I'm using required me to face-up. I can't even remember which to be honest but I had no alternative or recourse to refuse. In addition, in the UK company directors are legaly required to face-up to Companies House and confirm their identity, so they have my face too. Ah, and so is every single CCTV camera around London. I don't know how to fight this particular battle.
I think this kind of comment where you share the sentiment that you will ultimately admit defeat emboldens the factions that are hoping for people to be like you. I also think these kinds of comments may also bring doubt to people considering resisting these kinds of concessions.
In other words I think the people pushing these kinds of "identification" methods would love you for spreading their silent message of this being unavoidable knowingly or unknowingly.
Even if what you say is correct let's not make it easier for people wanting to enshittify the future, yeah?
I just wanted to tell you that I wholeheartedly agree with your statement and that you shouldn’t be discouraged by some of the nay-sayers in the replies. I feel that HN has many users who are techno-optimist, but are very pessimistic of the role of individuals and the possibilities of the society overall.
Even in the replies someone tries to appeal to some ideal of „rationalism“ which is nothing but defeatism to the status quo. They see any kind of passion, emotion or values as „irrational“ and categorically as something lesser.
But what is reason without values? Logic without axioms? Just treading in the trivial waters.
They won’t be emboldened by this comment, they will be emboldened when their internal data shows they aren’t losing users at a rate high enough to change their behavior.
Are you really advocating for suppressing rational assessments for the likelihood of success because you think the analysis is too discouraging?
If you already agree the resistance will ultimately lead nowhere, why not focus that energy on something with a better chance of success? Best guess would be partnering with someone like the EFF for a solution through lobbying And the courts.
How have the EFF and the courts worked so far? We do need an EFF, but they're clearly not all that effective. And the courts just won't do anything unless someone does something illegal.
If everyone thinks so, then surely yes, but if people realize, that change starts in the small and they can be part of the change, perhaps at some personal cost, but that it might be worth it, then suddenly change is possible.
If I have no choice, and no alternative, what can I do? I will never use an OS that require it on the OS level, and nobody can mandate it, not to a Linux user as myself - there will always be "another distro". But as a company director I have a legal requirement to verify my identity with my face. That's one. Every CCTV camera I pass by London, I assume is likely to have some soft of potential face recognition. Every transfer type transaction I do with my bank app requires me to face-up. So fine, I will skip Facebook or Instagram, but where will I get my cat-video dopamine fix?
I don't see myself as admitting defeat here. I'm choosing my battles. The gov here will drive this through as we're stuck with them until 2029.
I'm considering (with a heavy heart) to leave the UK and this is just one nail in a coffin full of nails.
I find it strange for these people to accept such a defeatist attitude because I'm the opposite.
I mean I will just not use the service and I'll seek out alternatives that are open source or create my own. I'll do anything possible until I'm the last one standing if that's what it comes down too.
I tried to sign up to Telnyx and they had the same crap from an unreliable data-breach and being-litigated persona identifier. I passed on that.
I've already been going down this road as I've abandoned Google and some of the big cloud providers in favor of smaller companies who aren't pushing these policies.
It isn't hard to click cancel. It's just people favor convenience over their own freedom because they have never experienced not having freedom like our founder's did 250 years ago. The problem is once freedom is gone, getting it back requires blood spilled and political reforms and revolutions based on what history teaches us.
The British crown never gave away the control, it is just obfuscated through the British-owned offshore financial networks. The Epstein files make this abundantly clear.
We are currently ruled by the third generation of post-WW2 five eyes nepo kids, with all problems this entails. The feel-good narrative about US was spun by Hollywood, but the old money of British aristocracy never went away. All the "self-made billionaires" who receive a Lordship title from the King just so the commoners work even more because they think they have a fair shot.
If someone like Ghislaine Maxwell applies for a visa in their colony USA, she receives a vanity social security number "Leet Babe" (1337 84883).
I think the kind of comment you're making here is wishful thinking. Raging into the void and then getting mad when everyone doesn't do the same is not an effective way to force change. It's just an effective way to make you feel good.
It has never been about those platforms though. I could not care less if CIAbook or Instaspam or any of these other anti-social slop sites exist.
They want to force all operating systems to require age sniffing. That's the main angle right now. I am curiously watching how systemd will add more implementation details to this; probably as a first step only for commercial linux distributions.
This is a little bit of a tangent compared to the post, but can someone explain to me why it's NOW that we have multiple countries (USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and probably others that I am not aware of) all looking at age verification for a technology (the internet and all the things it lets you access) has existed for over 2 decades, and has been mature for at least 10 years? You could buy illicit drugs and watch porn on the internet since the 2000s, but it's NOW that we're legislating things (in incomprehensibly stupid and hopelessly unenforceable ways)?
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.
Trying to put this all on Meta with a look at their 2025 lobbying spend is missing the point. The “think of the children” panic about the internet pre-dates this by years. Remember the debate around the TikTok ban? The states instituting laws about porn age checks pre-dates all of this too. I think trying to blame Meta is convenient because it’s easy to think there is just one villain coordinating everything, but the debate about children and the internet has been a spreading moral panic for years.
It's not only Meta though. People need to stop assuming Meta controls everything via its CIAbook. You see several actors behind that; which one contributes the most is an interesting detail, but ultimately it can be simplified to them planning Evil against The People.
Exactly, it's far bigger than Meta when the government's are pushing a larger agenda here.
The assumption is you have to control people to enforce laws. They keep pushing this notion that is a requirement to keep people safe. That somehow if we have big brother AI surveillance everyone will be on their best behavior.
Oracle, Palantir, Meta, and other mega billionaires push this agenda because who is going to stop them from controlling society and getting absurdly powerful and wealthy from it?
Global meetings (whether secret or not) where select people decide what to do next to minimize potential threats to their power. There isn't much more to it, really.
Not just minimize threats, but often to maximize their power.
Lobbyists do not just try to convince a politician that X is a good idea. Lobbyists give the politician money to introduce already drafted legislation, and then give other politicians money to support it. And if they can get the legislation passed in one place, they'll try it again.
The result is that suspiciously similar legislation appears in many places close in time, due to it being pushed by particular interests.
I'm not convinced this is about money as much as it is about blackmail, given how centralized data collection has become and how many intelligence agencies appear to have access to numerous 0-days for routinely gathering additional information. It could be both things as well.
What bothers me most isn't their corruption, but their apparent belief that it won't eventually affect them or their families - perhaps sooner than they think.
This has all been brewing for years. Remember the TikTok ban and all of the debates around it? We’ve been hearing news headlines about social media and kids for many years. The state level laws around porn site ID checks have been rolling in gradually for years, too.
There are always claims that is a shadowy cabal of world leaders coordinating in secret or that a specific corporation is lobbying to do it all, but the fact is that ID checking is oddly popular in theory to a lot of people who haven’t thought through the consequences. Check any thread on this topic on Hacker News where the idea is discussed in a way that makes it feel like it’s only for kids or only for Facebook and there’s a huge outpouring of support for the idea.
The topic only becomes unpopular when the actual consequences become apparent. For the Hacker News audience the popularity of these ideas does a complete U-turn as soon as the concept of ID checking extends to platforms we might use, like Reddit, Discord, or YouTube. When commenters think it’s only going to impact Facebook and TikTok they welcome ID checking laws with enthusiastic support.
Imo it definitely has to do with politicians and governments trying to appear strong on the topic of protecting kids from the harms of social media. I also believe a lot of it is well intentioned, albeit poorly executed
Rich people are panicking because they’ve seen a capital-poor country win a war with cheap drones and want to lock down as many technologies as they can, lest the ruled realize they can actually do something about their rulers.
I'm maybe a bit of an outlier here in that I do think that this is a genuine grassroots good faith effort to "protect the children" that does not have sinister ulterior motives. I know plenty of parents who have expressed enthusiasm for the idea of age-restricting websites.
"Why now" I think is pretty obvious -- the age limitations that exist currently are easily circumvented, but have given enough of a plausible deniability aspect that politicians have been able to skate by. There has been increasing research and media dedicated to the idea that there are aspects of the internet which we should be shielding children from. While many of this research is dubious, there's a rising moral panic around it.
The core of the problem is that there is no possible implementation of age verification that does not also require identity verification. In this I am in strong agreement with the article, but the use of paranoid and dramatic language as in this article only alienates people who find the conspiratorial tone to be reverse polarizing.
I agree only in the sense that Meta wants the OS to tell them the user’s age - BOTH for the ulterior motive of better ad targeting / fingerprinting, but also because shifting the liability gets the numerous current and future child safety lawsuits off the back.
This would be fine if it was actually done perfectly - ie. Devices get a signed ticket from the government identity provider, device can provides a cryptographically verifiable ticket to the site that its a valid identity and their age is within the $x age range but not tied to the user’s actual identity / document, and the device doesn’t ask the government identity provider to mint a new ticket each time it needs to attest (maybe 500 tickets are minted at a time and you auto renew 500 more each month)
However the likelihood of this actually being done correctly is slim to none.
The <meta name="rating"> html tag has existed since like the 90s. If you legitimately just want to 'protect the children' just enact legislation saying that adult content is responsible for setting this tag. Then parents can decide what their children can and can't see via browser settings. No giant biometric database, no invasive user mapping, no leaks, no creeping techno-feudalist state.
Collecting user biometric data and trying it to a nominally anonymous user identity is not required here.
This is 100% 'won't someone please think of the children' pearl clutching to hide what's actually going on - furthering control of the online exchange of ideas.
Crowd-based analysis of "the files" nearly went out of control, and they noticed how hard it is to identify social media users.
Only trust fund nepo kids from old money are allowed to have vanity social security numbers, multiple identities and scrubbed Wikipedia articles. The plebeians shall have only a single ID and use it to authenticate with every website.
I really want to know who else has a SSN starting with 1337.
Do not for a split second operate under the assumption that there aren't coordinating forces working on this. I know this trips the "conspiracy theories!!1!" flag in most people, but you can literally come up with organizations dedicated to things like this in mere seconds of googling. Here's a comment about US state-level coordination I made earlier, with a challenge to produce some examples that I then produced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065492
It happens at the national level too. I just did a simple Google search for "united nations committee to harmonize" [1] (no quotes in my search itself) and I count 5 or 6 committees explicitly dedicated to "harmonization" in the first ten results. And that's just the committees, you can count on each of them to have factions within (because politics, politics never changes) and outside forces competing and vying to get the "harmonizations" to favor them and disfavor their competitors. And as politics, politics never changes, paging Ron Perlman, these harmonization committees are unlikely to flinch away from "harmonizing" entirely new rules into existence... which, again, with not all that much searching you can easily find examples of them stating outright.
And the forces trying to influence those committees, are not all just sitting out in the public with some .org website with their true mission stated clearly above the fold. And I just use these UN committees, which are themselves literally the result of one search and a few seconds scrolling through the search page and anything but a complete list, as plain and obvious public examples operating in public for at least nominally good purposes. Nothing stops anyone from buying politicians in multiple countries at a time to push through something like age verification directly, without being open about who they are.
I personally don't think there are many people left yelling "conspiracy" when you say that globalized decisions are being pushed, especially if you've been alive for the last 10 years. Nowadays it's more about who is actually making these decisions and that discussion gets muddy quickly.
Because it’s been building for a while, and (in my opinion) because it’s not a major traffic generating topic on builder focused sites like HN.
The most proximate domino was the Australian social media ban. Australia was already a country known to experiment with ways to deal with social media - see the news fee they imposed on platforms.
Behind that was the build up of negative outcomes from social media for kids, and adults.
The harms are not something I tend to find actively discussed on HN; I assume because more people are interested in building the next thing, not digging into the trust and safety details.
Customer safety and support are also not going to get anyone promoted in tech. These are cost centers and will often stand in the way of addictive design.
Meta executives were nailed precisely for greenlighting designs their own teams told them were harmful for teens.
At the same time, there is lobbying going on by these firms, to push the burden of verification to someone else.
However, the degree of harm being caused by social media meant we were always going to see voter backlash.
Honestly? I think it's because Elon Musk pissed a bunch of bureaucrats off by buying X and being more permissive about what was allowed. Then came claims that AI porn or something was on X which is a vague claim. People say it was Meta lobbying but that's not it. Meta lobbied to have ID done at the operating system. The lobby for ID was already effective and on its way before that. The actual lobby doesn't seem to be popular at all. It's just some NGOs no one has heard of that support restrictions for porn. The same language popped up on three continents at once. I just don't think this is a grass roots campaign and I don't think corporations drove it either. Ultimately, I think governments decided that unregulated information/anonymity is a threat to their power.
Social media was unleashed onto the world with no harm studies or thought for the long term impact.
Now we’re catching up and realizing how bad it is.
For a similar case, see tasers in Canada after a handcuffed immigrant was killed by one. The question came up “how were tasers certified safe for humans?”.
The answer was “they weren’t. A private company just started selling them to police forces who just started using them.”
These lobbyists were dumb. You can be certain that some lobbyists are so efficient that detecting them reliably is very difficult. Even more so when private media is controlled by a few billionaires who are "in" on the system.
I like that how in the same place that they have been trying to "protect the children" for like a decade [1], they have also had a real rape gang epidemic. It's almost like they are, in fact, not really trying to protect the children.
I think it is great that people point out LLM generated articles here on HN. Sadly, it feels like I am slowly loosing my skill to identify LLM speak. Maybe I am getting worn out of all LLM content... So, please, list the indicators and telltale signs from the specific article or blog post (like others have done here already). At least I would appreciate it a lot.
> It is not age verification. It is identity verification.
> You can change a password. You cannot change your face.
> This is not a popularity contest, and refusal is not a vote you are trying to win
These were a couple sentences that were immediate flags to me. There've been countless articles written on this (I can dig them up if you want), but IMO there are pretty clear semantic rhythms you start to notice.
It is not foo, it is bar. You can zip, you cannot zap.
I'm always amazed too. I waste so much time clicking on links like that only to find slop that just wastes my time.
I'm guessing a huge number of people never even bother to click on the article and just comment based on the title, so there's that. Then there's cases where they are sympathetic to the subject or opinion and talk about that in the comments and ignore that the machine-written article doesn't actually contribute to the conversation at all.
Im sure a lot of people know about tor on this site...but let me remind everyone.
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.
iCloud private relay has done more in just a few years than Tor ever has, by being opt-out for iOS users instead of opt-in like Tor. Now platforms can’t rely on IP based reputation, instead relying on either a computational challenge (Cloudflare, Anubis) or de-anonymization (recaptcha relying on being signed into a Google account more than anything, especially when using private relay).
That wasn't meant to be an argument against other privacy protecting technologies. I'll take them all. Although you can't just compare apples to apples when you speak of close sources technology. I applaud apple for the long held stance of privacy protections.
And to be fair, tor comes at the price of speed. But convince isn't the only thing in the math equation here. Privacy basically boils down to a three part equation these days with the variables being Speed/Convenience.
A lot of that speed and convince can be made up for with being familiar with the tools and adapting to a new norm. The actual network speed isn't really that bad comparatively.
Everyone should study the basics on a server backend and full stack web.
If you can master what it takes to design and run your site on localhost....you are literally one step away from sharing it with anyone on the planet who has internet access for zero dollars because of the power of tor, and the global network that supports it.
The reality is, there is no gate there, just the knowledge of how to do it.
Tor is first and foremost a router.
Sites that block tor IP's do happen, this is because of the dual use nature of the technology. Its also well suited for abuse.
No. Tor is for the CIA. It won't work for them unless we use it as well. Criminals also find it useful.
It's easy to verify this. Tor was originally written by Paul Syverson, Michael G. Reed, and David Goldschlag. While all three were working at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
These are the origins of Tor yes. The same technology that protects the spy, protects the journalist, or the citizen whose government blocked them, or placed a wall of ID verification checks.
Your face is already everwhere. Your supermarket records it as you check out. Every retailer records it as you enter the store. The state has it. The Federal government has it if you have a passport or other federal ID. Your mortgage company probably required it when you digitally "signed" your loan application. Socials have it from all the selfies you've posted. It's a lost cause.
There is actually a way to prove the age anonymously. Yubikey-like devices support attestation - they can have a private key proving authenticity of a device.
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.
When I was 8 or 9, my Father would often give me 50p to go down to the nearby pub to get him 20 cigarettes and a half-pound bar of chocolate, which came to 48p. Always "and where's my change then?" when I returned. Tight git.
No, I think there are parents who would find a long enough webcam cable to point the cam at themselves while Jeff Epstein is grooming their kids in roblox.
The core point is that it isn't my responsiblity to take care of your children. When less than half of millennials (40% men, 55% women) have children, the "think of the children" catchphrase really starts to fall flat. Why should I think of the children? I don't even have children. It's the parents' problem, not mine. Stop making it my problem.
I agree 100% with the message and think we should strive to reject this kind of gathering wherever possible, but it feels like the horse is already out of the barn insofar as each and every one of our faces being out there. Hell, we have entire states where people can't watch porn without uploading their ID. The inertia is such that (I'm in the U.S.) we really need a constitutional amendment at this point to stop this.
New privacy legislation is about 20 years overdue. Between age verification, privately owned national camera networks, and above all else, data brokers, citizens need to reassert their right to anonymity.
In the face of government hostility, at least we here can make more tools like Signal or at least choose not to feed customer data to the beast.
> We run background checks on people who want to buy a gun, but we do not background check everyone at all times just in case.
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.
Who runs this site? There doesn't appear to be any information on this. A whois search returns nothing illuminating.
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."
I just have obs with a video of mkbhd downloaded playing in a loop, whenever I am asked for age verification I just start the virtual camera, select it at the age verification website and it immediately passes it (most of the time). MKBHD was just the first person that I could come up with that records extremely high res video.
idk, youtube worked a lot better than any avatar. I tried avatars at first with little success.
and you don't need any guide it's dead simple:
add video source
path: path/to/your/video
loop video checkmark: yes
Start Virtual Camera
then just select it when prompted in browser.
The left/right movements are sort of a meme for most checkers and just pass randomly, the ones that need you to open your mouth get bypassed by them talking in the video.
I have yet to receive my federal tax refund because I submitted my taxes through a preparation service and, thinking that physical checks were still an option (the tax software didn't tell me otherwise), I did not give the federal government an ACH account number for direct deposit. The IRS then told me I'd have to open an account to update/provide direct deposit info, which in turn requires me to register with ID.me to create an account. ID.me has an obnoxious signup policy which includes sending them a boatload of documentation, and a headshot. I'm not doing it. So to date, I have yet to receive my federal refund.
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.
So does this mean that, say, Apple actually doesn't have access to our FaceID data? Otherwise there'd be no need for no laws: just force Apple, Google, etc to share face information with "the government". Well, I guess technically "they" would probably need some kind of law to do this anyway. I feel like tons of people use various kinds of FaceID-type technologies for unlocking their phones, laptops, etc. So it would make sense if "they" already had all of our faces.
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.
Age assurance is the law in California and age verification is illegal in California. We should push more jurisdictions to adopt this model. While many age verification laws are malicious mass surveillance, some are because politicians didn't see a better option.
Here in the US, there’s a giant database of faces the government uses to ID people with an app. In the UK, they want this same level of invasive policing. Technology will always be used nefariously by police agencies until someone stops them, which no one will. No one, politically, wants to come out and “restrain policing” but that’s how the rich will position it so they can sell more flock cameras, more app platforms, more tech to the ever bottomless pockets of government. We are in a Thiel world.
The phrase "people will not just [...]" comes to mind here.
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%+.
Good heavens, the comments on that article make me want to vomit:
"Thanks to people with your mindset our streets and borders are not as safe as they should be."
This option is made freely available to passengers, but by choosing it you're signaling that you hate your country and public safety? It's no wonder people are scared to push back on invasive and discriminatory practices.
And don't handwaive away the real problem with children on social media. It's not good enough, not gonna cut it, there's strong consensus around fixing this big societal problem. Go ahead and blame the parents all you want - to a critical mass of people nowadays, it reads like the equivalent of blaming them for a 10 year old being let into a casino and getting addicted to slot machines. The debate will then just move on right past you because you're not being serious.
We need privacy-respecting age verification. It's not rocket science, it's just a matter of implementation. The bad actors - which are mostly bad by virtue of being ignorant - will win the debate if we're throwing hissy fits and telling parents to fuck off instead of coming up with constructive criticism of this approach to age verification.
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:
Those face scans are matching to the biometrics you’ve already provided to your own government when you obtained your modern passport.
My passport currently has a broken chip and I’ve been traveling extensively, so I need to go into the border guard queue every time I enter. It’s very annoying. And they take the face scan each time and their computer compares it to past images of my entry.
You can actually opt out of it. The guards will be a bit miffed but it is your right. In the EU the face scans are mandatory and the data will be retained.
There is a small sign in front of the facial scanner that says "Photo verification not required."
You can always say "I decline the photo verification", and they will check your license like back in the old days. This is what I have been doing for years now.
Things may not be quite so simple if your skin color is on the darker side, especially with the current administration. Doubly so if your passport shows you come from a country who's name ends in -stan.
All the previous administrations have extended the patriot act and other laws that enable warrantless spying and collecting data in the name of "security".
At Disneyland, there are separate park entrance lanes that don't use facial recognition software. I like that I can opt-out passively there.
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.
Yup. Most people are going to say "I have nothing to hide" and go with the flow. The ones who don't are signalling that perhaps they do have something to hide.
I don't see the point of opting out at an airport, of all places. They already know (or should know) the real names of everyone who's flying. Fully agree that facial recognition at an amusement park, or any private business, is egregious.
A while back I opened a bank account for my daughter. All that I needed was to scan my face, then the bank got everything from the department of home affairs (South Africa)
That means my goverment already has my face, with all my details associated with it. Bit Orwellian but there we are.
Perhaps we should distinguish between institutions that require strong identity (phone networks shouldn't be in this list but are, which is a separate argument) and institutions that really shouldn't, like random websites.
I hate that banks do that, right after that asinine Apple/Google monopoly proliferation. But “giving my face” to an institute where I was, since forever, required to submit a photo ID to join is a far cry from handing it over to earn the privilege of being exposed to whatever brainrotting garbage infests antisocial media these days…
If we're going to have self-censorship due to everything we say online tied to our real identity can we at least get some shiny buildings and high speed trains out of the deal too? I've been online since early 2000s internet and for all the soapboxing about freedom of speech over the years it seems a foregone conclusion that we'll get the same surveillance state as those other "less free" countries else without anything to show for it.
I verified my age with Apple by clicking one button and Apple said it assumed I was 18 based on the age of my Apple account (2011).
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.
A nicer way to say that is: "I can't decide whether to up vote or down vote you!"
There is real irony that we still use non-unique-to-purpose addressing to sign up for no-need-for-our-identity newsletters. In this case, in particular.
That makes perfect sense to me. I am sure the site's motives are fine, and yet the tech we still use is ridiculously aged and unsecure. Even on pro-security sites.
Yea u, me and few others, when they say it is must everyone will follow and give them even kids faces. cos majority of ppl are sheeps that are waiting for orders same as they did with covid vaccines. During covid at some point i had feeling that my cousins will tied me up and drag to hospital to get vaccine if authorities said yes, go, hunt unvaccinated
> It is not age verification. It is identity verification.
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 ...
Democracies building the tools of total autocracy. Real but fringe threats used to create the ultimate centralization of leverage.
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!
You can just lie by using someone else's ZKP. If that's not considered to be a problem, then the California approach of just asking the device owner is much better and you still don't need the ZKP.
Too late. I'm pretty sure it's already not allowed in many countries, including most of Europe.
They wanted to ban hijab/burka, but that would be discrimination, so they banned all face covers: ski masks, balaclavas, "V" plastic masks, motorcycle helmets when not driving one, everything.
It ends with "The platforms need you far more than you need them". And I think this is the misconception. No, they don't. The amount of people who will sign this, is a fraction of a fraction of a "platform"'s users. They will not care if they lose 50,000 users out of 2 Billion. A drop in the ocean. Not the target audience anyway.
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.
You are correct that your data isn't particularly impactful for these platforms - but you're also overestimating the value that many of these services have. A fair few of them have competitors with better features and privacy offerings so the only reason you need them is purely for the network effect of everyone else using them.
And increasingly, everyone isn’t using them, even if they’re on them.
I’m on Insta and WhatsApp and I use them a few times per year. I’m on Messenger and have seen a dramatic dropoff in messages. I’m on FB frequently and notice only a small fraction of my friends bother anymore and it’s become an interest platform to make up the lack, so I’m trending toward less time there. I’m on Twitter/X but check in maybe once a month.
I may not be a typical user, but I’m probably not unique either.
No, I don't think you're unique at all. I think this all tracks and applies to more and more of the general population.
These mainstream services no longer provide what people signed up for: life updates, pictures of kids and dogs, etc. These value-add posts are becoming less frequent because of/and are being replaced by streams of posts from people _you should follow_ or content they're pretty sure will rile you up about ... whatever. Generally, the people who are still active and whose posts slip through (because it's their only outlet) are effectively monkeys slinging shit (e.g. uncles posting AI slop memes about Barack Obama's suits).
It seems like younger generations have moved on to more silo'd experiences. I don't use TikTok but it's my understanding that it's more about connecting with people who share common interests (more akin to HN or Reddit) and not as much about connecting with your high school Spanish teacher who has gone full MAGA and whose posts you don't care to see and/or who you don't want seeing your posts and trolling you in the comments. This same cohort also seems to be spending much more time in private group chats and, for the most part, the platform doesn't seem to matter; it's just a message broker.
I'm very much like you. There are several apps that I use to communicate with a handful (or less) of people in the world. I see people on travel sites saying "Just use WhatsApp" and I'm more or less, yes it's installed on my phone and I use it with a couple people but it's certainly not something that most people I know use.
Probably something of a demographic (geography/age) thing.
I visit my facebook once a year and always regret it
The competitors will be also regulated. It’s a slippery slope.
Just because the network effect is why you need them doesn’t make that need go away.
It represents an increase in cost to use the service. Most such services have a wealth of competitors for your time and attention.
"Need" is an extremely strong word that is not appropriate for many Internet services where facial recognition is being pushed for.
If there is a substitute and I am not time constrained 100% i'm switching. But I've been in a situation already where a platform I'm using required me to face-up. I can't even remember which to be honest but I had no alternative or recourse to refuse. In addition, in the UK company directors are legaly required to face-up to Companies House and confirm their identity, so they have my face too. Ah, and so is every single CCTV camera around London. I don't know how to fight this particular battle.
Move from London, you have all of Europe to... nevermind.
Your pessimism is warranted. But there are places that are more welcoming still.
They arguably don't need any users as long as they can maintain the delusion of being important and especially present that delusion to politicians.
I think this kind of comment where you share the sentiment that you will ultimately admit defeat emboldens the factions that are hoping for people to be like you. I also think these kinds of comments may also bring doubt to people considering resisting these kinds of concessions.
In other words I think the people pushing these kinds of "identification" methods would love you for spreading their silent message of this being unavoidable knowingly or unknowingly.
Even if what you say is correct let's not make it easier for people wanting to enshittify the future, yeah?
I just wanted to tell you that I wholeheartedly agree with your statement and that you shouldn’t be discouraged by some of the nay-sayers in the replies. I feel that HN has many users who are techno-optimist, but are very pessimistic of the role of individuals and the possibilities of the society overall.
Even in the replies someone tries to appeal to some ideal of „rationalism“ which is nothing but defeatism to the status quo. They see any kind of passion, emotion or values as „irrational“ and categorically as something lesser.
But what is reason without values? Logic without axioms? Just treading in the trivial waters.
They won’t be emboldened by this comment, they will be emboldened when their internal data shows they aren’t losing users at a rate high enough to change their behavior.
Which will be partly because of this comment.
Are you really advocating for suppressing rational assessments for the likelihood of success because you think the analysis is too discouraging?
If you already agree the resistance will ultimately lead nowhere, why not focus that energy on something with a better chance of success? Best guess would be partnering with someone like the EFF for a solution through lobbying And the courts.
How have the EFF and the courts worked so far? We do need an EFF, but they're clearly not all that effective. And the courts just won't do anything unless someone does something illegal.
Is it all that rational?
If everyone thinks so, then surely yes, but if people realize, that change starts in the small and they can be part of the change, perhaps at some personal cost, but that it might be worth it, then suddenly change is possible.
If I have no choice, and no alternative, what can I do? I will never use an OS that require it on the OS level, and nobody can mandate it, not to a Linux user as myself - there will always be "another distro". But as a company director I have a legal requirement to verify my identity with my face. That's one. Every CCTV camera I pass by London, I assume is likely to have some soft of potential face recognition. Every transfer type transaction I do with my bank app requires me to face-up. So fine, I will skip Facebook or Instagram, but where will I get my cat-video dopamine fix?
I don't see myself as admitting defeat here. I'm choosing my battles. The gov here will drive this through as we're stuck with them until 2029. I'm considering (with a heavy heart) to leave the UK and this is just one nail in a coffin full of nails.
Leaving is unfortunately kind of the only option, but I worry other countries are just going to follow this process too.
There is a term for what you describe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
I find it strange for these people to accept such a defeatist attitude because I'm the opposite.
I mean I will just not use the service and I'll seek out alternatives that are open source or create my own. I'll do anything possible until I'm the last one standing if that's what it comes down too.
I tried to sign up to Telnyx and they had the same crap from an unreliable data-breach and being-litigated persona identifier. I passed on that.
I've already been going down this road as I've abandoned Google and some of the big cloud providers in favor of smaller companies who aren't pushing these policies.
It isn't hard to click cancel. It's just people favor convenience over their own freedom because they have never experienced not having freedom like our founder's did 250 years ago. The problem is once freedom is gone, getting it back requires blood spilled and political reforms and revolutions based on what history teaches us.
The British crown never gave away the control, it is just obfuscated through the British-owned offshore financial networks. The Epstein files make this abundantly clear.
We are currently ruled by the third generation of post-WW2 five eyes nepo kids, with all problems this entails. The feel-good narrative about US was spun by Hollywood, but the old money of British aristocracy never went away. All the "self-made billionaires" who receive a Lordship title from the King just so the commoners work even more because they think they have a fair shot.
If someone like Ghislaine Maxwell applies for a visa in their colony USA, she receives a vanity social security number "Leet Babe" (1337 84883).
I think the kind of comment you're making here is wishful thinking. Raging into the void and then getting mad when everyone doesn't do the same is not an effective way to force change. It's just an effective way to make you feel good.
It has never been about those platforms though. I could not care less if CIAbook or Instaspam or any of these other anti-social slop sites exist.
They want to force all operating systems to require age sniffing. That's the main angle right now. I am curiously watching how systemd will add more implementation details to this; probably as a first step only for commercial linux distributions.
This is a little bit of a tangent compared to the post, but can someone explain to me why it's NOW that we have multiple countries (USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and probably others that I am not aware of) all looking at age verification for a technology (the internet and all the things it lets you access) has existed for over 2 decades, and has been mature for at least 10 years? You could buy illicit drugs and watch porn on the internet since the 2000s, but it's NOW that we're legislating things (in incomprehensibly stupid and hopelessly unenforceable ways)?
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.
It's all caused by a Meta lobbying initiative across multiple countries as documented in https://tboteproject.com/ (sadly, the website is down right now), but you can find references e.g. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/the-tbote-project/
> ...jwz.org...
Holy fuck, man, visiting that with a HN referer serves up a rather NSFW rude image, and evidently sets a cookie to make sure it happens next time too.
replacement link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260401175031/https://www.jwz.o...
Not that NSFW, could do with a trim though ...
Art.
Archive of first link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260429210901/https://tboteproj...
Trying to put this all on Meta with a look at their 2025 lobbying spend is missing the point. The “think of the children” panic about the internet pre-dates this by years. Remember the debate around the TikTok ban? The states instituting laws about porn age checks pre-dates all of this too. I think trying to blame Meta is convenient because it’s easy to think there is just one villain coordinating everything, but the debate about children and the internet has been a spreading moral panic for years.
It's not only Meta though. People need to stop assuming Meta controls everything via its CIAbook. You see several actors behind that; which one contributes the most is an interesting detail, but ultimately it can be simplified to them planning Evil against The People.
Exactly, it's far bigger than Meta when the government's are pushing a larger agenda here.
The assumption is you have to control people to enforce laws. They keep pushing this notion that is a requirement to keep people safe. That somehow if we have big brother AI surveillance everyone will be on their best behavior.
Oracle, Palantir, Meta, and other mega billionaires push this agenda because who is going to stop them from controlling society and getting absurdly powerful and wealthy from it?
Global meetings (whether secret or not) where select people decide what to do next to minimize potential threats to their power. There isn't much more to it, really.
Not just minimize threats, but often to maximize their power.
Lobbyists do not just try to convince a politician that X is a good idea. Lobbyists give the politician money to introduce already drafted legislation, and then give other politicians money to support it. And if they can get the legislation passed in one place, they'll try it again.
The result is that suspiciously similar legislation appears in many places close in time, due to it being pushed by particular interests.
I'm not convinced this is about money as much as it is about blackmail, given how centralized data collection has become and how many intelligence agencies appear to have access to numerous 0-days for routinely gathering additional information. It could be both things as well.
What bothers me most isn't their corruption, but their apparent belief that it won't eventually affect them or their families - perhaps sooner than they think.
Nefarious actors will always attempt to institute these programs via well-meaning stooges
AI coming along is another “great opportunity” to try and force these programs
This has all been brewing for years. Remember the TikTok ban and all of the debates around it? We’ve been hearing news headlines about social media and kids for many years. The state level laws around porn site ID checks have been rolling in gradually for years, too.
There are always claims that is a shadowy cabal of world leaders coordinating in secret or that a specific corporation is lobbying to do it all, but the fact is that ID checking is oddly popular in theory to a lot of people who haven’t thought through the consequences. Check any thread on this topic on Hacker News where the idea is discussed in a way that makes it feel like it’s only for kids or only for Facebook and there’s a huge outpouring of support for the idea.
The topic only becomes unpopular when the actual consequences become apparent. For the Hacker News audience the popularity of these ideas does a complete U-turn as soon as the concept of ID checking extends to platforms we might use, like Reddit, Discord, or YouTube. When commenters think it’s only going to impact Facebook and TikTok they welcome ID checking laws with enthusiastic support.
Imo it definitely has to do with politicians and governments trying to appear strong on the topic of protecting kids from the harms of social media. I also believe a lot of it is well intentioned, albeit poorly executed
Rich people are panicking because they’ve seen a capital-poor country win a war with cheap drones and want to lock down as many technologies as they can, lest the ruled realize they can actually do something about their rulers.
I'm maybe a bit of an outlier here in that I do think that this is a genuine grassroots good faith effort to "protect the children" that does not have sinister ulterior motives. I know plenty of parents who have expressed enthusiasm for the idea of age-restricting websites.
"Why now" I think is pretty obvious -- the age limitations that exist currently are easily circumvented, but have given enough of a plausible deniability aspect that politicians have been able to skate by. There has been increasing research and media dedicated to the idea that there are aspects of the internet which we should be shielding children from. While many of this research is dubious, there's a rising moral panic around it.
The core of the problem is that there is no possible implementation of age verification that does not also require identity verification. In this I am in strong agreement with the article, but the use of paranoid and dramatic language as in this article only alienates people who find the conspiratorial tone to be reverse polarizing.
I agree only in the sense that Meta wants the OS to tell them the user’s age - BOTH for the ulterior motive of better ad targeting / fingerprinting, but also because shifting the liability gets the numerous current and future child safety lawsuits off the back.
This would be fine if it was actually done perfectly - ie. Devices get a signed ticket from the government identity provider, device can provides a cryptographically verifiable ticket to the site that its a valid identity and their age is within the $x age range but not tied to the user’s actual identity / document, and the device doesn’t ask the government identity provider to mint a new ticket each time it needs to attest (maybe 500 tickets are minted at a time and you auto renew 500 more each month)
However the likelihood of this actually being done correctly is slim to none.
I've been able to age restrict websites with my childrens' devices for years? Privately, on the device. The website side is pure moatism.
Yes but your approach requires parenting, which is unacceptable to many people with children.
The <meta name="rating"> html tag has existed since like the 90s. If you legitimately just want to 'protect the children' just enact legislation saying that adult content is responsible for setting this tag. Then parents can decide what their children can and can't see via browser settings. No giant biometric database, no invasive user mapping, no leaks, no creeping techno-feudalist state.
Collecting user biometric data and trying it to a nominally anonymous user identity is not required here.
This is 100% 'won't someone please think of the children' pearl clutching to hide what's actually going on - furthering control of the online exchange of ideas.
Crowd-based analysis of "the files" nearly went out of control, and they noticed how hard it is to identify social media users.
Only trust fund nepo kids from old money are allowed to have vanity social security numbers, multiple identities and scrubbed Wikipedia articles. The plebeians shall have only a single ID and use it to authenticate with every website.
I really want to know who else has a SSN starting with 1337.
It's because of Jonathan Haidt's book
I don't know who that is or which book you are talking about, because he has written many, it seems.
By all means don't provide any additional information on what you mean, what book, what it's about, what it has to do with this, or anything else.
It took me 30s to Google this guy's name and find his latest book on Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxious_Generation
Do not for a split second operate under the assumption that there aren't coordinating forces working on this. I know this trips the "conspiracy theories!!1!" flag in most people, but you can literally come up with organizations dedicated to things like this in mere seconds of googling. Here's a comment about US state-level coordination I made earlier, with a challenge to produce some examples that I then produced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065492
It happens at the national level too. I just did a simple Google search for "united nations committee to harmonize" [1] (no quotes in my search itself) and I count 5 or 6 committees explicitly dedicated to "harmonization" in the first ten results. And that's just the committees, you can count on each of them to have factions within (because politics, politics never changes) and outside forces competing and vying to get the "harmonizations" to favor them and disfavor their competitors. And as politics, politics never changes, paging Ron Perlman, these harmonization committees are unlikely to flinch away from "harmonizing" entirely new rules into existence... which, again, with not all that much searching you can easily find examples of them stating outright.
And the forces trying to influence those committees, are not all just sitting out in the public with some .org website with their true mission stated clearly above the fold. And I just use these UN committees, which are themselves literally the result of one search and a few seconds scrolling through the search page and anything but a complete list, as plain and obvious public examples operating in public for at least nominally good purposes. Nothing stops anyone from buying politicians in multiple countries at a time to push through something like age verification directly, without being open about who they are.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=united+nations+committ...
I personally don't think there are many people left yelling "conspiracy" when you say that globalized decisions are being pushed, especially if you've been alive for the last 10 years. Nowadays it's more about who is actually making these decisions and that discussion gets muddy quickly.
Making it more difficult to access social media for Adults to access social media isn't detrimental.
Because it’s been building for a while, and (in my opinion) because it’s not a major traffic generating topic on builder focused sites like HN.
The most proximate domino was the Australian social media ban. Australia was already a country known to experiment with ways to deal with social media - see the news fee they imposed on platforms.
Behind that was the build up of negative outcomes from social media for kids, and adults.
The harms are not something I tend to find actively discussed on HN; I assume because more people are interested in building the next thing, not digging into the trust and safety details.
Customer safety and support are also not going to get anyone promoted in tech. These are cost centers and will often stand in the way of addictive design.
Meta executives were nailed precisely for greenlighting designs their own teams told them were harmful for teens.
At the same time, there is lobbying going on by these firms, to push the burden of verification to someone else.
However, the degree of harm being caused by social media meant we were always going to see voter backlash.
Combination of factors, but mostly because Meta is pushing it globally: https://www.reuters.com/world/meta-lobbies-congress-protecti...
One would think that after the Burma genocide the millionaires at Meta would have learned a lesson and keep their fingers out of politics.
Honestly? I think it's because Elon Musk pissed a bunch of bureaucrats off by buying X and being more permissive about what was allowed. Then came claims that AI porn or something was on X which is a vague claim. People say it was Meta lobbying but that's not it. Meta lobbied to have ID done at the operating system. The lobby for ID was already effective and on its way before that. The actual lobby doesn't seem to be popular at all. It's just some NGOs no one has heard of that support restrictions for porn. The same language popped up on three continents at once. I just don't think this is a grass roots campaign and I don't think corporations drove it either. Ultimately, I think governments decided that unregulated information/anonymity is a threat to their power.
Social media was unleashed onto the world with no harm studies or thought for the long term impact.
Now we’re catching up and realizing how bad it is.
For a similar case, see tasers in Canada after a handcuffed immigrant was killed by one. The question came up “how were tasers certified safe for humans?”. The answer was “they weren’t. A private company just started selling them to police forces who just started using them.”
Tasers are bad is your example? cops should go back to clubbing people over the head I suppose? - Remember all metaphors are bad.
> can someone explain to me why it's NOW that we have multiple countries
Because there are actors pushing for this. And they let money flow, so the lobbyists work.
People think lobbyists don't do this? Well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...
These lobbyists were dumb. You can be certain that some lobbyists are so efficient that detecting them reliably is very difficult. Even more so when private media is controlled by a few billionaires who are "in" on the system.
I like that how in the same place that they have been trying to "protect the children" for like a decade [1], they have also had a real rape gang epidemic. It's almost like they are, in fact, not really trying to protect the children.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_age_verification_in_the...
Can't we even write a short text like this without LLMs anymore, not even when it's really important, when it's about humans against the inhumane?
I think it is great that people point out LLM generated articles here on HN. Sadly, it feels like I am slowly loosing my skill to identify LLM speak. Maybe I am getting worn out of all LLM content... So, please, list the indicators and telltale signs from the specific article or blog post (like others have done here already). At least I would appreciate it a lot.
> It is not age verification. It is identity verification.
> You can change a password. You cannot change your face.
> This is not a popularity contest, and refusal is not a vote you are trying to win
These were a couple sentences that were immediate flags to me. There've been countless articles written on this (I can dig them up if you want), but IMO there are pretty clear semantic rhythms you start to notice.
It is not foo, it is bar. You can zip, you cannot zap.
The multiple uses of "it's worth X" made me question the authorship, for one
I hear you — and the problem is real
Your comment fills a genuine gap
Honest answer -- you're right.
it's wild to me how many AI written articles get front page on HN
I'm always amazed too. I waste so much time clicking on links like that only to find slop that just wastes my time.
I'm guessing a huge number of people never even bother to click on the article and just comment based on the title, so there's that. Then there's cases where they are sympathetic to the subject or opinion and talk about that in the comments and ignore that the machine-written article doesn't actually contribute to the conversation at all.
Here is the trick:
Im sure a lot of people know about tor on this site...but let me remind everyone.
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.
iCloud private relay has done more in just a few years than Tor ever has, by being opt-out for iOS users instead of opt-in like Tor. Now platforms can’t rely on IP based reputation, instead relying on either a computational challenge (Cloudflare, Anubis) or de-anonymization (recaptcha relying on being signed into a Google account more than anything, especially when using private relay).
That wasn't meant to be an argument against other privacy protecting technologies. I'll take them all. Although you can't just compare apples to apples when you speak of close sources technology. I applaud apple for the long held stance of privacy protections.
And to be fair, tor comes at the price of speed. But convince isn't the only thing in the math equation here. Privacy basically boils down to a three part equation these days with the variables being Speed/Convenience.
A lot of that speed and convince can be made up for with being familiar with the tools and adapting to a new norm. The actual network speed isn't really that bad comparatively.
I'm using Tor right now! Everyone should. It's too bad that many websites block it, but most of those websites are slop anyway.
Everyone should study the basics on a server backend and full stack web.
If you can master what it takes to design and run your site on localhost....you are literally one step away from sharing it with anyone on the planet who has internet access for zero dollars because of the power of tor, and the global network that supports it.
The reality is, there is no gate there, just the knowledge of how to do it.
Tor is first and foremost a router.
Sites that block tor IP's do happen, this is because of the dual use nature of the technology. Its also well suited for abuse.
Tor is very much for US overseas intelligence operatives, among other things.
That is who it was created for.
Yet the same technology that protects them, protects the everyday Joe.
The binaries do not discriminate.
Tor is not for criminals. It's for you and me.
No. Tor is for the CIA. It won't work for them unless we use it as well. Criminals also find it useful.
It's easy to verify this. Tor was originally written by Paul Syverson, Michael G. Reed, and David Goldschlag. While all three were working at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
Yes, that's what it was created for. The internet was created by DARPA and happened to be useful for other things
These are the origins of Tor yes. The same technology that protects the spy, protects the journalist, or the citizen whose government blocked them, or placed a wall of ID verification checks.
I encourage everyone to learn about the origins. Even study these people and what they have said in the past. Don't for get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Mathewson.
Nah, those people use plaintext Gmail as Epstein demonstrated.
Your face is already everwhere. Your supermarket records it as you check out. Every retailer records it as you enter the store. The state has it. The Federal government has it if you have a passport or other federal ID. Your mortgage company probably required it when you digitally "signed" your loan application. Socials have it from all the selfies you've posted. It's a lost cause.
There is actually a way to prove the age anonymously. Yubikey-like devices support attestation - they can have a private key proving authenticity of a device.
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.
The problem with that is, parents be like:
>Here kid, take my key, go get me some beer.
Everyone everywhere gets forced to deal with bullshit, then the people it is supposed to be protecting circumvent it directly.
When I was 8 or 9, my Father would often give me 50p to go down to the nearby pub to get him 20 cigarettes and a half-pound bar of chocolate, which came to 48p. Always "and where's my change then?" when I returned. Tight git.
The same can happen with any type of authentication, unless you are ok with someone pointing a webcam and authenticating you non stop.
No, I think there are parents who would find a long enough webcam cable to point the cam at themselves while Jeff Epstein is grooming their kids in roblox.
The core point is that it isn't my responsiblity to take care of your children. When less than half of millennials (40% men, 55% women) have children, the "think of the children" catchphrase really starts to fall flat. Why should I think of the children? I don't even have children. It's the parents' problem, not mine. Stop making it my problem.
I agree 100% with the message and think we should strive to reject this kind of gathering wherever possible, but it feels like the horse is already out of the barn insofar as each and every one of our faces being out there. Hell, we have entire states where people can't watch porn without uploading their ID. The inertia is such that (I'm in the U.S.) we really need a constitutional amendment at this point to stop this.
New privacy legislation is about 20 years overdue. Between age verification, privately owned national camera networks, and above all else, data brokers, citizens need to reassert their right to anonymity.
In the face of government hostility, at least we here can make more tools like Signal or at least choose not to feed customer data to the beast.
New people are born every day whose faces necessarily are not out there.
> We run background checks on people who want to buy a gun, but we do not background check everyone at all times just in case.
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.
Who runs this site? There doesn't appear to be any information on this. A whois search returns nothing illuminating.
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."
I just have obs with a video of mkbhd downloaded playing in a loop, whenever I am asked for age verification I just start the virtual camera, select it at the age verification website and it immediately passes it (most of the time). MKBHD was just the first person that I could come up with that records extremely high res video.
Please post how to do this. Maybe we can combine it with something like https://this-person-does-not-exist.com/en and video generation?
idk, youtube worked a lot better than any avatar. I tried avatars at first with little success.
and you don't need any guide it's dead simple:
then just select it when prompted in browser.The left/right movements are sort of a meme for most checkers and just pass randomly, the ones that need you to open your mouth get bypassed by them talking in the video.
I have yet to receive my federal tax refund because I submitted my taxes through a preparation service and, thinking that physical checks were still an option (the tax software didn't tell me otherwise), I did not give the federal government an ACH account number for direct deposit. The IRS then told me I'd have to open an account to update/provide direct deposit info, which in turn requires me to register with ID.me to create an account. ID.me has an obnoxious signup policy which includes sending them a boatload of documentation, and a headshot. I'm not doing it. So to date, I have yet to receive my federal refund.
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.
[delayed]
So does this mean that, say, Apple actually doesn't have access to our FaceID data? Otherwise there'd be no need for no laws: just force Apple, Google, etc to share face information with "the government". Well, I guess technically "they" would probably need some kind of law to do this anyway. I feel like tons of people use various kinds of FaceID-type technologies for unlocking their phones, laptops, etc. So it would make sense if "they" already had all of our faces.
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.
Face unlock on iPhone is completely on-device. This is why you have to set it up again every time you buy a new device.
Age assurance is the law in California and age verification is illegal in California. We should push more jurisdictions to adopt this model. While many age verification laws are malicious mass surveillance, some are because politicians didn't see a better option.
I will give them faces, just not my faces.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45081323
How is this different from sending my government ID to access things like Stripe, Robin Hood, etc?
It seems that without legal obligation things will continue to go this route.
Here in the US, there’s a giant database of faces the government uses to ID people with an app. In the UK, they want this same level of invasive policing. Technology will always be used nefariously by police agencies until someone stops them, which no one will. No one, politically, wants to come out and “restrain policing” but that’s how the rich will position it so they can sell more flock cameras, more app platforms, more tech to the ever bottomless pockets of government. We are in a Thiel world.
The phrase "people will not just [...]" comes to mind here.
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-...
Good heavens, the comments on that article make me want to vomit:
"Thanks to people with your mindset our streets and borders are not as safe as they should be."
This option is made freely available to passengers, but by choosing it you're signaling that you hate your country and public safety? It's no wonder people are scared to push back on invasive and discriminatory practices.
I found the signs to be hard to find and poorly placed.
But since I knew about it before traveling, I just said no photo please and it was pretty frictionless.
The people behind me did not even realize you could say no, and no one really wants to be late for their flight.
Make the sign bigger. Its not a good test in my view.
The TSA already knows what your face looks like, though.
This and every post like it hurts the cause. Don't argue "Resist!" like a child, argue with an alternative.
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.
And don't handwaive away the real problem with children on social media. It's not good enough, not gonna cut it, there's strong consensus around fixing this big societal problem. Go ahead and blame the parents all you want - to a critical mass of people nowadays, it reads like the equivalent of blaming them for a 10 year old being let into a casino and getting addicted to slot machines. The debate will then just move on right past you because you're not being serious.
We need privacy-respecting age verification. It's not rocket science, it's just a matter of implementation. The bad actors - which are mostly bad by virtue of being ignorant - will win the debate if we're throwing hissy fits and telling parents to fuck off instead of coming up with constructive criticism of this approach to age verification.
I.....
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.
Those face scans are matching to the biometrics you’ve already provided to your own government when you obtained your modern passport.
My passport currently has a broken chip and I’ve been traveling extensively, so I need to go into the border guard queue every time I enter. It’s very annoying. And they take the face scan each time and their computer compares it to past images of my entry.
Same in the USA I believe.
You can actually opt out of it. The guards will be a bit miffed but it is your right. In the EU the face scans are mandatory and the data will be retained.
Only regulation can solve such issue.
However, our government is very weak....
Is there even an option at the airport to refuse face scanning? I assume that signs you up for a one way trip to a cavity search.
TSA does it, Customs does it when entering the USA after a trip too.
There is a small sign in front of the facial scanner that says "Photo verification not required."
You can always say "I decline the photo verification", and they will check your license like back in the old days. This is what I have been doing for years now.
Things may not be quite so simple if your skin color is on the darker side, especially with the current administration. Doubly so if your passport shows you come from a country who's name ends in -stan.
All the previous administrations have extended the patriot act and other laws that enable warrantless spying and collecting data in the name of "security".
Pure conjecture, Reddit-coded, seal-clapping bait.
So far I’ve been fine politely declining. Haven’t been back to the US in a while though.
At Disneyland, there are separate park entrance lanes that don't use facial recognition software. I like that I can opt-out passively there.
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.
Yup. Most people are going to say "I have nothing to hide" and go with the flow. The ones who don't are signalling that perhaps they do have something to hide.
Last time I opted out at the (edit: TSA) scan, a number of people behind me followed suit.
I enjoyed that. I will remember to opt out again.
I don't see the point of opting out at an airport, of all places. They already know (or should know) the real names of everyone who's flying. Fully agree that facial recognition at an amusement park, or any private business, is egregious.
A while back I opened a bank account for my daughter. All that I needed was to scan my face, then the bank got everything from the department of home affairs (South Africa)
That means my goverment already has my face, with all my details associated with it. Bit Orwellian but there we are.
I completely agree with this, but my banking apps, my broker, my health insurance, my simcard provider all already require my face for identification.
Perhaps we should distinguish between institutions that require strong identity (phone networks shouldn't be in this list but are, which is a separate argument) and institutions that really shouldn't, like random websites.
FYI the processing for FaceID on iPhones is entirely offline. I think the Samsung androids have offline face id as well.
I hate that banks do that, right after that asinine Apple/Google monopoly proliferation. But “giving my face” to an institute where I was, since forever, required to submit a photo ID to join is a far cry from handing it over to earn the privilege of being exposed to whatever brainrotting garbage infests antisocial media these days…
Well-monied providers will steal it, perhaps with the courtesy of a buried and penalized opt-out.
it may benefit: children, social media, marketing, police state, ai, data brokers, and many others
does it benefit you?
If we're going to have self-censorship due to everything we say online tied to our real identity can we at least get some shiny buildings and high speed trains out of the deal too? I've been online since early 2000s internet and for all the soapboxing about freedom of speech over the years it seems a foregone conclusion that we'll get the same surveillance state as those other "less free" countries else without anything to show for it.
You can have all that if you immigrate to China.
They already have your face.
Yeah, "they" probably simply have our FaceID data that we're willingly collecting ourselves, supposedly for our own security.
Face ID is entirely on device and it is cryptographically difficult to extract the data even with a jailbroken device.
Well, hopefully this is indeed the case!
Who is the author?
Either Claude van Code or Chad McGpt.
Wow both of these guys are prolific writers. I see them everywhere
I verified my age with Apple by clicking one button and Apple said it assumed I was 18 based on the age of my Apple account (2011).
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.
Yeah. Suddenly those piles of Apple accounts lying around seem a bit more useful.
I particularly like the form at the bottom for collecting your email address and adding it to a big list.
EDIT: looks like it's gone now. Gonna count that as a win.
Don't be fucking stupid equating these 2 things together
A nicer way to say that is: "I can't decide whether to up vote or down vote you!"
There is real irony that we still use non-unique-to-purpose addressing to sign up for no-need-for-our-identity newsletters. In this case, in particular.
I would personally be much happier sharing that link with others if it did not have the information-collecting form.
That makes perfect sense to me. I am sure the site's motives are fine, and yet the tech we still use is ridiculously aged and unsecure. Even on pro-security sites.
sry but at first, I thought it was about Anthropic's authentication.
Yea u, me and few others, when they say it is must everyone will follow and give them even kids faces. cos majority of ppl are sheeps that are waiting for orders same as they did with covid vaccines. During covid at some point i had feeling that my cousins will tied me up and drag to hospital to get vaccine if authorities said yes, go, hunt unvaccinated
> It is not age verification. It is identity verification.
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 ...
Democracies building the tools of total autocracy. Real but fringe threats used to create the ultimate centralization of leverage.
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!
You can just lie by using someone else's ZKP. If that's not considered to be a problem, then the California approach of just asking the device owner is much better and you still don't need the ZKP.
I am fine with device vouched sessions. That protect my and my devices' identities.
> You can just lie by using someone else's ZKP.
Yes, it is trivial to share access/identity, purposely or carelessly.
Not sure what point you are making, since that isn't specific to ZKP.
If it's not ZK you can get arrested for sharing it
I assume you more likely? Since legal liability would be the same.
Logs of identity vs. access history being useful for investigating sharing? What kind of logs does California State keep?
ZKP: Zero Knowledge Proof, for the unfamiliar.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof>
Can we start a trend of wearing ski masks and other face coverings in public?
Too late. I'm pretty sure it's already not allowed in many countries, including most of Europe.
They wanted to ban hijab/burka, but that would be discrimination, so they banned all face covers: ski masks, balaclavas, "V" plastic masks, motorcycle helmets when not driving one, everything.
Sounds miserable in summer. Let's start a trend of removing cameras from public spaces instead.
Has it ever occurred to you that this is intentional?
All those Bilderberg and WEF forums and Peter Thiel's Dialog Club are not for nothing