Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services
141–150 of 645 posts
Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
And yet, it's the generation that struggles the most with managing files on their work laptops and on SMB shares. 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)
Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services
#143I'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…
Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification. Age verification is a useful side effect that makes it easier to sell to the general public.
Big Tech has had at least a decade to fix this, did nothing of note, and is all out of ideas. Privacy advocates had the same time to figure out a "least bad" technical solution, but got so obsessed with railing against it happening at all, that nothing got any traction.
So governments are here to legislate, for better or worse. They know it's a trade-off between being undermined by external forces vs. the systems being abused by future governments, but their take is that a future authoritarian government will end up implementing something similar anyway.
Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You don’t upload a “file” in a “folder” to TikTok. You upload a “video” from your “library”. Consumers have been conditioned to stop thinking about files especially when it comes to media since iTunes and the iPod in 2001.
As a non-Apple user, this is not something that happened to me. I literally have a "Files" app on my Android phone and my laptop/desktop.
Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services
#145I 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…
Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I use lights every day, but I know way less about electricity than my grandparents, two of whom who could remember when their town was electrified as children and who therefore treated it as the marvel it truly is. And also because we've worked out a ton of bugs in electricity and it often just works. My kids will know way less about filesystems than I do, because I had to learn DOS commands to navigate around the op…
Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> every single extension provides 100% access to my websites to whoever controls the extension. 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?
Oh really? Then why do my browsers keep moving things?
Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet, it's the generation that struggles the most with managing files on their work laptops and on SMB shares. 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.
> Ask them how to copy it somewhere else 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…
It's just not commonly used for the reason the other person mentioned (share buttons between apps that are file type aware)
Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services
#149Why does Claude require my phone number. It's honestly a reason why I don't use the service.
Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services
#150Earlier 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,…
> 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.
We might be safer in terms of vulnerabilities, root exploits, RCEs, etc. but the internet is still full of malware, scams are still just as rampant. Vigilance is still very much required, but is no longer taught.
Look at all the malware available on the Play Store. The curation does nothing but create an illusion of safety.