Live data from Hacker News

Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

age-verifier.kibty.town

281–290 of 494 posts

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#281
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you massively overestimate how many people actually care. My guess is that 95% or more of all Discord users do not care and simply upload their selfie or ID card and be done with it. I know I will (although they did say that they expect 80%+ to not require verification since they can somehow infer their age from other parameters)

> I know I will Are you a minority, LGBTQ+, etc or of a "different" political persuasion that might have any reason to be distrustful of the US government? If so, you probably wouldn't just "be done with it".

No, I'm not, and I also don't live under an opressive government that tracks those people down. I simply don't care if the us government or some random US company knows about what I play, eat, talk about or who I sleep with. And my guess is that outside the US LGBTQ+ and "different political view" bubble, most people also don't care. And that bubble makes up maybe 5% of Discord's user base

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#283

"k-id, the age verification provider discord uses doesn't store or send your face to the server. instead, it sends a bunch of metadata about your face and general process details." I think the primary issue is not the "send your face" (face info) to a server. The problem is that private entities are greedy for user data, in this case tying facial recognition to activities related to interacting with other people, mos…

I can't speak about this being a current law, but there were laws in multiple US states at various times that prevented you from storing facial data on the server. In turn features like snapchat's face filters were doing all the relevant computation locally on the device (which back then was certainly a complicated achievement).

US tech companies are constantly under FTC audit relating to how they use user data. This is certainly not something that needs to be seriously worried about, certainly less so than say the way in which cameras placed all over cities are used to track all sorts of people or storing GPS locations attached to a specific devices UUID.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#284
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in Australia you absolutely can have a debit card under 18 and it’s extremely common for adults to not have a credit card.

> At least in Australia you absolutely can have a debit card under 18 Same in the UK, but Steam uses credit cards for age verification there and refuses if you provide a debit card instead. Evidently the payment backends can tell credit and debit apart.

When does steam require age verification?

It sometimes asks for my age for viewing a game and I can input any ol' date I want to. It doesn't even flinch if I input a different date every time.

I also don't recall them asking about my age when I was actually underage and paid using a PaySafeCard, but then again they didn't have porn on the platform at that point either.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>as a young preteen in the 90s and 00s, I made a lot of online friends As another 90s preteen, sure, but the internet today has a lot more pedos and groomers online than in the 90s, and preteens today easily share footage of themselves to those adult weirdos, which didn't happen in the 90s because mostly limitations of technology. BUt if you look at tiktok live it's full of preteen girls dancing, and creepy old men d…

The solution is parents using the parental control feature on their children’s devices. If laws need to be made about something it should be to punish those parents who neglect to safeguard their children using the tools already available to them. If the parental controls currently provided aren’t sufficient then they should be modified to be so - in addition to filtering, they should probably send a header to websit…

Australian laws decided to explicitly not blame the parents and place the responsibility on the platform. Turns out not all parents are responsible adults with a diploma in dark pattern navigation, and some kids don't even have parents. So if the goal is to help the kids, rather than have someone to blame when they get abused, you can't just pass the buck.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#286
post #4

The real and robust method will be generating artificial video input instead of the real webcam. I really don’t think any platform will be able to counter this. If they start requiring to use a phone with harder to spoof camera input, you will simply be able to put the camera in front of a high resolution screen. The cat and mouse game will not last long.

There's no need to counter it, the whole point is to hit the social aspect of being on these platforms. If even half the kids can't figure out how to make it work, then a massive part of the problem is solved because a much larger percentage are only using it due to network effects.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#287
post #235

"k-id, the age verification provider discord uses doesn't store or send your face to the server. instead, it sends a bunch of metadata about your face and general process details." I think the primary issue is not the "send your face" (face info) to a server. The problem is that private entities are greedy for user data, in this case tying facial recognition to activities related to interacting with other people, mos…

> the thought of requiring others to show their faces never occurred to me at all I know you meant as a service provider, but as a avid IRC (and an online game that conventionally alt-tabbed into a irc-like chat window) chatter as a young preteen in the 90s and 00s, I made a lot of online friends that I would not discover what they looked like IRL for decades, some never. People I was gaming with in the 90s, for the…

In the early 2000s, the biggest social media (though we didn't call it that back then) in Finland was IRC-Galleria (IRC-Gallery). It was originally made for IRC users to upload pictures of themselves and see what fellow IRCers looked like. You'd create a profile, add pictures and tag which channels/servers you were on.

Since there were no other websites like that back then, it was eventually overrun by non-IRC-users and transformed into what we'd now call a more generic social media platform. Something like the eternal September I guess. People started calling the gallery "IRC" as shorthand, which royally pissed off the original userbase. Fun times.

Then Facebook appeared and everyone moved there.

It's still up, but it's more of a historical relic these days. Not sure who, if anyone, still uses it: https://irc-galleria.net/

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC-Galleria

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#288
post #127

Age verification itself isn't such a bad thing. I feel most people are more angry about having to verify their actual identity. Every ad provider knows your address and complete identity every time you log into anything though. I guess its the illusion of anonymity that's so popular.

Horseshit.

There's often a degree of uncertainty with the data advertisers have. This would heavily reduce that uncertainty and enable worse behavior on the part of advertisers.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#289

"k-id, the age verification provider discord uses doesn't store or send your face to the server. instead, it sends a bunch of metadata about your face and general process details." I think the primary issue is not the "send your face" (face info) to a server. The problem is that private entities are greedy for user data, in this case tying facial recognition to activities related to interacting with other people, mos…

The frustration aimed at Discord et al is largely misplaced. I'm sure these companies don't mind gathering extra data about their users, but the primary impetus for age verification is government legislation. Moving to alternative platforms is not a long term solution because it's attacking the problem from the wrong direction.

I agree that government legislation is part of the equation, but I don't agree that moving to other platforms is not a solution. If Discord were to witness a significant exodus of paying users because of this new verification process, they would probably start fighting the fight themselves.

That said, I don't expect this to happen, switching is very hard for many reasons.

Re: Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

#290

[dead]

The governments making laws which mandate it feel otherwise.

No law mandates Discord impose this globally.

To be clear - this is a wholly discretionary act on their part to implement this in jurisdictions that have no such legal requirement.

Post reply on HN