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I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

neilzone.co.uk

71–80 of 645 posts

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#71
post #6

I was sitting in a room the other day with a young adult, we were searching for additional algorithm learning materials. They searched in Google, and accept the cookies. They clicked on a website, and accepted those cookies too. They then started entering their email address to access another service. I was completely taken aback. I'm the sort of person that either rejects the cookies, or will use another site entire…

I do this, more or less, although I am a bit older. It's not as if I enter my real name, address, or email at every opportunity, but there is really no perceptible feedback loop that would force one to contemplate the consequences. I visit my local news site and the first thing I see is a massive cookie banner which lists over a thousand third-party vendors and asks me to either "Accept all", or if I am being prudent, click adjacent button called "Choose" to go to another page, then manually untick dozens of tracker categories, and then click "Allow selection". Whatever I chose, it wouldn't have any tangible impact on my life. I simply do not care.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#72
post #6

I was sitting in a room the other day with a young adult, we were searching for additional algorithm learning materials. They searched in Google, and accept the cookies. They clicked on a website, and accepted those cookies too. They then started entering their email address to access another service. I was completely taken aback. I'm the sort of person that either rejects the cookies, or will use another site entire…

I've been saying this for years. GDPR and Cookie Law were created for big corporations to legitimise data trade where before it was grey area. Now they get consent as people blindly click accept and they can make money. It was never about privacy.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#73
post #6

I was sitting in a room the other day with a young adult, we were searching for additional algorithm learning materials. They searched in Google, and accept the cookies. They clicked on a website, and accepted those cookies too. They then started entering their email address to access another service. I was completely taken aback. I'm the sort of person that either rejects the cookies, or will use another site entire…

> It is the young people that are growing up conditioned to press accept 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,…

Maybe we should make young learners in primary school use "infected" Windows XP so they can dodge spam popups and learn what and what not to click.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#74
post #6

I was sitting in a room the other day with a young adult, we were searching for additional algorithm learning materials. They searched in Google, and accept the cookies. They clicked on a website, and accepted those cookies too. They then started entering their email address to access another service. I was completely taken aback. I'm the sort of person that either rejects the cookies, or will use another site entire…

Does it even actually matter what you do? How many lawsuits/investigations have there been in the last decade revealing that some company or another that swore up and down was following privacy laws, protecting your data, and not selling it actually were. I'm at the point where I figure anyone who wants to track me is, and any privacy pop-ups or the like are just for show.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#75
We’ve had age verification for decades. It just depends on specifically what is being verified. Congress passed Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act back in 1998, that basically made it extremely tedious for websites to serve children under 13 years of age. How did everyone manage this in the early 2000s? Every child simply lied to the website with an incorrect birthdate. Now that was before real name policy was instituted by social networks and it was also common for people to provide a false name to websites. This approach of “asking the user for a birthdate and accepting it as true” is the only age verification method that’s sane.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#76
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like the state (at least in places like USA) cracked down on children roaming freely so now people hide their kids inside playing video games so a Karen doesn't call CPS when mommy has other things to do all day besides play helicopter parent staring down at their kid all day.

Is there any hard evidence that this is true compared to say 20 years ago. I’ve heard it repeated a million times but no one’s ever provided evidence

Neglect laws are written too broadly, giving too much discretion to CPS to decide what constitutes neglect or inadequate supervision. There have been a couple cases IIRC in Florida where parents were arrested for letting their kids walk/play in parks alone, albeit these were very young children.

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.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#78
post #56
post #6

I was sitting in a room the other day with a young adult, we were searching for additional algorithm learning materials. They searched in Google, and accept the cookies. They clicked on a website, and accepted those cookies too. They then started entering their email address to access another service. I was completely taken aback. I'm the sort of person that either rejects the cookies, or will use another site entire…

It's not just cookies, it's explicit consent to track you, and sell your browsing history to ~1500 spy companies around the world. 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 bloc…

What would a safe extension model look like to you?

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.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to a service that only accepts such data as proof.

Steam thinks I was born Jan 1, 1970. Not that I needed to lie when I did my age verification back 15 years ago, I just randomly scrolled the year down and selected one. As the years have marched on, though, that "birthdate" becomes significantly closer to my real birthday.

That doesn't make any sense, your fake age increases every year just like your real age.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#80
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily it’s already possible to verify your age without actually giving out any data like your birthdate

And without having to trust that the government isn't keeping track of every request for age verification? I'd be curious how that might work as I haven't yet seen a zero-trust age verification system.

The age verification proposal of the EU tries to do that, the government knows you used age verification (and I think the rough number of times you used it), but they don't know when or where you used it.

https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/d...

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