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I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

neilzone.co.uk

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Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#291

Post by dewey »

bArray wrote: post #6

I was sitting in a room the other day with a young adult, we were searching for additional algorithm learning materials. They searched in Google, and accept the cookies. They clicked on a website, and accepted those cookies too. They then started entering their email address to access another service. I was completely taken aback. I'm the sort of person that either rejects the cookies, or will use another site entire…

Accepting cookies vs. entering personal information are very different buckets for me.

I just click "Accept all" on every cookie banner, life it too short to figure out which checkboxes and dark patterns I have to avoid on each site to not hand over some data...that is than later on just tracked in the backend ("server to server tracking"). Or sold by my credit card company, or tracked by me hovering over some video on YouTube. With the amount of data available unselecting some check boxes on a website just doesn't make a difference.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#292

Post by catoc »

cm2012 wrote: post #240
1shooner wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, if you don't practice any tracking limitation, you're almost certainly giving additional parties (directly or otherwise) access to your personal information. This is marketing data brokerage, this is the whole ballgame. To your point about the actual harm, I've come to see it as a kind of ecological problem. Wasting energy and sending more trash to a landfill doesn't harm me individually, at least not i…

The effect of that data is serving you better ads. Its not a big deal. Dystopian governments have way better sources of citizen data than anonymized ad exchanges. It basically just powers product discovery in a giant global marketplace.

” it’s not a big deal. Just gets you better ads.”

I thought this was just ignorance.

Then I checked the profile. They ”have lots of experience with digital advertising “

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#293

Post by seanw444 »

simmerup wrote: post #268
bradley13 wrote: post #263

It is likely not a coincidence that so many different countries simultaneously started pushing for age verification. The decline of privacy, the increase in intrusive government surveillance, the increasing restrictions on free speech - this is all part of a very disturbing pattern. Our governments are becoming increasingly authoritarian, and these are the tools they use to keep the populace under control.

And also our countries are being attacked by external actors who want to sow discord and damage our institutions

> sow discord

Funny choice of wording: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/02/discord-voluntarily-pu...

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#294

Post by muyuu »

bArray wrote: post #6

I was sitting in a room the other day with a young adult, we were searching for additional algorithm learning materials. They searched in Google, and accept the cookies. They clicked on a website, and accepted those cookies too. They then started entering their email address to access another service. I was completely taken aback. I'm the sort of person that either rejects the cookies, or will use another site entire…

i've caught a lot of heat in the UK where i live for my position on GDPR, which is that i completely reject it, because people seem to believe it's there to protect any rights

if there's anything remotely good with GDPR is the requirement to companies to disclose known data breaches

all the rest of it is a terrible idea and only serves to nag people and legitimise the darkest of patterns

the regulation should be there to disallow companies from asking certain information, everything else regarding tracking is self-defeating as it's 1) seldom enforceable 2) hardly binding in any meaningful way 3) pushing people to concentrate their services where they have already surrendered their data 4) legitimising of dark patterns

this new and blatant step towards digital id is a hill i intend to die on, I will not comply and I will do everything in my power so that others don't have to and are even punished for doing so

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#295

Post by psychoslave »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #271
cluckindan wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the fine print. You’re usually not consenting to cookies, you’re consenting to having your data gathered, processed, enriched and sold by hundreds of companies around the world. One click usually gives random foreign corpos the right to your data across a multitude of platforms, the right to identify you across data sets, and to permanently link your device identifiers to you, for ”fraud detection” on a site whi…

> Read the fine print. You’re usually not consenting to cookies, you’re consenting to having your data gathered, processed, enriched and sold by hundreds of companies around the world. They'll get it one way or another With IP tracking, you don't really need cookies much anymore

IP is personal information, at least under GPDR in Europe.

https://gdpr.eu/eu-gdpr-personal-data/

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#296

Post by bArray »

flurdy wrote: post #138
bArray wrote: post #6

I was sitting in a room the other day with a young adult, we were searching for additional algorithm learning materials. They searched in Google, and accept the cookies. They clicked on a website, and accepted those cookies too. They then started entering their email address to access another service. I was completely taken aback. I'm the sort of person that either rejects the cookies, or will use another site entire…

That all random game and messaging sites now wants my kids' passport uploaded to some random 'id verification company' is madness. But now instead, my 11 year old's Roblox thinks she is 18 because she wore glasses in their age verification webcam tool. And it can't be changed unless she uploads a passport, which I will never allow. Please, gov.uk introduce a gov ID verification service? I could trust that, -ish, I ha…

> That all random game and messaging sites now wants my kids' passport uploaded to some random 'id verification company' is madness.

This is truly crazy. Random companies interacting on this level with children is far from ideal.

> Please, gov.uk introduce a gov ID verification service? I could trust that, -ish, I have worked with public sector clients several times...

I don't like the idea of governments collecting this sort of data either.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#297

Post by zahlman »

bArray wrote: post #6

I was sitting in a room the other day with a young adult, we were searching for additional algorithm learning materials. They searched in Google, and accept the cookies. They clicked on a website, and accepted those cookies too. They then started entering their email address to access another service. I was completely taken aback. I'm the sort of person that either rejects the cookies, or will use another site entire…

> the young people that are growing up conditioned to

How does the conditioning start?

> not value their personal data

Okay, but in practice how much do they do with it that isn't ad placements?

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#299

Post by pants2 »

andsoitis wrote: post #123
thewebguyd wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is the young people that are growing up conditioned to press accept It's really alarming, actually. I run the cyber security training & phishing simulations at my work, and it's the younger employees that struggle the most. It's like they just assume that everything on the web is trustworthy. It's not hard to see why though. They grew up with app stores & locked down devices. No concept of a file or file system,…

> It's like they just assume that everything on the web is trustworthy. > It's not hard to see why though. They grew up with app stores & locked down devices. When we create a safer world, people’s defense mechanisms naturally atrophy or are never developed in the first place.

When I joined my last job I noticed that their email settings were misconfigured... EVERYTHING was going straight to the inbox, not even the most basic of spam filters were in place.

When I got filtering on observe-only mode I saw users were getting up to a dozen phishing emails every day.

We quickly did a hard simulated phishing test and most users opened the email but zero users clicked through.

Two years later, after we had excellent email filtering in place, our simulated phishing test had a 30% fail rate.

Take from that what you will!

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#300

Post by dexterdog »

jen20 wrote: post #182
esseph wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> files especially when it comes to media since iTunes and the iPod in 2001 As a non-Apple user, this is not something that happened to me. I literally have a "Files" app on my Android phone and my laptop/desktop.

Both iPhone and iPad have an app named "Files" too.

But it gives you access to almost none of your actual files
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