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

neilzone.co.uk

471–480 of 645 posts

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

#471
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…

There is a third path, Firefox focus. Accept everything, the end the session. That said even with throwaway relay emails I don't sign up to much

I use regular Firefox with the option to delete all data on quit. And I quit maybe once per day or so, as soon as I feel there are too many tabs open. Serves the same purpose.

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

#472
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'm sure many law professionals felt the same way when we started getting bombarded with EULAs.

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

#473
I sort of like these restrictions. You're making hard for me to access your site - I close it. You block it behind a paywall - I close it. You block it because of ublock - fine again, I close your site. I have only so much time and you're helping me.

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

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the Paradox of Voting is the exact same situation [1]. My decision to vote is not rational, but I know if all the rational people don't vote that is bad, and so I focus on the other parts of voting, like civic pride and the little sticker that says "I voted" > It may be you don't believe in democracy at all, and that's fair, but consumer action is the only way you can affect business decisions, by joining the de…

It is pretty paradoxical and got me thinking. I don't know how to measure the value of my vote. I feel like the immediate value is less than the effort, but on the other hand, I don't think it's so simple. As you said, if no "rational" people vote, that's catastrophic and so I'm helping to maintain a larger system. Maybe a culture. Movements can have collective power no individual can have, but they can't exist witho…

What happened to being part of a community?

I do not think this should be analysed from the perspective of an individual but from the perspective of being part of a collective.

Individually we are pathetic naked monkeys, collectively we are mighty

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

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the exact same logic as opting to not go through the hassle of registering to and casting your vote in your national elections (unless that physically isn't an option where you live) -- yes, your government isn't going to make a decision one way or another based on your vote alone. But will you affect the sociopolitical trends by whatever fraction of societal opinion you represent? It may be you don't believe…

> consumer action is the only way you can affect business decisions I mean, insomuch as any action I take is a consumer action, because I am a consumer, this is true. That's why Luigi'ing is a consumer action. But 'vote with your wallet' is an illusion; you have no way of informing an entity why you are rejecting their service if you simply don't patronize them. On a ballot you're actively choosing another over them.…

Not spending money at Target is not voting with your wallet. Voting with your wallet is the spending you do at a business that isn't Target instead.

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

#476
post #56
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 cookies, it's explicit consent to track you, and sell your browsing history to ~1500 spy companies around the world. To the sibling comments: don't "accept the cookies" and then delete them. - - - I'm super angry at what the web has become, especially at the OS browser community. There is 0 browser (that I know of) that can access the web safely and conveniently. Atm I use Firefox with uBlock which bloc…

I had similar frustrations and been maintaining a Firefox fork trying to fill a gap there. The result is Konform Browser and I think it might be relevant to you; please check it out!

https://codeberg.org/konform-browser/source/releases

https://techhub.social/@konform

Shared today on Show HN but seems to be drowning in deluge of LLMs...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47227369

> every single extension provides 100% access to my websites to whoever controls the extension

That feels a like a bit of overstatement and depends on what addons you use and how you install them... CSPs at least make it possible to restrict such things by policy (assuming user has been exposed to it and parsed it...). https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... MV3 introduced further restrictions and controls regarding addon capabilities. While I agree the UI and UX around this could be much better, it's not all hopeless. The underlying pieces are mostly there.

While the fundamental addon execution security model in Konform Browser is inherited from upstream, for core addons like uBO you can improve the supply-chain security situation by loading it under "system scope" and disable addon updates in the browser itself. So while we don't (yet) improve on the runtime aspects you speak of, at least for now we can tighten up the supply-chain side to minimize risk of bad code running in the first place.

Literally `apt-get install webext-ublock-origin-firefox`.

"Enterprise policy files" can be used to change Firefox behavior and tweak security model around addon loading. A little explanation and reference of how it works if you want to do the same in other FF build or for other addons: https://codeberg.org/konform-browser/source#bundled-extensio...

Any particular addon you think is missing from the list there and should also be packaged and easily available? Maybe will be able to improve some of the security-UI/UX here too down the line. I'd be keen to hear your take on how this should be done better!

Regarding what addons can and do leak about you to the outside... I think you may also take interest in FF Bug 1405971. We ship a patch for that which can hopefully be upstreamed Soon (tm).

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

#477
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…

simple solution: go to a convenience store. Show your id, maybe 2 pieces. They frown, shrug, and give you an anonymous verification token, usable once (or maybe a set of 20), that you can then use to anonymously verify your age. Yeah, people will sell these tokens online, but that's not the end of the world. People have bought liquor for minors who sit around the corner from the liquor store since forever. It's still…

This is a perfectly reasonable solution if the problem really is child safety. But we all know it's not. There's money in surveilance and profiling.

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

#478
post #459
post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I find extraordinary is y'alls bullshit theory that it is extraordinary to claim the CPS apparatus wasn't used more before when it didn't even exist until like ~1974, and before then as a much different process. You seem to have replied to the wrong post. > As usual, just blame the victim, then complain they don't provide evidence knowing full damn well child and family welfare services complaints are sealed a…

But it's not rare at all. It really just sounds like you haven't had reason to pay attention to this before and now don't want to accept it's become a thing. A google search for "cops called on kids playing alone" results in a never-ending series of stories like this. I think most of them are from people with your perspective being caught by surprise.

I have kids, and I know hundreds of parents across large portions of the country. None of them have these issues.

A person driving down a private road and threatening to call CPS because they can't see the parent is not rare?

And the parent poster didn't just say someone threatened to call the cops, they said that they would be jailed in two very specific circumstances where jailing him would have led to very negative consequences for the arresting parties in anything beyond the immediate term.

Many people are stupid, and do stupid things like calling the cops for no valid reason at all. Those people are annoying and can be ignored, and I would not be remotely surprised by any pseudo-anonymous person doing something stupid. What would surprise me is the cops actually responding to the call and making the decisions that the other poster claimed, with a few exceptions where I would be much less surprised.

Since he only responds to questions with tangential rants, we'll never know for sure what happened.

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

#479

Stop making your kids my problem! We have everything to hide. It is called personal identity. All data online managed by companies will always be misused, lost to scammers, blamed back to you for something you never did, and hunt you down.

> Stop making your kids my problem! This is an interesting point: there is a trade-off between kids being denied access to inappropriate websites and adults not being forced to verify their age. We can't have both, so we must weigh which is more important. One could argue that protecting kids is clearly more important; on the other hand, there are way more adults in the world than kids, so more people are impacted wi…

I saw porn when I was under 18, and I'd wager the majority of people also have going back to the 70s or 80s. We all ended up mostly normal

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

#480
The only way I can think of to do this completely anonymously (at least for the government and social media) is for you to buy a card in cash that has a little code on it. You'd need your ID to buy it, and you'd put your code into your operating system and things that demand age verification can ask the OS whether or not you're over 18. Alternatively, you can give the service your code to verify your age, but that would be less convenient and lead to a larger tracking footprint, so it likely wouldn't be used unless necessary
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