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

neilzone.co.uk

611–620 of 645 posts

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

#611
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative being to bend over and grab our ankles with both hands the moment the scummy ad-tech industry requests our data? Sorry mate, the GDPR is there for a bloody good reason; and legit companies obey the law.

The GDPR is theater. An effective privacy law would have prevented data collection in the first place. Data collected will be abused, and a cute little banner won't change this.

Ummmmm.

The GDPR does outlaw unnecessary collection of personal data without explicit opt-in consent. It's baffling you appear ignorant of this.

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

#612
post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So-called "cookie banners" usually ask for your consent to much more than optional tracking cookies. By accepting you might be giving your permission to e.g. track you through various fingerprinting methods, build a profile and share it with advertising partners.

If they are aggressive enough to do fingerprinting, what makes you think they would abide to your choice? You do browser fingerprinting when you want to overcome people rejecting cookies.

Usually it's the fine of 2% of total global revenue (not profit)

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

#613
post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GDPR is theater. An effective privacy law would have prevented data collection in the first place. Data collected will be abused, and a cute little banner won't change this.

Ummmmm. The GDPR does outlaw unnecessary collection of personal data without explicit opt-in consent. It's baffling you appear ignorant of this.

The consent is the problem. It should be illegal even with consent, so this whole industry wouldn't exist.

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

#614
post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they arrested (or just fined?) someone for calling to burn down a hotel with migrants. For you this is an oppressive dictatorship, but it doesn’t match reality. It also has no bearing on willingness to implement proof of age without additional disclosure. But yeah not EU, one country in Europe is unlike another, etc.

I don't know the specific case you're referring to, though that's far from the only fine or arrest in the UK related to social media posts. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...

This is paywalled. What were the posts?

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

#615

When I heard roblox was doing this, I asked both my kids if they uploaded their face data. They both had already. I didn't think to warn them. Really annoyed a company can ask this of children without parental consent.

This raises an intriguing idea. The solutions will require children to upload their personal information, including photos. Like roblox.

Children are clearly not capable of understanding the ramifications of this decision. So, prompting children to upload such info should itself be illegal.

Nevermind that most adults do not understand the ramifications either, but we assume they are capable of consenting to anything by fiat, so let's ignore that...

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

#616
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In which countries?

Germany: https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/03/03/is-it-a-crime-to-mo...

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

#617

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…

"then I am hopefully helping decrease the return advertisers get by using personal information".

Arguably, clicking on the ad but never buying would have a stronger negative affect. The advertiser pays for your click but gets no return...

I use an adblocker too.

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

#618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I do actually vote in every election, for the same reasons you are talking about. There are social reasons I do it, and there is something communal and bonding about the process of elections. But it isn't because my individual vote actually matters.

>vote matters... If you only pay attention to national elections sure. Tons of local and state elections come down to a couple hundred votes all the time.

Even coming down to a couple of hundred votes still means your single vote doesn’t matter. It technically only matters if it comes down to one vote.

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

#619
post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GDPR is theater. An effective privacy law would have prevented data collection in the first place. Data collected will be abused, and a cute little banner won't change this.

Ummmmm. The GDPR does outlaw unnecessary collection of personal data without explicit opt-in consent. It's baffling you appear ignorant of this.

Yet, Facebook and Google have a thriving business in the EU among I’m assuming EU companies.

So you can pretend that the law is effective or you can admit that all it gave the world were cookie banners.

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

#620
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The age verification proposal of the EU tries to do that, the government knows you used age verification (and I think the rough number of times you used it), but they don't know when or where you used it. https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/d...

I can't imagine countries with such strict speech laws, for example, would be willing to build a system that is technically incapable of linking the person visiting a sire and the site requesting verification. This proposal may have been updated since I read it previously, so I could be wrong now, but it didn't read as a true zero-knowledge proof as key steps in the flow still required a level of trusting the governm…

It's a proposal, so you can check out how it would work.

Anonymous age verification is technically possible, but it is as pointless as any other age verification system, it could easily be circumvented if someone older willing to help.

Probably there is a reason why nobody uses it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

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