Discord's face scanning age checks 'start of a bigger shift' • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by bccdee » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 1:32 PM UTC

Andrex wrote: post #306

stavros wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Jesus, how does your society still function when underage people can see videos of people having sex?! It kind of isn't anymore. But not just because of porn, obviously. Early porn exposure goes hand in hand with the problems we see typified in the recent Netflix movie Adolescence. Seen women constantly railed and treated like meat when that young probably does do something. "Videos of people having sex" is deliber…

> Early porn exposure goes hand in hand with the problems we see typified in the recent Netflix movie Adolescence

There's really no evidence of this. I find it much more plausible that the boom in misogynistic radicalism is caused by the flourishing of radically far-right niche content online. Our society has become more politically extreme in a number of ways over the past couple decades, and there's no porn equivalent for anti-immigrant or anti-trans sentiment. Andrew Tate, however, is very much of a kind with figures like Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones.

That's not to say porn viewership doesn't have an effect on kids, but I expect it would be much more modest. Unrealistic ideas about sex, anxieties about penis size. I'm in my mid-20s; internet porn was highly accessible to me & my peers when we were young, and while it did have an effect on youth culture, it was quite modest—nothing like the hard pivot to misogyny which I've heard teachers describe when their students become interested in (again) Andrew Tate.

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

#332

Post by fc417fc802 » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 1:33 PM UTC

SkyBelow wrote: post #315

lucb1e wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is card verification a lesser form of surveillance? It's not just about which is worse surveillance, it's also simply that everyone has a face but not everyone has a credit card. I'm not deemed creditworthy in this country I moved to (never had a debt in my life but they don't know that) so the card application got rejected. Do we want to upload biometrics or exclude poor and unknown people from "being 18"? I reall…

>everyone has a face Does everyone who is 18+ have a face that passes for 18+ (and the inverse as well)? Overall it seems like a bad idea, but one demanded by what sounds like a good idea with not reasonable way to fully implement it, leading to a tangled network of bad ideas patching other bad ideas patching other bad ideas all the way down.

The thing being demanded is decidedly not a good idea. A reasonable demand would be that sites over a certain size include a standardized age or content rating in the headers. That would facilitate a whitelist approach, which is the only viable way to accomplish the stated goal.

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

#333

Post by hsbauauvhabzb » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 1:36 PM UTC

lupusreal wrote: post #327

Dylan16807 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite TLS, filtering is easier to set up now than it was in 1998. You might have to block some apps in the short term, but if you suggest apps can avoid age verification if they stop pinning certificates then they'll jump at the option. Consolidation is the only tricky part that's new.

Filtering has never been easy or practical for the general public. But the situation has become much worse. In 1998 it was easy for a family to have no computer at all, or to put their single computer in the living room where it could be supervised. Internet use was limited because it tied up the phone line. These factors made it easy for parents to supervise their children. Today, computers are everywhere, fit in yo…

Seems like a reasonable argument to ban encryption rather than actually parent your children. As a conservative voter with nothing to hide, I’m in.

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

#334

Post by dharmab » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 1:37 PM UTC

Symbiote wrote: post #224

high_priest wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a debit card when I was 13. An absolute godsend during international travel, not having to bother with cash as a forgetful teenager. The card providers share your identity in monetary transactions, but I don't think this data does & should include birthdate.

These checks accept only a credit card. That's useful as one option, but can't be expected of 18 year olds in most countries, and older adults in many.

I had a credit card at 15. I had to travel for some school related stuff and it was easier to carry a card than excessive amounts of cash.

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

#335

Post by lupusreal » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 1:37 PM UTC

rapind wrote: post #217

Terr_ wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> trying to get everyone to filter We never needed everyone to filter, just parents busy lobbying the government to impose crap onto every possible service and website across the entire world. Instead, they should purchase devices for their kids that have a child-lock and client-side filters. All sites have to do is add an HTTP header loosely characterizing it's content. 1. Most of the dollar costs of making it all h…

There's a peer / social issue at play as well though. If you believe that smart phones are disastrous for kids (I happen to think so), and don't allow your 13yo daughter to have one, you are pretty much forcing her to be the odd one out. Maybe that's OK for some parents, but you can't deny that this cost exists. Preventing your son from playing certain video games that all of his friends enjoy also has a social cost.…

> This is why I think it's great when schools ban phones in class.

This was the absolute norm in the 00s when cellphones became common and cheap enough for teens to often have one. If you were seen with a phone out it would be confiscated. At some point schools apparently just gave up and only a few are starting to rediscover the policy as though it's a novel idea.

What the fuck happened? When exactly did this transition happen?

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

#336

Post by hsbauauvhabzb » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 1:38 PM UTC

Loic wrote: post #262

stavros wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I suppose you do not have children. I am open-minded, mid 40's. The level of violence in porn you can get access to with just one click, has no comparison with what I could get access to as a kid (basically nothing). With the net, you get access in one click to the worse and the best. It is a lot of work as a parent to educate the kids about that. As kids, teenager and even as 20 something, if we wanted to do some ex…

I keep hearing this argument, but I don’t come across any violent porn unless I explicitly look for it. What are the search terms you people are using?

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

#337

Post by rchaud » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 1:39 PM UTC

I'm on several UK-based soccer message boards and none of this seems to be required there. The forums are running on Xenforo or PhpBB, self-hosted by the admin. Some of those forums have thousands of user accounts registered.

Is Discord considered to be different as it's a centralized aggregator platform like Reddit, vs a standalone thing like a message board?

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

#338

Post by karaterobot » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 1:43 PM UTC

> The social media company requires users to take a selfie video on their phone and uses AI to estimate the person's age.

What I did not see in this article was anything about how AI can tell a 13 year old from a 12.9 year old with confidence. This seems unlikely to me.

I agree with the article's implication that websites will now want a scan of everyone's faces forever. Their insistence that they won't store the face scans is like one those cute lies that kids tell, and adults aren't fooled by. Either you're outright lying, or you're using the loophole of not storing the image, but rather storing a set of numbers, drived from the image, which act as a unique fingerprint. Or, you're sending it to a third party for storage. Or something like that. But you're definitely keeping track of everyone's faces, don't try to pull a fast one on me young lady, I've been around the block before.

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

#339

Post by SkyBelow » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 1:46 PM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #332

SkyBelow wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>everyone has a face Does everyone who is 18+ have a face that passes for 18+ (and the inverse as well)? Overall it seems like a bad idea, but one demanded by what sounds like a good idea with not reasonable way to fully implement it, leading to a tangled network of bad ideas patching other bad ideas patching other bad ideas all the way down.

The thing being demanded is decidedly not a good idea. A reasonable demand would be that sites over a certain size include a standardized age or content rating in the headers. That would facilitate a whitelist approach, which is the only viable way to accomplish the stated goal.

The issue is that there are some online activities which we all agree that children must be banned from no matter the cost to do so. Society has now started shifting in what actually falls in that group, but no one is arguing against the group entirely. There are very invasive solutions to this that have historically been accepted in the most agreed upon use cases, but not that society has started to shift on what falls into that category, we see a lot of friction as others don't want those solutions applied elsewhere.

Whitelisting was never an accepted solution for this worst category, and thus it will not be an accepted solution to any specific cases that society has started to move into that category (accepted to the portion of society moving it into that category, those who don't put it in that category will see such solutions are massive overreach).

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

#340

Post by fc417fc802 » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 1:51 PM UTC

lupusreal wrote: post #329

fc417fc802 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has there been some outbreak of this? Genuinely confused. My impression is that sort of behavior has been decreasing my entire life while access to porn has been increasing.

My impression is that parents are increasingly alarmed at young boys becoming bitter misogynists. Maybe that isn't happening and it's just a moral panic? Or maybe those boys watching lots of pornography and coming to believe that women are whores are two entirely unrelated phenomenons? Media diet shapes what we are, and kids are more impressionable than most. It is therefore natural and reasonable for parents to want…

I don't think that's quite what's happening, I think the phenomenon in question is occurring primarily within a specific age group, and I think it doesn't correlate with porn availability or consumption.

If X predates A by a long time then any attribution of A to X is going to need extensive evidence.

I think the phenomenon you refer to has to do with politics and culture. It's loosely related to the pendulum swinging back against DEI type stuff. Depending on your political persuasion you might replace "bitter misogynists" with something like "angry cynics".