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

neilzone.co.uk

311–320 of 645 posts

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

#311
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU has more freedom of speech than the US, the US has just a different way of punishment. It’s much easier in the US to lose your job for what you say as in the EU and in the US the consequences of losing your job are more severe if you don’t have enough money so you can afford to lose it. US freedom of speech comes with a price tag that puts the censor inside your brain.

And in the eu you go to jail for criticing politicians. I guess it's really all the same, eh?

In which countries?

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

#312
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People trade away longevity for short term convenience. Then when that convenience is shown to be bad/unhealthy people refuse to give up that convenience. So many aspects of our lives are like this now. People just accept defeat cuz it would mean giving up one click ordering or free return shipping or they might have to look at labels to avoid bad companies.

It's because people are too busy and distracted to understand and even listen to what dangers are heading towards them

And this WILL CONTINUE until we choose to turn off and walk away from THE GREAT DISTRACTION MACHINE. We call it “social media”.

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

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I click “accept the cookies” almost every time. I just personally don’t feel it’s worth the effort and cost to try to avoid it. the effort and cost to download an ad-blocker that automatically removes the prompt to accept/deny entirely is practically zero and the amount of clicks you'd save yourself would quickly exceed the clicks it took to install the blocker. > I just don’t think it is something that is worth st…

> I'd be willing to bet the data being collected by tracking your browsing history has already been screwing you over in various aspects of your life, online and offline, but you won't be told when it happens or why. Ok, can you give me a plausible example of what that harm could be? This seems in line with the exact thing I said in my comment; every time I ask how it could harm me, I am given vague statements about…

I guess the thing that worries me is more so population effect versus direct personal ones. When companies know they can extract useful information from a source, there becomes a market for the information, which further incentivizes others to collect the information. The other thing is that even if you don't care about ads, I assume you care at least about browsing privacy. The main reason why GDPR was even passed was data privacy and security.It is difficult to know who has what personal information and for how long they keep it. Because of that, it just takes one breach where suddenly your email/username/personal information, along with all of your browsing activity, gets leaked. This wouldn't only be the ones that you purposely entered your email address in; it just takes one site to have your cookie "fingerprint" and email connected, and suddenly all the sites that recorded that fingerprint will have a record that you visited them. All in all, I agree that there is a low chance of personal harm to you, but I look at it like putting motor oil in the storm drain. "Low trust" cultures where people only care about the direct effects of actions to themselves instead of society as a whole always fare worse than cultures where everyone sets a standard of what is acceptable or not.

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

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an exaggeration. Young people on average have grown up with drastically greater understanding of what a file is than any other generation that has come before them. They grew up using Chromebooks or laptops in school, constantly interacting with the local file systems, uploading files to Instagram and TikTok from the file systems on their smartphones, browsing their phones for files constantly. They know what…

> Young people on average have grown up with drastically greater understanding of what a file is than any other generation that has come before them. I totally disagree!!! Yes, everyone works with computer, phone, tablet, whatever, nowdays! But does generation z "knows" about what a computer is? Absolutely not!!! While tech has advanced and graduated IT personal know more than previous generations (obviously!), all t…

I agree, but I'd push that to anyone after millennials rather than gen x. I was born in '87 (Millennial) and our generation was the last one to bridge the analog->digital divide, having grew up in both worlds, I think it gave us a kind of unique understanding and relationship with tech that younger folks don't have.

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

#315

Enforcing laws against porn companies distributing porn to minors seems reasonable. It's already illegal many places, such as the US. It is then their responsibility to gate by age. It has always worked this way for liquor stores or basically anything else age-gated, including some online services like poker. If you dont want to provide age verification you don't have to.

There is a difference between a liquor store checking your ID, and a liquor store scanning your ID, appending it to a record of your purchase, and uploading it to a service to be processed by third parties (such as insurance companies, perhaps). (In the US, the latter occurs more often than you may expect.)

It’s possible to build mechanisms for this. Not perfect or foolproof ones. Maybe your phone stores a digital ID for its owner and sets a cryptographically signed “IsAdult” header. If you pull the signing key from the phone you can spoof that, but you can bring a fake ID to the bar too.

The problem is that the people who want age verification don’t really care about the technical details of how it’s implemented and the people who oppose age verification just want unfettered online pornography out of principle, so no one is actually thinking about how to implement age verification in a way that protects privacy.

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

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in my mid forties, been working as a professional software developer for over 20 years. I click “accept the cookies” almost every time. I just personally don’t feel it’s worth the effort and cost to try to avoid it. What “dark pattern cookie trick” are you worried about? I just can’t come up with a scenario where it will actually harm me in any way. All the examples I have heard are either completely implausible…

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…

Do you have any napkin math on the ecological impact in quantifiable terms? I'm just super curious what the scope of the problem is.

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

#317
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…

Again the HN bubble, I assure that the vast majority of adults of any age are not privacy conscious.

That was kind of the point.

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

#318
post #294
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 ther…

GDPR has very little to do with dark patterns, nag screens, or online tracking?

> "all the rest of it is a terrible idea"

Having a legal right to ask a company for a copy of all the data they have on you is terrible?

Having a right to ask a company to correct errors in data about you, or delete data about you, that's terrible?

A company having to tell you what they intend do with data about you and stick to it for the threat of a big fine, that's bad?

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

#320

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…

Sadly, this still doesn't do anything to show me that I should opt out. I, as an individual, am not going to have any effect on a business if I opt out or not. No business decision is going to be made because I opt out. You might argue that it will matter if enough of us do it. Sure, that is true... but again, it won't matter if I do it or not. If N number of people opting out is enough to ruin the business model, th…

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