Live data from Hacker News

Never Give Them Your Face

nevergivethemyourface.com

361–370 of 468 posts

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop using Facebook. It's really that simple. Found the guy who's never heard of "shadow profiles." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile

I agree shadow profiles are a huge problem, but I suspect they're not worth much to Meta in terms of revenue. You can't show ads to a shadow profile, for example. Best way to hurt them financially is to just log off.

I suspect they're not worth much to Meta in terms of revenue.

I think they're probably worth quite a bit, or Meta wouldn't spend billions acquiring and maintaining the data.

And as we know, in the valley there are always more and more customers for data, personal and otherwise.

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#362
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I need to figure out some way to communicate how these things really work.

I think lots of people around here would agree that "the rich" are doing nefarious things. But people get real fuzzy on what those things really are and how they work. Like, the rich don't just stand around in a well-apportioned fancy study with a big wooden desk, smoking a cigar and ambiently shouting into the void "GEE I SURE HOPE THINGS GOOD FOR ME HAPPEN" before checking their pocketwatch for the time and pouring themselves an expensive alcoholic beverage... and then, in entirely unrelated news, it so happens that for no reason the government loosens some environmental restrictions that was bothering the billionaire, and some worker's rights get rolled back.

They hire people who know how to build organizations, and give those people money, and those people hire other people who know how to build those sorts of things, and then they hire lawyers and managers and line workers and people who know how to outsource and contract and do whatever it needs to get it done.

And none of these people are going to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times outlining exactly how they're doing all this. Even if they aren't actively trying to be secretive, they don't run around telling people all about it.

You can see a public and frequent example of how this works when a politician spins up a major election campaign, like for President or Governor. An entire organization of thousands of people with one explicitly political goal spun up, grown, expanded with volunteers, and then shut down again in a matter of months. It's much closer to how this stuff looks than the unexamined ideas people seem to have in their heads. It's no problem for a billionaire to spin something like that up for a cross-country law push.

Or, to put it simply, the way the rich accomplish their goals is basically with "conspiracies", specifically in the form of these sorts of organizations built to accomplish their goals. They don't just hope and wish. They use money to pay people to do things. If your view of the world doesn't have room for that, if your brain flips out at the idea that rich people pay people to do things, that's not a sophisticated and refined view of the world that is so much better than the ones held by those people who keep falling for those theories... it's hopelessly naive. Things mostly happen because people take actions. The way you and your buddies may get together to clean up a park on a weekend, a billionaire or a collection of them create organizations to do things.

That doesn't even remotely mean every conspiracy is therefore true. But things like a coordinated push across multiple countries for almost the exact same law is plainly obviously the result of some organization that has been built to accomplish that goal. That is by far the most likely outcome. No other one makes even slightly as much sense. I don't have to know what that organization is for that to be my most dominant hypothesis.

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#364
To take the other side as nearly all comments agree, I'm not too worried about my face. My socials - twitter, fb, linkedin all have my face and 2/3 real name. When I do things in the real world I also have a face. Also if I want to be anonymous on social networks you can still pretty much. You can worry too much about that stuff. Not that the author worries, being an LLM.

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#365

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…

I'm maybe a bit of an outlier here in that I do think that this is a genuine grassroots good faith effort to "protect the children" that does not have sinister ulterior motives. I know plenty of parents who have expressed enthusiasm for the idea of age-restricting websites. "Why now" I think is pretty obvious -- the age limitations that exist currently are easily circumvented, but have given enough of a plausible den…

It won’t work, it’s just another crank of the enshittification ratchet that will make everyone’s life worse. Well, everyone except those who control a lot of wealth and power, they’ll still be comfortably isolated from the people they abuse.

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#366
post #2

Age assurance is the law in California and age verification is illegal in California. We should push more jurisdictions to adopt this model. While many age verification laws are malicious mass surveillance, some are because politicians didn't see a better option.

What law?

AB1043. Age signals shall not contain more data than required.

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all caused by a Meta lobbying initiative across multiple countries as documented in https://tboteproject.com/ (sadly, the website is down right now), but you can find references e.g. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/the-tbote-project/

It's not only Meta though. People need to stop assuming Meta controls everything via its CIAbook. You see several actors behind that; which one contributes the most is an interesting detail, but ultimately it can be simplified to them planning Evil against The People.

Successful propaganda, and political and policy intervention, as with all forms of control and intervention, rely on applying additional pressure where there's a latent interest and potential.

There's a wonderful line from a different context which I find applies quite broadly:

"The Art of ship handling involves the effective use of forces under control to overcome the effect of forces not under control."

-- Charles H. Cotter

Meta, one of the wealthiest corporations and indeed institutions on the Planet, is exploiting a long-extant tendency and proclivity in technological policy. It's doing so against long-standing traditions within the tech community, largely to serve its own interests. Meta aren't the only actor seeking greater surveillance and forced identification, but the are among the very most powerful. Culpability devolves from that, and violation of tech-community norms, alone.

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#368
post #87
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just minimize threats, but often to maximize their power. Lobbyists do not just try to convince a politician that X is a good idea. Lobbyists give the politician money to introduce already drafted legislation, and then give other politicians money to support it. And if they can get the legislation passed in one place, they'll try it again. The result is that suspiciously similar legislation appears in many places…

I'm not convinced this is about money as much as it is about blackmail, given how centralized data collection has become and how many intelligence agencies appear to have access to numerous 0-days for routinely gathering additional information. It could be both things as well. What bothers me most isn't their corruption, but their apparent belief that it won't eventually affect them or their families - perhaps sooner…

That apparent belief is common. People with current access to power, seldom anticipate what might happen in the future if it is turned against them.

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#369
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By all means don't provide any additional information on what you mean, what book, what it's about, what it has to do with this, or anything else.

It took me 30s to Google this guy's name and find his latest book on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxious_Generation

And froidpink could have obviated that 30s investment multiplied by however-many readers, and clarified just how the reference applies, with ... another 30 or seconds investment on their part.

Lazy contribution to group comms is its own minor evil.

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's increasingly difficult to accomplish much on the Internet without JavaScript, though. This is an era where literal image hosting sites won't show you an image without it; where it's used to reinvent tags, forms, even ordinary hyperlinks.

On the other hand, it's never been easier to design a place that doesn't need those things, or be confident the javascript is on your side.

javascript, like tor, is powerful in both directions depending on what it's used for.

Post reply on HN