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Never Give Them Your Face

nevergivethemyourface.com

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Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#401

Post by dwd »

billyoyo wrote: post #208
panny wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What does getting the COVID vaccine have to do with surveillance Google and Apple built contact tracing directly into iOS and Android during Covid. And it's still there. And all they'd need to do to make it opt-out or required is to flash an update with some small print in an EULA. It is WAY more invasive and you probably already gave your phone your face with features like face unlock too. But hey, we can stop this…

You're describing contact tracing, that is not vaccination. If people were less afraid of vaccinations, invasive practices like contact tracing would be less necessary. Arguing against that sort of contact tracing may have merits (Not necessarily saying I agree but it's a discussion worth having). Arguing against vaccination is dangerous and ends up with people dead.

Contact tracing is a valuable tool when eradication is an option. It probably should have been used early to manage the current H5N1 (bird flu) pandemic by tracing poultry and livestock movements. Can't do much about migratory wild birds, but we should be able to manage people spreading it.

Problem is vaccination doesn't necessarily prevent transmission for respiratory viruses. There's a general misconception that being vaccinated will prevent you catching it - like you have some invisible shield.

Vaccination should prevent it progressing from an upper respiratory illness to lower respiratory where you primarily develop pneumonia (Covid triggered all sorts of other immune inflammation responses and affected other organs). Most vaccine injuries were the same immune response, but could have been worse had the individual caught Covid.

What vaccines don't do is prevent you spreading a highly transmissible virus before your immune response kicks in and deals with it.

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#402

Post by btbuildem »

Duanemclemore wrote: post #50

Who runs this site? There doesn't appear to be any information on this. A whois search returns nothing illuminating. So... is it part of the parable they're trying to tell that they're seeing who will go against the exact sort of advice they're giving? Or does this -just happen to be- the kind of shady data gathering that they're warning against? to quote the site itself, "We spent a generation teaching people the fi…

> whois search returns nothing illuminating

Which is something you should expect from someone intent on privacy

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#403

Post by inigyou »

Nevermark wrote: post #391
inigyou wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am John Smith, I give out my non-ZK age tokens, I get arrested because 200 people logged in as me today

You didn't answer who is collating all that arrest-targeting information. It isn't news that adults can be irresponsible with age-verification credentials. Letting children use adult's credit cards isn't criminalized either. Adult sites not default-serving underage users does not require fine-grained surveillance or criminalizing clueless parents/adults.

The government, obviously, when the sites call it to check their tokens

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#404

Post by necovek »

testing22321 wrote: post #65
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…

Social media was unleashed onto the world with no harm studies or thought for the long term impact. Now we’re catching up and realizing how bad it is. For a similar case, see tasers in Canada after a handcuffed immigrant was killed by one. The question came up “how were tasers certified safe for humans?”. The answer was “they weren’t. A private company just started selling them to police forces who just started using…

> Social media was unleashed onto the world with no harm studies or thought for the long term impact.

To require a safety study for anything someone might "unleash" as a public product would be bonkers: nobody would be able to release anything at all.

But I do not think social media as such — when originally it came to prominence — was anything that caused significant harm. Things like internet forums, BBs and blogs did have some troublesome elements rooted in privacy of the participants (allowing harrasement, for instance). In all though, it was a positive for society though — I have learned so much as a kid by exploring areas where experts out their expertise out and discussed challenges with you.

While the trend of this continued with the birth of modern social media like MySpace, Facebook, Orkut/Google Wave/Google Plus, Twitter, Instagram, Digg, Reddit, Flickr... originally they were a significant net positive for society too — they opened up the world for many to express themselves (just like blogs did for the more technically savy).

At some point, trying to monetize attention, the winning social media companies started applying well established (from traditional media), arguably immoral marketing tactics: leveraging psychological research to keep people engaged and sell ads for their financial gain.

I believe targeting these practices regardless of the media type is what needs to be regulated.

Harassment is already well regulated, but with kids (and adults), they do not always take it seriously or are not able to detect it: I am acknowledging this needs work too.

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#405

Post by thefroh »

Henchman21 wrote: post #349
joenot443 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

These are normal patterns in US English. The zeal to accuse limits the scope of possible responses. There are all sorts of things humans do when writing that LLMs mimic — em-dashes for instance — that are entirely legitimate ways to communicate but get shouted down for… reasons? Surely you’re aware that LLMs were trained on the ways humans write specifically to mimic them? Yes? So what’s the gripe? Someone cranked ou…

it's like AI-generated images, though those tend to be more obvious than AI-generated text due to the "average" effect being visually obvious. Yes, these are normal patterns in English, but it is not normal to use them with the frequency that triggers people's llm-lese senses.

I don't see a way out of it until either generated content is either completely unable to be distinguished from authored content (unlikely?), or there's a silver bullet for identifying generated content (also unlikely?)

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#406

Post by frm88 »

urbnspacecowboy wrote: post #385
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #62

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 all caused by a Meta lobbying initiative... Is it really, though? As commenters on JWZ's blog pointed out (once you get around his HN link blocker, hah), the project contains very questionable LLM work.

Yes, it is. There are other sources that trace the evolution of age-verification, with Meta quitting all lobbying groups that advertise against it and forming new ones with Spotify and Match Group as well as actively financing Digital Childhood Alliance. Meta wants the verification to happen on a non-app level (read Playstores or eveb OS level) to avoid all cost and liability: https://techoversight.org/2025/07/29/bloomberg-meta-google-l...

This one-size fits all approach is built to solve problems social media platforms have with their systems while making our members, small tech companies and app developers, collateral damage,” said App Association spokesperson Jack Fleming.

Also: article in Reuters https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630804

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#408

Post by MobiusHorizons »

inigyou wrote: post #186
MobiusHorizons wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really advocating for suppressing rational assessments for the likelihood of success because you think the analysis is too discouraging? If you already agree the resistance will ultimately lead nowhere, why not focus that energy on something with a better chance of success? Best guess would be partnering with someone like the EFF for a solution through lobbying And the courts.

How have the EFF and the courts worked so far? We do need an EFF, but they're clearly not all that effective. And the courts just won't do anything unless someone does something illegal.

Compared to “resist by opting out”, the EFF has been much more successful. So far I’m not aware of any meaningful change in tech enshitification from grassroots opting out (could certainly be missing some instances, though, happy to be told about any). The EFF has at least had some notable wins in crypto export, fighting copyright enforcement abuses, limiting certain types of surveillance (license plate readers in California for example), and right to repair.

I’m not saying they have been enough to prevent things from getting worse, but they have actually done things that have staying power, and affect policy to this day, which is better than the track record of opting out as far as I know.

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#409

Post by MobiusHorizons »

rockskon wrote: post #193
MobiusHorizons wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really advocating for suppressing rational assessments for the likelihood of success because you think the analysis is too discouraging? If you already agree the resistance will ultimately lead nowhere, why not focus that energy on something with a better chance of success? Best guess would be partnering with someone like the EFF for a solution through lobbying And the courts.

Cynicism isn't knowledge. Cynicism isn't an assessment. Cynicism is an assumption. Cynicism is emotional armor because the thought of caring again and the risk of it not panning out is more painful than not caring at all. The only rational aspect of cynicism is that it makes you feel better. It isn't relevant about one's actual ability to change the world. If efforts in the past didn't work to affect political change…

When has this tactic (opting out to force change) ever worked on problems of any meaningful scale before? Please don’t say the civil rights movement, because those boycotts were not effective on their own. Pressure is required to force change, and opting out does not produce the necessary pressure unless it is genuinely a significant portion of users and lasts years.

These strategies have been tried time and time again and have proved not to be strong enough to overcome economic forces.

Re: Never Give Them Your Face

#410

Post by frm88 »

greenavocado wrote: post #33

Has it ever occurred to you that this is intentional? All those Bilderberg and WEF forums and Peter Thiel's Dialog Club are not for nothing

Peter Thiel's Dialog Club

Off topic but I was really astonished to find Ezra Klein on the list of permanent members.

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