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

neilzone.co.uk

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

#121

Post by arvid-lind »

adventured wrote: post #84
thewebguyd wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

That's an exaggeration. Young people on average have grown up with drastically greater understanding of what a file is than any other generation that has come before them. They grew up using Chromebooks or laptops in school, constantly interacting with the local file systems, uploading files to Instagram and TikTok from the file systems on their smartphones, browsing their phones for files constantly. They know what…

Maybe they do more intuitively think of things as virtual objects, but it seems like the issue is they don't have a deeper understanding of how the mechanisms behind the abstractions work and can easily get fooled into accepting terms they wouldn't if they properly understood.

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

#122

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

raron wrote: post #80
_heimdall wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The EU passing a law about the internet? What could possibly go wrong?

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

#123

Post by andsoitis »

thewebguyd wrote: post #62
bArray wrote: 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,…

> 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.

When we create a safer world, people’s defense mechanisms naturally atrophy or are never developed in the first place.

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

#125

Post by Barbing »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #108

When thinking about verifying your identity with a service, you have to ask yourself "what will be the impact to me if everything this service knows about me, every click I've made, everything I've watched/read/uploaded is posted publicly on the internet, attached to my full name, address and photo?". Because those are the very real stakes; if you verify with enough services, this will happen to you. Weigh that again…

Price discrimination comes to mind. What else?

(“what will be the impact to me”)

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

#126

Post by flurdy »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #29
LoganDark wrote: post #17

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.

Only when chatting in a large channel at work, did I realise nearly 1/3 of the people there also set theirs as 1/1/1970. Which I presume is the first date that phisers will try to enter to reset people's accounts.

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.

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

#127

Post by SiempreViernes »

sspiff wrote: post #60

I'm fine with providing my identity for online banking and other finance platforms for legal & taxation purposes. 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 g…

Honestly I think these age verification laws are blunt instruments responding to the decade of avoided moderation the big platforms have managed to pull off.

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.

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

#128

Post by crazygringo »

skeptic_ai wrote: post #95
fusslo wrote: post #93

Personally, I can see use cases for verifying my identity: 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…

You lost your account and you still back to Gmail? Impressive

Google didn't do anything wrong, they lost their Yahoo and it was the only way they had of verifying their older Gmail. What do you expect, when you don't have access to your recovery method, and it's a free service so it's not like you can prove ownership of a credit card previously used for billing or something? And especially since that was presumably from before the days when Gmail required a phone number, so your recovery e-mail was the only mechanism, and things like 2FA authentication codes didn't exist.

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

#129

Post by cableshaft »

I have a date I use that's incorrect, but consistent so I can remember it if I need to, that I use for age verification for anything that doesn't truly need an accurate birthdate (example, age verification to view games on Steam).

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.

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

#130

Post by Barbing »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #68
jermaustin1 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

When a 10-year-old registers for an adult website, they pretend they're 100 years old. Their age is 90 years different from the stated birthday. Eighty years later, the birth date is just as far off—but the implied age is now only 10 years off.
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