Never Give Them Your Face • Hacker News Board

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#311

Post by pseudalopex » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

john_strinlai wrote: post #278

bronlund wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you overestimates the protection Tor provides. We have seen multiple cases of people getting caught on there, and CIA probably owns half the exit nodes anyways.

> We have seen multiple cases of people getting caught on there as far as i am aware, no one has been caught due to something technical in relation to tor. it's always something dumb like logging into an email that has the person's real name in it, using a credit card, leaving javascript on, or otherwise making some opsec failure.

This could be true. But law enforcers lied how they found evidence in other cases.[1] They could have lied in Tor cases.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#312

Post by addedGone » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

dd8601fn wrote: post #276

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #194

I quit facebook over a decade ago. Then, a few months back, I was under some pressure to sell something, and the facebook marketplace appears to be the way to go locally. So I tried to create a facebook account. They wanted to scan my face, and in a moment of weakness, I performed the ritual. Thirty seconds later, they suspended my account due to violations of their terms of service: "this decision cannot be appealed…

Meta, obviously the same company, has four separate pages that handle the creation of a “page” for a business. They all prompt for the same information to do the same job. You are required to make one of these “pages” to be able to advertise on any Meta property. None of them work, and they have non-functional error handling. And if you keep trying, getting zero feedback about what’s wrong, you get the “scan your fac…

It's actually real that a ton of businesses must resort to shady providers of "Ads account" for legitimate stuff, nowadays it's very hard to join Facebook, if you didn't have an account made the past years, it's likely that you can't signup and run your business on it, you have to use illegal methods.

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#313

Post by schmuhblaster » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #194

I quit facebook over a decade ago. Then, a few months back, I was under some pressure to sell something, and the facebook marketplace appears to be the way to go locally. So I tried to create a facebook account. They wanted to scan my face, and in a moment of weakness, I performed the ritual. Thirty seconds later, they suspended my account due to violations of their terms of service: "this decision cannot be appealed…

Hmm, that also happened to me. Scan face, account lost forever?

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#314

Post by andrewla » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 5:13 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #85

fl4regun wrote: post #31

This is a little bit of a tangent compared to the post, but can someone explain to me why it's NOW that we have multiple countries (USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and probably others that I am not aware of) all looking at age verification for a technology (the internet and all the things it lets you access) has existed for over 2 decades, and has been mature for at least 10 years? You could buy illicit drugs and watch p…

Do not for a split second operate under the assumption that there aren't coordinating forces working on this. I know this trips the "conspiracy theories!!1!" flag in most people, but you can literally come up with organizations dedicated to things like this in mere seconds of googling. Here's a comment about US state-level coordination I made earlier, with a challenge to produce some examples that I then produced: ht…

Yes, it screams "conspiracy theories" because it is literally a theory that involves malign conspiracies. And yes, this is repellent to many people.

It is most repellent, I think, to people who genuinely hold the belief ("I want to prevent minors from using websites that are generally agreed to be harmful to minors"). When you tell these people "no, you actually want a totalitarian state that controls what adults are allowed to believe", they think you're crazy, because they don't believe this.

That this is an inevitable consequence of the solution to the problem that they want to solve is a question of tradeoffs that people are not generally aware of, and I think it's way more important for people to be aware of those tradeoffs without being told that it is the illuminati and the freemasons and George Soros and Fox News trying to Orwell their way into a global police state.

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#315

Post by xorcist » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 5:13 PM UTC

red_admiral wrote: post #215

btown wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the panic is indeed nothing new, Meta could have chosen a path of solidarity across the tech industry, lobbying for the ways age/identity verification makes people of all ages less safe, especially in the context of phishing and data harvesting. Instead, its strategy has become to advocate for increasing the net levels of tracking and regulatory burden, so long as it is positioned to burden other parts of the t…

The next question is why alphabet, apple, even Microsoft aren't opening their purses to push back on this? They're going to be the ones in court for false negatives.

They get to scan people's faces?

Ad companies are data collection companies.

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#316

Post by hennell » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

> Name the places now demanding "age verification," and see how many will accept a plain government document that says only that you are over eighteen — and nothing else. Almost none will. Because age was never the point.

Name the physical places that would accept a plain government document that says only that you are over eighteen and nothing else? None will, not because 'age was never the point', or because every bar or casino is stealing your face - but because a plain document doesn't offer any proof you are it's owner. Photo ID has been standard as age verification because it's the best way to prove the official ID actually links to the person holding it.

There are more concerns in a digital world with giving your ID / face, but the idea that the demand for photo ID proves it's all a big data grab not remotely about age is a conclusion looking for evidence.

(Plus they acknowledge some sites have done age verification where all they want is your face to confirm you look over 18 - which they then ignore, claiming it's all really a ploy to get your documents. So why isn't the site 'Never give them your documents'?)

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#317

Post by mawadev » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

joenot443 wrote: post #160

vodou wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is great that people point out LLM generated articles here on HN. Sadly, it feels like I am slowly loosing my skill to identify LLM speak. Maybe I am getting worn out of all LLM content... So, please, list the indicators and telltale signs from the specific article or blog post (like others have done here already). At least I would appreciate it a lot.

> It is not age verification. It is identity verification. > You can change a password. You cannot change your face. > This is not a popularity contest, and refusal is not a vote you are trying to win These were a couple sentences that were immediate flags to me. There've been countless articles written on this (I can dig them up if you want), but IMO there are pretty clear semantic rhythms you start to notice. It is…

My brain skims the entire blog before reading it and if I see two short sentences with dots and negation or even one single em dash, I ctrl+w out

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#318

Post by aappleby » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

this would be more convincing if it wasn't ai written.

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#319

Post by skort » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 5:16 PM UTC

9dev wrote: post #27

Can't we even write a short text like this without LLMs anymore, not even when it's really important, when it's about humans against the inhumane ?

I also will not take any article or website seriously if it uses AI generated graphics/art.

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#320

Post by xmprt » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

joenot443 wrote: post #160

vodou wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is great that people point out LLM generated articles here on HN. Sadly, it feels like I am slowly loosing my skill to identify LLM speak. Maybe I am getting worn out of all LLM content... So, please, list the indicators and telltale signs from the specific article or blog post (like others have done here already). At least I would appreciate it a lot.

> It is not age verification. It is identity verification. > You can change a password. You cannot change your face. > This is not a popularity contest, and refusal is not a vote you are trying to win These were a couple sentences that were immediate flags to me. There've been countless articles written on this (I can dig them up if you want), but IMO there are pretty clear semantic rhythms you start to notice. It is…

I agree that these are signs of AI, but they're also the way that people write. I use the "it's not X it's Y" framing a lot of the time because it's a quick way to get my point across. It's probably the sign of a bad writer because I can't come up with a different/better way to say the same thing, but I'm not AI.