I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by SJC_Hacker » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 5:41 PM UTC

cluckindan wrote: post #266

cortesoft wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in my mid forties, been working as a professional software developer for over 20 years. I click “accept the cookies” almost every time. I just personally don’t feel it’s worth the effort and cost to try to avoid it. What “dark pattern cookie trick” are you worried about? I just can’t come up with a scenario where it will actually harm me in any way. All the examples I have heard are either completely implausible…

Read the fine print. You’re usually not consenting to cookies, you’re consenting to having your data gathered, processed, enriched and sold by hundreds of companies around the world. One click usually gives random foreign corpos the right to your data across a multitude of platforms, the right to identify you across data sets, and to permanently link your device identifiers to you, for ”fraud detection” on a site whi…

> Read the fine print. You’re usually not consenting to cookies, you’re consenting to having your data gathered, processed, enriched and sold by hundreds of companies around the world.

They'll get it one way or another

With IP tracking, you don't really need cookies much anymore

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

#272

Post by pull_my_finger » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 5:42 PM UTC

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…

I use Cookie AutoDelete on Firefox and it's great. It works with Firefox Container Tabs (groups have their own cookie settings), and let's you greylist (allow cookies from a particular domain pattern until the tab is closed) or whitelist (always allow from the domain pattern). I set it up for my kids computers also. The default is to blacklist (cookies aren't set), and I can whitelist for particular sites where they need say persistent login.

Definitely in 2026 kids should be getting tons of education in public school about how to safely browse the internet, both for personal data privacy and for safety against stalking, doxxing, grooming etc in the same way millenials were grilled about source checking internet resources like Wikipedia.

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

#273

Post by WesolyKubeczek » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 5:42 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #163

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…

I am in my mid forties, been working as a professional software developer for over 20 years. I click “accept the cookies” almost every time. I just personally don’t feel it’s worth the effort and cost to try to avoid it. What “dark pattern cookie trick” are you worried about? I just can’t come up with a scenario where it will actually harm me in any way. All the examples I have heard are either completely implausible…

Which is why I installed the "Consent-o-matic" extension which dutifully denies everything for me, and I have uBlock Origin for everything else.

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

#274

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 5:43 PM UTC

ajam1507 wrote: post #242

marmarama wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is those self-same authoritarian strongmen are very successfully using sockpuppeting to change national discourses in ways that benefit them and are detrimental to the targeted countries. Hybrid war is real and has been ongoing for more than a decade. LLMs make it way more cost effective. Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification. Age verification is a us…

> Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification. How does automatically determining your age serve the goal of ID verification? It seems like most sites are choosing this as the first option. If the point was to link your ID, why wouldn't they ask everyone to provide it?

[deleted]

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

#275

Post by CamouflagedKiwi » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 5:43 PM UTC

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…

Are those young people really doing the wrong thing by accepting? They are getting on and solving their problem, they have probably never had any personal harm done by "some weird dark-pattern cookie trickery".

It's almost like forcing (almost) every website to add these cookie banners has desensitised people to what they're actually saying.

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

#276

Post by Levitz » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 5:43 PM UTC

cm2012 wrote: post #240

1shooner wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, if you don't practice any tracking limitation, you're almost certainly giving additional parties (directly or otherwise) access to your personal information. This is marketing data brokerage, this is the whole ballgame. To your point about the actual harm, I've come to see it as a kind of ecological problem. Wasting energy and sending more trash to a landfill doesn't harm me individually, at least not i…

The effect of that data is serving you better ads. Its not a big deal. Dystopian governments have way better sources of citizen data than anonymized ad exchanges. It basically just powers product discovery in a giant global marketplace.

>The effect of that data is serving you better ads.

On the contrary, the ads become worse, since they become better at trying to get me to buy some crap I don't need.

The more irrelevant to my profile they are, the better.

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

#277

Post by autoexec » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #249

autoexec wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I click “accept the cookies” almost every time. I just personally don’t feel it’s worth the effort and cost to try to avoid it. the effort and cost to download an ad-blocker that automatically removes the prompt to accept/deny entirely is practically zero and the amount of clicks you'd save yourself would quickly exceed the clicks it took to install the blocker. > I just don’t think it is something that is worth st…

this is definitely happening and for some reason, no one has any clear evidence on it. Conspiracy theories are gossip for men.

We have all kinds of evidence for it (for example, here's an article about the data sold to insurance companies https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driv...) and we've had evidence for a very very long time (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/data-brokers-selling-personal-i...)

The data collected about us online is extensively used against us both online and offline. The multi-billion dollar industry around collecting and selling every scrap of data about you and your personal life didn't spring up because nobody was making money from it.

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

#278

Post by cortesoft » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #235

cortesoft wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in my mid forties, been working as a professional software developer for over 20 years. I click “accept the cookies” almost every time. I just personally don’t feel it’s worth the effort and cost to try to avoid it. What “dark pattern cookie trick” are you worried about? I just can’t come up with a scenario where it will actually harm me in any way. All the examples I have heard are either completely implausible…

> I click “accept the cookies” almost every time. I just personally don’t feel it’s worth the effort and cost to try to avoid it. the effort and cost to download an ad-blocker that automatically removes the prompt to accept/deny entirely is practically zero and the amount of clicks you'd save yourself would quickly exceed the clicks it took to install the blocker. > I just don’t think it is something that is worth st…

> I'd be willing to bet the data being collected by tracking your browsing history has already been screwing you over in various aspects of your life, online and offline, but you won't be told when it happens or why.

Ok, can you give me a plausible example of what that harm could be? This seems in line with the exact thing I said in my comment; every time I ask how it could harm me, I am given vague statements about tracking and data. Charging me more if they think I can afford it is surely a thing to worry about, but there are so many ways to do that without tracking that I already need to take actions to defend against that (comparison shopping, price history tools, etc).

I am not saying I don’t think companies can take data they have access to and use it to extract more value from me… I am saying I don’t thing opting out of cookies is going to do much to change that, for better or worse.

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

#279

Post by ticulatedspline » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #228

I completely agree. The only services for which I will verify my age (and the entire rest of my ID) are bank accounts and other services involving a real legal requirement for real ID. The notion that you should upload a passport to random sites for age verification is unbelievably dangerous. That's a recipe for identity theft. And face scanning is also an invasion of privacy, not to mention very unreliable (my 16 ye…

even better would be a solution that didn't require even proxy or direct government log in.

like if you could be issued an E-id that could perform a local signature/challenge-response that allowed the site to confirm an age bracket (like 12 or below,13-17,18-20, 21+), assert the entity that issued the id but not assert a stable identifier (not even pairwise) and not pass any data between other parties.

Obviously not foolproof, credentials can be stolen (same in your scenario) but the site doesn't need to care, they should be legally in the clear. Basically it would let you anonymously assert your age.

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

#280

Post by AzN1337c0d3r » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

cm2012 wrote: post #240

1shooner wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, if you don't practice any tracking limitation, you're almost certainly giving additional parties (directly or otherwise) access to your personal information. This is marketing data brokerage, this is the whole ballgame. To your point about the actual harm, I've come to see it as a kind of ecological problem. Wasting energy and sending more trash to a landfill doesn't harm me individually, at least not i…

The effect of that data is serving you better ads. Its not a big deal. Dystopian governments have way better sources of citizen data than anonymized ad exchanges. It basically just powers product discovery in a giant global marketplace.

Insurance is likely using that same data to adjust rates.