I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by Terr_ » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 6:19 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #84

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,…

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…

To disagree and recycle some past writing:

> Yeah, I have a particular rant about this with respect to older generations believing "kids these days know computers." [...] they mistake confidence for competence, and the younger consumers are more confident poking around because they grew up with superior idiot-proofing. The better results are because they dare to fiddle until it works, not because they know what's wrong.

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

#332

Post by basket_horse » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 6:20 PM UTC

wonnage wrote: post #252

cm2012 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This might’ve been true in 2012 but definitely is not the case today “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”

The counter point to that quote is that someone whose salary depends on something likely has a lot more understanding of the topic than the average person. Not saying theyre always in the right. But the average internet user thinks they are way better informed than they actually are.

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

#333

Post by jim33442 » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 6:21 PM UTC

I'm not reluctant. Rather, there's zero chance I'll do this. If Discord wants to put me into <18 mode for it, fine.

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

#334

Post by Bender » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 6:22 PM UTC

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

I do not hesitate to drop a domain that acts suspicious into uBlock Origin -> My Filters:

    ||somedomain.tld$

Never gets another packet from me. I use local Brick & Mortar businesses for as many things as I can. The businesses on the internet have jumped the shark.

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

#335

Post by xg15 » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 6:22 PM UTC

I sort of get his point, but on the other hand, if the debate is "should social media sites be age restricted / have mandatory age verification?" then the argument "I can't see any reason to, because I personally don't use social media" doesn't seem particularly useful.

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

#336

Post by autoexec » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 6:23 PM UTC

sdevonoes wrote: post #259

autoexec wrote: post #235

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…

There’s a burden in ad blocker plugins: you never know when they will get compromised. Im comparison to that, simply ignoring the cookie baner is less effort imho

Preventing add-ons from auto-updating is helpful. Enshittification happens more often than serious security updates, especially when it comes to add-ons that do something very basic such as hide a banner.

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

#337

Post by mixmastamyk » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 6:23 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #290

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…

Ok, so suppose I am consenting to all of those things. I still have the same question… how is my life going to be made worse by that happening?

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/uber-for-nursing...

Also, gig workers get paid less when in a poor financial position. Harassed, detained when crossing borders.

These are the start, not the end.

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

#338

Post by seniortaco » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 6:24 PM UTC

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…

You know you can clear your cookies right?

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

#339

Post by ryanwhitney » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 6:24 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #310

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…

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…

While I have no idea of the actual outcome, I’ll muddle through the extra step + thinking to opt-out where possible.

My own personal bend is that I do not want to be sold anything and I want anonymity where possible. We’re constantly being advertised to. Anything small action that I can take to deter that, or make the ads less personalized/interesting/distracting to me, is worth it. Even if I also will never knowingly click an ad.

It’s probably largely a control thing psychologically. With cookie banners specifically, I also don’t want to concede to dark patterns which make accepting easier than rejecting.

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

#340

Post by insane_dreamer » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 6:24 PM UTC

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…

It's not just young people. I think the above represents 98% of the people out there.

We've collectively long ago crossed over from privacy to convenience, and there's no going back. You and some of us here on HN (myself included) are the outliers.