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Discord's face scanning age checks 'start of a bigger shift'

bbc.com

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Re: Discord's face scanning age checks 'start of a bigger shift'

#121

Post by doublerabbit »

blibble wrote: post #109
doublerabbit wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All things IRC lacks. IRC gives you all the features of a normal client but you've got to create them yourself which itself is a dark-art that's been squandered by today's gimmicky services. Just because it doesn't have a fancy UI to present the media doesn't mean it can't. Encode to base64 and post in channel. Decode it back to normal format... IRC is excellent for large amounts of stringed text. You could even st…

sending any reasonably sized jpeg as base64 text will take you several minutes with typical server flood protection

You could chunk it, compress it with gzip. Usenet uses yENC.

Public servers sure, may have protections in place but your own server and with IRCd's being easy configurable makes it non-trivial.

Re: Discord's face scanning age checks 'start of a bigger shift'

#122

Post by brundolf »

jjice wrote: post #2

Aside from the privacy nightmare, what about someone who is 18 and just doesn't have the traditional adult facial features? Same thing for someone who's 15 and hit puberty early? I can imagine that on the edges, it becomes really hard to discern. If they get it wrong, are you locked out? Do you have to send an image of your ID? So many questions. Not a huge fan of these recent UK changes (looking at the Apple E2E sit…

Devil's advocate: couldn't this be better for privacy than other age checks because it doesn't require actual identification?

Re: Discord's face scanning age checks 'start of a bigger shift'

#123

Post by paulryanrogers »

brundolf wrote: post #122
jjice wrote: post #2

Aside from the privacy nightmare, what about someone who is 18 and just doesn't have the traditional adult facial features? Same thing for someone who's 15 and hit puberty early? I can imagine that on the edges, it becomes really hard to discern. If they get it wrong, are you locked out? Do you have to send an image of your ID? So many questions. Not a huge fan of these recent UK changes (looking at the Apple E2E sit…

Devil's advocate: couldn't this be better for privacy than other age checks because it doesn't require actual identification?

Considering the ubiquity of facial recognition tech, I imagine it could very quickly be abused to identify people

Re: Discord's face scanning age checks 'start of a bigger shift'

#125

Post by gertrunde »

I would like to think there there is a solution that can be engineered, in which a service is able to verify that a user is above an appropriate age threshold, while maintaining privacy safeguards, including, where relevant, for the age-protected service not to be privy to the identity of the user, and for the age verification service to not be privy to the nature of the age-protected service being accessed.

In this day and age, of crypto, and certificates, and sso, and all that gubbins, it's surely only a matter of deciding that this is a problem that needs solving.

(Unless the problem really isn't the age of the user at all, but harvesting information...)

Re: Discord's face scanning age checks 'start of a bigger shift'

#127

Post by leotravis10 »

roenxi wrote: post #4
jjice wrote: post #2

Aside from the privacy nightmare, what about someone who is 18 and just doesn't have the traditional adult facial features? Same thing for someone who's 15 and hit puberty early? I can imagine that on the edges, it becomes really hard to discern. If they get it wrong, are you locked out? Do you have to send an image of your ID? So many questions. Not a huge fan of these recent UK changes (looking at the Apple E2E sit…

Also, key point in the framing, when was it decided that Discord supposed to be the one enforcing this? A pop-up saying "you really should be 18+" is one thing, but this sounds like a genuine effort to lock out young people. Neither Discord nor a government ratings agency should be taking final responsibility for how children get bought up, that seems like something parents should be responsible for. This is over-rea…

There's a SCOTUS case in FSC v. Paxton that could very well decide if age verification is enforced in the US as well so sadly this is just the beginning.

Re: Discord's face scanning age checks 'start of a bigger shift'

#128

Post by 1659447091 »

Hizonner wrote: post #81
1659447091 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't pretend that actual users would have any meaningful control over anything. You do have control, you just don't like the option of control you have which is to forgo those social/porn sites altogether. You want to dictate to businesses and the government how to run their business or country laws that you want to use. And you can sometimes, if you get a large enough group to forgo their services over their poli…

Those businesses also have control. They just don't like the option of control they have, which is to stay out of those countries altogether. > This is something you should send to your government that makes those rules. My government hasn't made those rules, at least not yet. Last time they tried, I joined the crowd yelling at them about it. It's easier to do that if people aren't giving them technology they can pre…

> Those businesses also have control. They just don't like the option of control they have, which is to stay out of those countries altogether.

Yes. ?

Apparently they don't want to leave and are happy staying there and complying. If you don't like a businesses practice, don't use them. . .

> Last time they tried, I joined the crowd yelling at them about it.

Good. I hope more people that feel as strongly about the subject as you will follow your lead.

> It's easier to do that if people aren't giving them technology they can pretend solves the fundamental problems with what they're doing.

No one is "giving" them technology that pretends anything. There is a community effort to come up with privacy focused, secure solutions. If you noticed the OIDC4VC protocols are still in the draft phase. If it's fubar no one will use it. Worse than that is, if nothing comes of any proposed solutions, the state won't just say oh well you tried.

Either we will continue to deal with the current solution of businesses collecting our ids and biometrics and each one having a db of this info to sell/have stolen, or, some consultant that golfs with some gov official will tell them the tech industry can't figure it out but they have a magic solution that's even better and will build a system (using tax dollars) that uses government IDs with the added bonus of tracking and then all of our internet usage can be tracked by the government.

Wantonly dismissing any effort to make things better in an acceptable way is not going to make it magically go away forever. That ship has sailed. You can resist efforts to find a privacy focused solution and get stuck with an even worse one from the state, or, get your crowd yelling hat back on and help make sure data and privacy protections are solidly baked into these solutions the tech community is trying to build.

Re: Discord's face scanning age checks 'start of a bigger shift'

#129

Post by paxys »

gertrunde wrote: post #125

I would like to think there there is a solution that can be engineered, in which a service is able to verify that a user is above an appropriate age threshold, while maintaining privacy safeguards, including, where relevant, for the age-protected service not to be privy to the identity of the user, and for the age verification service to not be privy to the nature of the age-protected service being accessed. In this…

Transferring your age and a way to verify it to any third party is by definition a privacy violation. Doing so in a safe way is literally impossible since I don't want to share that information in the first place.

Re: Discord's face scanning age checks 'start of a bigger shift'

#130

Post by pdpi »

jjice wrote: post #2

Aside from the privacy nightmare, what about someone who is 18 and just doesn't have the traditional adult facial features? Same thing for someone who's 15 and hit puberty early? I can imagine that on the edges, it becomes really hard to discern. If they get it wrong, are you locked out? Do you have to send an image of your ID? So many questions. Not a huge fan of these recent UK changes (looking at the Apple E2E sit…

> what about someone who is 18 and just doesn't have the traditional adult facial features?

This can be challenging even with humans. My ex got carded when buying alcohol well into her mid thirties, and staff at the schools she taught at mistook her for a student all the time.

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