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Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

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Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#471

When will it be normalized to be able to say "Parents should just be doing their job" before we decide to ruin everything online for everyone else. Although I know it's not really about protecting the kids. I wonder if the politicians are exempt from this too as they were chat control. > The scanning would apply to all EU citizens, except EU politicians. They might exempt themselves from the law under “professional s…

The amount of time and energy that I have to put in to keep my 3 individual kids safe online while still allowing some access is mind-blowingly high. It shouldn’t be as hard as it is. It’s so hard, in fact, 99.9% of parents give up on it. I’m not one to do that but I’ve strongly considered it many times.

Parental controls are fractured across every platform, they can’t enforce everything in one place, domain filtering isn’t practical, some sites (like YouTube) are needed for schoolwork and they include adult content intermingled with no sane way to bifurcate those. It’s also impossible to disable the forced short-form video push onto toddlers and teens.

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#472

It's kind of surprising that no-one has really come out with a proper privacy-preserving approach to this yet. It is clearly _possible_; there are reasonable-looking designs for this. But no-one's doing it; they're just collecting photos and IDs, and then leaking them all over the place.

Here's my solution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447282 The problem is privacy activists and free speech activists (though there's some overlap between the two they aren't the same) oppose age verification by any means since it has the potential to infringe on both ever so slightly. Meanwhile age verification gates are being demanded and thrown up all over the Internet at a frightening pace. So we get only…

The issue with your solution still comes down to yet another centralizing middleman with no real incentive to be efficient. And all the incentive to lobby governments and extract more wealth from the people.

This can of course be done government by government, but that isn't scalable for a global company.

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#474

I'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts. Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with…

I recently moved a small community group from Slack to Zulip. Half because of the UX for infrequent visitors (topics are so much better than "50 unread messages in #general"). And half because of your organisational values, which are more aligned with ours than are those of Salesforce. The Bluesky team talks about "credible exit", and Zulip has that in spades - which makes me not want to exit. Thank you for the work…

> topics are so much better than "50 unread messages in #general"

my experience is exact opposite

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#475

It is a great irony that the heavy handed push for "protect da kids" is all happening while we learn, day by day, that the richest and most powerful members of our society have no problem hanging out with a convicted child sex trafficker. Rules for thee, free love for me.

Just like how you learn that all black men are criminals when you see a few of them committing crimes!

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#476
> The first option uses AI to analyze a user’s video selfie, which Discord says never leaves the user’s device. If the age group estimate (teen or adult) from the selfie is incorrect, users can appeal it or verify with a photo of an identity document instead.

Are they shipping a video classifier model that can run on all the devices that can run Discord, including web? I've never heard of this being done at scale fully client-side. Which begs the question of whether the frames are truly processed only client-side...

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#477

When will it be normalized to be able to say "Parents should just be doing their job" before we decide to ruin everything online for everyone else. Although I know it's not really about protecting the kids. I wonder if the politicians are exempt from this too as they were chat control. > The scanning would apply to all EU citizens, except EU politicians. They might exempt themselves from the law under “professional s…

What's ruined by this? Honestly asking

It's giving my identification to a no face company, that I don't know will handle the data correctly. And if they don't I have absolutely no recourse.

Also, why should I need to identify myself at all ? I used to use IRC for the better part of my life, I still do infact. So to have to Identify myself by sending my ID to a random company is insulting to me.

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#478

I'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts. Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with…

What is the video calling and screen share experience like?

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#479

It should go without saying but, *CANCEL YOUR NITRO SUBSCRIPTION NOW IF YOU'RE PAYING FOR ONE* (for whatever reason) This was just announced today and a flood of canceled payments within the next 24 hours are the easiest way to send a message. And also tell people on the servers you're on to do the same. It's not like they give you anything of real value for that money.

Cancelled

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#480

When will it be normalized to be able to say "Parents should just be doing their job" before we decide to ruin everything online for everyone else. Although I know it's not really about protecting the kids. I wonder if the politicians are exempt from this too as they were chat control. > The scanning would apply to all EU citizens, except EU politicians. They might exempt themselves from the law under “professional s…

I have a friend who is a social worker. Hearing stories from them, I think people severely overestimate the level of involvement that many parents have with their kids. Social workers who are checking in on middle school kids at the hospital with burn marks on their arms or elementary school kids who showed up under the influence of cannabis aren’t also going to have time to enforce online safety. If this is what it…

Parents are just burnt out, I think. Online spaces have become so consolidated and enshittified that it’s seriously a choice between basically keeping them offline - which is a very socially isolating thing to be these days - and letting a small number of faux-accountable monopolies ranging from Discord to Google and Meta call the shots. It’s kind of a no-win situation.

I’d love to have my kids in relatively small, intimate online spaces where I can’t necessarily assume they will be perfect (nor do I want them to be - they deserve to have some room to learn to navigate problems for themselves) but I can at least assume they won’t be overwhelmed by the impossibility of successfully navigating life in a globalized fishbowl. But if there’s one thing late stage capitalism abhor, it’s a self-contained community of real humans from which the powers that be can’t extract “value”.

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