As the years have marched on, though, that "birthdate" becomes significantly closer to my real birthday.
I understand there's a clever phrasing here but I didn't get it. English is only my second language.
I feel time has gone faster since I got a job, if that makes sense. Every day yearning for it to be 5o clock so I can check out, every week yearning for the weekend, every month yearning for the last day to get paid. Doing this is just asking for time to be over sooner.
I am fully aware that my standard fake birthday is now used by me in some many places, that I have started to have a fake fake birhday. I should really just randomise and store it in my password manager.
But obviously the context of this OP story ruins all that.
I'd be curious how that might work as I haven't yet seen a zero-trust age verification system.
https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/d...
Instead, they didn't know much about me apparently and just stored what I told them.
Then it appears they were hacked because some completely unrelated release of stolen data included all my data, specifically all that data I had provided to that service, that one time.
The Verification Service is the honeypot for your private information. Arg.
I'm the sort of person that either rejects the cookies, or will use another site entirely to avoid some weird dark-pattern cookie trickery. I don't like the idea of any particular service getting more information than they should.
Siting there I realized, we were not the real target. It is the young people that are growing up conditioned to press accept, enter any details asked of them, and to not value their personal data. Sadly, the damage is already done.
I don't even think it would be even a blip on the radar now.
It really is depressing how much ground we've given.
My local library is run by the county government, so of course the government can see the checkouts, they are the ones I check the book out from. But they restrict checkout information from others. For example, a parent can see the checkouts of their own children, but not after they turn 13.
Perhaps you're talking about subpoenas? Checking some other libraries I see SF Public Library has some discussion about that, but they delete books from your checkout history once they are returned. https://sfpl.org/about-us/confidentiality-and-usa-patriot-ac...
It’s naive to think that cookies are the only tool used for tracking, but they are the most powerful tool for web based tracking.
Accept everything, the end the session.
That said even with throwaway relay emails I don't sign up to much
There is a similar story with Ford and how they build pavement everywhere and taught the young population that roads are for cars. Now we have to drive for 10 minutes to get from one shop on the plaza to another shop on the different plaza.
To the sibling comments: don't "accept the cookies" and then delete them.
- - -
I'm super angry at what the web has become, especially at the OS browser community. There is 0 browser (that I know of) that can access the web safely and conveniently. Atm I use Firefox with uBlock which blocks the cookie banners, but Firefox's extension model is broken, and every single extension provides 100% access to my websites to whoever controls the extension. I don't like it.
We need a browser with a safe extension model.
Browsers should provide a filtering option before they makes a request.
IMO a lot of no-brainer options are missing from personal computers. Like the ability to start a program with restricted access to files, network or OS calls (on Windows and on Linux). Browsers should provide the ability to inspect, and filter network access, run custom javascript on websites, etc.
At some point, you have to implicitly trust someone unless you audit every line of code (or write it yourself) and build everything from source that you run.
What makes it worse is that a substantial portion of users block web trackers through an adblocker. However on phones, unless you have a rooted phone or use some DNS-based blocker, all these analytics get uploaded without restraint.
Atm I use Firefox with uBlock which blocks the cookie banners, but Firefox's extension model is broken, and every single extension provides 100% access to my websites to whoever controls the extension. I don't like it.
Some browsers (e.g. Vanadium, Vivaldi) have a built-in adblocker, so you have to trust one party less.
But the browser also has 100% access to all of the websites. The browser is software that works for you. You control the browser.
Who but yourself do you imagine controls your extensions?
It's really alarming, actually. I run the cyber security training & phishing simulations at my work, and it's the younger employees that struggle the most. It's like they just assume that everything on the web is trustworthy.
It's not hard to see why though. They grew up with app stores & locked down devices. No concept of a file or file system, no concept of software outside of the curated store & webapps. People that never had to take responsibility for their own digital safety because "someone else" (Google, Apple) always did it for them.
It was also drilled into me that the default state of anything on the internet is to be untrusted and potentially harmful.
It also helped that you could actually tinker with things, and there were plenty of foot guns around to drill that lesson home.
Somewhere along the way that message got lost and didn't get communicated to the young ones, and I'm not even that old (38).
No other prior generation comes close.
Compare them to people growing up in the 1980s. The average person at that time was overwhelmingly oblivious to computing very broadly, their grasp of a "file" as a concept would have been close to non-existent. That was just 40 years ago.
In the mid 1980s a mere 10% of US households had home computers. And that was a high mark globally, it was drastically lower in nearly every other country (closer to zero in eg China, India at that time). The number of people routinely using office PCs was still extremely low.
Today young people have a computer in their hand for hours each day, and they knowingly manage files throughout the day.
They know app silos, not file system hierarchy. Ask a teenager where a file is on their phone and the will tell you the name of an app. Ask them how to copy it somewhere else, and they'll use the share sheet and send it to another app.
High adoption doesn't equate to high literacy.
To be fair, at least Android and presumably iOS grant apps by default no access to your files in modern versions.
The only way to get, e. G., an attachment downloaded via Thunderbird to a PC or another app is the share dialogue. A user does not access to the isolated app storage by default on an unrooted Android phone. For better or worse the young user is actually making the right choice here for their platform.
(This is also why making a backup of an Android phone is a nightmare when you aren't using a first party option. ADB is sometimes able to bypass it)
My kids will know way less about filesystems than I do, because I had to learn DOS commands to navigate around the operating system if I wanted to play computer games, which led to a lifelong interest in how computers actually work at a level they can (and, so far, do) happily ignore.
And easily get sold add-on services. How many people hit the 5GB iCloud limit for backups and just pay without stopping to think that it might be possible to do local backups to your computer and you don't really have to pay for extra storage?
Just hit them with the scary language "You are at risk of losing your photos forever if you don't pay!" because that concept of "Oh, photos are just files in a directory and I can copy those anywhere I want" doesn't exist. To many, those photos are part of the gallery app, not a separate file from it and since that app only runs on the phone, surely it must not be possible to copy them anywhere unless I pay for the storage.
> It's not hard to see why though. They grew up with app stores & locked down devices.
When we create a safer world, people’s defense mechanisms naturally atrophy or are never developed in the first place.
In the early aughts I was sitting in on privacy discussions that reluctantly acknowledged that regardless of what we do online, surveys showed you could offer someone at the mall a free Snickers and they'd fill out the whole form.
The perceived cost to the individual of divulging their personal data is near zero; dangling nearly any incentive in front of them will induce them to let it go. And that's not a new phenomenon.
It's technically public information, so collecting Ids is legal, but it's also a universal primary key within the country that allows merging any user-related table you run into.
Retail says it's just to associate it with receipts in case you need that later, but I'd rather just get a photo of the printed receipt for later than rely on them to find my receipt. Supermarkets, Drug stores, and petrol stations tie it to (possible) discounts or points at check-out, which is price discrimination and it's illegal, but we are in our way to get surge pricing as soon as the new US bootlicker president begins his period next week.
But now instead, my 11 year old's Roblox thinks she is 18 because she wore glasses in their age verification webcam tool. And it can't be changed unless she uploads a passport, which I will never allow.
Please, gov.uk introduce a gov ID verification service? I could trust that, -ish, I have worked with public sector clients several times...
Because of this, I found it odd that the regulation allows displaying the accept cookies button. Instead, it should be rejecting cookies by default and a separate flow to accept tracking cookies (e.g. via account settings page)
and remember its like ratchet. there might be 99% of services that use inhouse face id, and its enough to have only one to leak your data.
Pretty much sums up all modern discourse in banning social media and doing age checks. When I was growing up it was satanic symbols in the music I listened to.
I guess - wtf is wrong with adults? Why do they feel compelled to control the younger generation?
Offline there is a reason for that, online are enough countries where it breaks the law if you sell without verification at least for NC-17 titles
I suppose idea is that Chinese women will stay at home with the child so the state doesn't have to provide any help?
On one other occasion I walked with my child (again from the bus) until we got to our own property, then my child and I parted ways while my child walked the long road (our private road) around. A Karen pulled up and interrogated our child for being outside "alone" and I had to intervene before they could resort to calling the authorities.
Either of these anecdotes were absolutely unheard of when I was a kid. I would literally walk around all day alone with a real, loaded gun hunting animals on many occasion including on public roads starting around age 7. I cannot imagine what would happen if you let a kid do that today.
And then there was the other time, I took my child to the park, and the police were called on me, because apparently it is "suspicious" for a child to be out and about with a man of a different race (yes I FOIAd the body cam). I was detained under suspicion of kidnapping while the police terrified me and my child. When I was a kid the police wouldn't get called because the father would never bother accompanying their child to the park. After I was released I just drove off and took her inside to watch youtube.
None of those are true in my area, and how did the "Karen" even get to your child on your private road?
The park incident happened in a very liberal, rich area and the rest happened in very conservative area. The only place I've lived where the Karens and nanny state CPS stuff doesn't seem to penetrate well is black working class neighborhoods because there are so many working single moms that the Karens literally don't have enough hours in the day to snitch out all the "unsupervised" kids playing outside and the balance finally tilts hard enough the kids can have some age appropriate independence
Outside of that, there's increased traffic and the US as a whole is way too car centric. Suburbs are horribly designed, and we prioritize moving cars instead of moving people, and any kind of infrastructure design that might slow down traffic, reduce the need to drive, or mildly inconvenience a driver gets shot down.
There is a very real danger of getting killed by a distracted idiot in a car, and that risk is much higher today. I commute on I5 every day for work and every single day I see multiple people, going 80MPH watching tiktoks on their phone on the dash mount, or obviously looking down texting. I can't blame anyone for not wanting their kids running around the neighborhood when we can't even be responsible enough to pay attention when we are driving 2 ton death machines.
(In the US, the latter occurs more often than you may expect.)
I'm in the UK, I'm normally connected through a VPN these days.
1 - 1 - 1970 is always mine - Unix zero
> And… the answer is “none”.
> At least, none that I can think of at the moment.
Think back to the recent pandemic.
Work? Online. School? Online. Recreational activities? Online. Talking to loved ones you don’t live with? Online. Birthday party? Online. Nonfood shopping? Online. Banking? Paying taxes and bills? Online. Job interview? Doctors appointment? Online. Dating? You guessed it, online.
The internet’s a big thing these days.
Very few of the things you list are things that I do primarily online (even during the pandemic), and none of those are things that I can only do online.
The author here seems to be commenting specifically on the type of anonymity-breaking age assurance widely being utilized along with the vaguely justified social media bans. Given the right technology to prove an age threshold but while preserving anonymity I'd be curious how their thoughts would change.
For example, we've never seen people critiquing the naive kind of 'Are you over 18?' prompts seen on ye olde Reddit or adult sites, precisely because those weren't breaking anonymity or leaking any trackable identifiers.
The question I'd ask myself is; who would _I_ trust to implement privacy preserving verification?
The only answer I can come up with right now is; myself. I would trust myself.
All this is to facilitate that lifestyle without any concerns that far more damage is likely to happen by allowing it to happen than insisting on adequate parenting
France has an ID service to pay taxes, and they have a network of possible ID verification systems. Like, you can ID through the tax system, or through the healthcare system. It works fine.
Implementing an API that uses the same to provide age verification is not rocket science.
If you need age verification for a website, say "smedia.fr", then you go there, then it makes you get an age verification token to "franceid.gov.fr", that guy gives you back a token, you send the token to smedia.fr which checks the token with franceid.gov.fr
I don't understand how this is even an issue.
It's honestly a reason why I don't use the service.
I can't think of a single other use case in which I'd be willing to verify my identity. I'd rather go back to hosting email myself, and am fine with circumventing content access control for all other platforms for personal use.
We're seeing the world slide towards authoritarian strongmen, and we want to give them a massive index of who we are and what we do? I'd rather not.
So many aspects of our lives are like this now. People just accept defeat cuz it would mean giving up one click ordering or free return shipping or they might have to look at labels to avoid bad companies.
I've run ad blockers for years now, but I'm still trying to forget those disgusting zit popping pictures that trended in ads for a while. Or those incredibly stupid life hack shorts, like the one where someone tied a cord around a mug and the hack to get it loose was smashing the cup... that crap made me despair for humanity as much as the Gaza genocide.
But google and facebook convinced the legislators that it would be impossible to keep that chum away from kids on their platform, so the legislators are going with the next option: banning the kids from the platforms.
What I think must result is, a monotonic cultural erosion and deprecation of such platforms and regions implementing those restrictions, and continuous replacement with engineered and packaged foreign imports from venues and regions from psychological "upstream" where there aren't such restrictions. But I guess that's what they explicitly desire.
If none, you were born on March 5, 1957.
(Note on evaluating this: there are some circumstances where the penalty changes later. I know one person who's Global Access paperwork was delayed because they lied to their airline's frequent flyer program about their age. But that was the whole consequence: a need to update their data with the airline).
Banking, taxes, treasurydirect, linkedin, docusign, online filing,
Right now all those are tied to my gmail account.
So I'm feeding google all this juicy (IMO) confidential information. What happens when I get locked out by google's automatic systems? I already lost my first gmail account from like 2003, when you had to get an invite to sign up. I'm stuck in a verification loop that emails a yahoo email that no longer exists. Impossible to get a real person to look at it.
If I can just verify that I am who I say I am without an email account... That'd be worth it. Of course that just shifts the burden to the identity verification company rather than an email company.
But verifying my age? I see no purpose other than a backdoor for mass identity verification. keeping lists of people and what they're accessing. Buying alcohol online still requires the person accepting the package to be over 21. Buying firearms online still requires being shipped to an FFL.
I already despise how much information my ISP has about what I see, what I access, and when.
Weigh that against the value of using the service. A lot of times that will still probably come out in favor of using the service. Sometimes, especially given the kind of services that want age verification, the potential cost is such that you would be insane to verify.
(“what will be the impact to me”)
It's roughly the same age as mine, but if someone tried to pass themselves off as me with that birthdate, they wouldn't succeed.
These companies are mostly just verifying I'm an adult anyway, and I am legit that.
But yeah, I don't like just giving the actual date everywhere as it can potentially be used for identity theft.
jjgreen•1h ago