I think it is great that people point out LLM generated articles here on HN. Sadly, it feels like I am slowly loosing my skill to identify LLM speak. Maybe I am getting worn out of all LLM content... So, please, list the indicators and telltale signs from the specific article or blog post (like others have done here already). At least I would appreciate it a lot.
> It is not age verification. It is identity verification.
> You can change a password. You cannot change your face.
> This is not a popularity contest, and refusal is not a vote you are trying to win
These were a couple sentences that were immediate flags to me. There've been countless articles written on this (I can dig them up if you want), but IMO there are pretty clear semantic rhythms you start to notice.
It is not foo, it is bar. You can zip, you cannot zap.
I agree that these are signs of AI, but they're also the way that people write. I use the "it's not X it's Y" framing a lot of the time because it's a quick way to get my point across. It's probably the sign of a bad writer because I can't come up with a different/better way to say the same thing, but I'm not AI.
> I agree that these are signs of AI, but they're also the way that people write
Certainly. If these were one-offs in an otherwise human written piece then we wouldn't even be discussing it.
In this case, they're just the simplest examples in an objectively LLM produced piece. I'm happy to point to more if you're skeptical; I'd happily wager cash the prose here wasn't written by human fingers.
I could tell it was AI, but it was interesting nonetheless. FWIW, I don't think AI enablement is inherently bad; this can be a game changer for an individual with an interesting thought yet difficulty expressing themselves in written word. (Obviously, it's also created a real problem with the ability to create near infinite well-written content, especially in the case of propaganda.)
I do agree with you that the quotes cited out are literary constructs used by humans, and there's a risk we get trigger-happy in calling out AI-slop. Still, those are just the most obvious tells — there were absolutely other, less notable mannerisms that confirmed it for me. If you interact enough with an LLM, you can become quite good at detecting their output through subtle subconscious cues that are hard to put to words.
I do wonder where some of the tropes came from. Claude tends to say "____ is doing a lot of work in this sentence", yet I don't recognize that as a common construction for humans overall or even a specific community (e.g. journalists). Perhaps I'm just unfamiliar with some vernaculars found in training data. Yet sometimes, it legitimately feels like they've actually developed a lingo of their own — an emergent property.
I find it all truly fascinating (along with other feelings…), and I never expected computers to be able to "understand" language anywhere near the degree we see today. Will it soon plateau, requiring another breakthrough? Or is there plenty of juice left to squeeze?
I personally don't like reading text written by LLMs, I'd rather just read the prompt itself. I suspect you feel differently. I imagine this says a lot about the reader :)
These are normal patterns in US English. The zeal to accuse limits the scope of possible responses. There are all sorts of things humans do when writing that LLMs mimic — em-dashes for instance — that are entirely legitimate ways to communicate but get shouted down for… reasons?
Surely you’re aware that LLMs were trained on the ways humans write specifically to mimic them? Yes? So what’s the gripe? Someone cranked out a “thought piece” with no effort or actual thinking on their own?
But thats the promise of AI.
So are you advocating doing away with AI tools and research? Maybe we start asking “should we” not “can we”? Now that is a position I might get behind.
But really how the hell am I supposed to write at all when nearly ANYTHING I write could be interpreted as AI-generated and then shouted down in some quasi-ad-hominem attack on me while not engaging with any points made?
it's like AI-generated images, though those tend to be more obvious than AI-generated text due to the "average" effect being visually obvious. Yes, these are normal patterns in English, but it is not normal to use them with the frequency that triggers people's llm-lese senses.
I don't see a way out of it until either generated content is either completely unable to be distinguished from authored content (unlikely?), or there's a silver bullet for identifying generated content (also unlikely?)
>>Sadly, it feels like I am slowly loosing my skill to identify LLM speak. Maybe I am getting worn out of all LLM content...
Its quite simple, at least by HN rules. If you dont like an article, post "This is LLM" and move on. Within 5 minute your post will be voted t o the top.
I know, right? It used to be easy: just look for writing in a very long-winded style, almost as if the author is being paid per word, in a place where that sort of writing didn't belong. I think it was because that type of writing represented a disproportionate fraction of the tokens in the training data due to the long-winded-ness. Somewhere around a year ago, they figured out some way to deal with that problem.
I think it will become pretty simple. Does the author say somewhere on their site that they don't use AI for writing? If yes, then great. Otherwise, it's very likely LLM-generated — particularly if the author spends a lot of time writing positively about AI. (And what if they lie? They will be discovered eventually, at which point they can be blacklisted.)
Oh my god. I’m triggered. Opus 4.8 thinks everything is load-bearing, arguments, functions, classes, you name it, there’s always a few load-bearing things in every conversation.
You're on Y-Combinator here, a start-up incubator all about AI and launching new things, that literally used to be run by Sam Altman, and that was the launching pad of OpenAI.
And you're surprised there is a lot of AI content?
I'm always amazed too. I waste so much time clicking on links like that only to find slop that just wastes my time.
I'm guessing a huge number of people never even bother to click on the article and just comment based on the title, so there's that. Then there's cases where they are sympathetic to the subject or opinion and talk about that in the comments and ignore that the machine-written article doesn't actually contribute to the conversation at all.
Yeah. If the "don't post AI generated comments" guideline was extended to cover posts, I wonder what % of recent front page articles would be impacted.
It is upsetting. Is it worth surrendering one's practice of thinking and communicating effectively in order to resist corporate overreach? Or is such a neglect doomed to result in the very problem of passivity that this post pushes back against?
Exactly. I stopped reading part way through. The first thought was ... this seems like quite a lot of words to say not an awful lot of contents. And then the sentences started jumping out.
> A verification regime does not need your approval — it needs your participation
I quit facebook over a decade ago. Then, a few months back, I was under some pressure to sell something, and the facebook marketplace appears to be the way to go locally. So I tried to create a facebook account.
They wanted to scan my face, and in a moment of weakness, I performed the ritual. Thirty seconds later, they suspended my account due to violations of their terms of service: "this decision cannot be appealed". So now they have my face and I still can't use the marketplace.
I can only assume I'm suspended due to the behavior of somebody who tried to use my identity for something during the decade when I had no facebook account. Apparently not even my face is strong enough authentication for me to convince them that I'm not whoever it was that caused whatever the problem was.
This is why biometrics will never make sense. They're too immutable. Maintaining multiple accounts is not a bug, it's a debugging mechanism. Since I have only the face that I do, I can't even figure out why I'm banned.
We need to instead stop trusting people merely because they have an account. 10k upvotes/likes/5-star-reviews should mean nothing if I don't explicitly or transitively trust the upvoters/likers/reviewers. We have to build things that make decisions by traversing the trust graph so instead of being banned with no recourse, I can create a no-trust identity and elevate it back to personhood status by convincing my meatspace friends to trust it by having a conversation with them in meatspace.
I don't think you can assume your identity was compromised. I know the Facebook denial dialog suggests that "unusual activity" was detected and you need to access it via your mobile device. Of course as you know that doesn't help.
I signed on for Meta enhanced support for a month (nb, don't bother doing this, it's a waste of money) and had numerous voice calls with pandering support people who assured me it had nothing to do with identity and everything to do with vague "Community Standards violations" that can't be identified. FWIW the restrictions are indefinite and can't be appealed.
FB is set up like it's based on the film "Brazil" mated with Sartre's "No Exit."
I’m sorry am I reading this right? You now have to pay for the privilege of getting support so you can participate in Zuck’s infostealer so that he can then sell your data and make money off it? I think I’m getting too old for tech.
I do strange things, so it's possible that the cause has to do with some quirk of my behavior while closing the account in 2011, or while attempting to reopen it in 2026, and not somebody else's behavior in the interim.
I don't really care about facebook, I found a buyer for the thing. I'm just saying that the use of biometrics is bad engineering because it amplifies the severity of adjacent bugs to "blocker". Starting over with a new identity should be painful enough to discourage bad behavior, but it should be possible to enable users who do strange things sometimes to navigate the system.
I tried to make an account while forgetting my VPN was engaged. Another US IP address but one from a block of IPs I’m sure is used for nefarious purposes. So because I briefly shared an IP block with ne’erdowells, I am, without an option to appeal, banned from interacting with Facebook forever.
Google Ads is ghosting me too. I really could get behind legislation that requires companies to have a human point of contact in these cases, but I guess a private company has the right to ignore people they don’t want as customers.
I made an account on LinkedIn while forgetting my VPN was enabled and set up my profile. They immediately flagged me as suspicious and restricted my account, and demanded I upload an ID to remove the restriction, to which I complied and they lifted the restriction. Then about a month later I tried to add my sibling as a connection and they didn't get any notification, then my sibling tried to search up my name to add me and I wasn't showing as a search result. Seems I was shadowbanned even after providing my ID, which seems insane to me that the main professional social network can just do that to someone without due process or any indication. This type of thing could sabotage someone's entire professional career or ruin their self-confidence as everyone ignores all of their messages and activity
I have the same problem with my actual residential ISP. You wouldn't think sites like Etsy would ban entire IPs, but they apparently have; can't view the site at all, just a generic "you are blocked" message.
At least half the sites I try to visit are endless captcha loops, mostly from cloudflare. Trying to make online orders with a credit card often gets the order automatically flagged or canceled. Many sites give a generic cloudflare "you are blocked" message, when I've never visited them before.
I recently tried to download some manuals from the RICOH website, and all four different residential ISPs I tried from were blocked, and these were family members' connections that aren't part of any sort of proxy botnet or similar.
Meta, obviously the same company, has four separate pages that handle the creation of a “page” for a business.
They all prompt for the same information to do the same job.
You are required to make one of these “pages” to be able to advertise on any Meta property.
None of them work, and they have non-functional error handling. And if you keep trying, getting zero feedback about what’s wrong, you get the “scan your face and give us your biometric data” wall.
As such I cannot advertise on Instagram. Like, I can’t give them money, even when I try. It’s impossible that I’m the only one in the world, and it’s costing them money. Directly.
You would think that with their infinite AI resources they would be able to recognize problems, identify the source, and unfuck themselves… right?
In days, not years… right?
At least that’s what we’re told. But it seems reality doesn’t quite agree.
It's actually real that a ton of businesses must resort to shady providers of "Ads account" for legitimate stuff, nowadays it's very hard to join Facebook, if you didn't have an account made the past years, it's likely that you can't signup and run your business on it, you have to use illegal methods.
I bought my last car on Craigslist. It was quite pleasant and I like the car. Not that there isn't garbage/scams there, but there's garbage on marketplace too (more, to my eye). I make a point to always go to Craigslist first. It still exists, and it's kicking!
OfferUp also has a ton, as does AutoTempest and even good old fashioned AutoTrader. I'm currently shopping for my son.
Facebook seems to have the lowest cost cars, but it also seems to be the least successful way of contacting people. When I bought a car for my sister in April, I contacted (no exaggeration) 70+ sellers and heard back from about ten of them. And yes, I changed the default "Is it still available?" message to something demonstrating urgency e.g. "I have cash and would like to buy." But with persistence, I found her the right car through Marketplace. Really hate the FBook search interface though, it's total garbage.
I spend most of my time looking on CList and OfferUp.
Same! I recommend an old (2017-) Nissan Leaf. I got one for very cheap when gas was at a local peak, and now that's it's going down, I'm seeing even better deals. The low range can be a plus when it's a 16-year-old driver whom you have no interest in seeing drive out of the city. haha
I had the exact same experience. Never used Facebook. Wanted to create a page for a product. Suspended. Did the face scan. Now they have my face and I'm still suspended. Absolute joke. Zuckerberg can go suck a fat one.
I had the same thing, tried to set up an instagram account for a website I run. It locked me out instantly and asked for a face photo; after I uploaded it it went to review; after about 40 minutes that brand new instagram account was permanently suspended for posting content which breaches the terms of service, with no appeal possible. It did let me download the full account data which of course had nothing in it and no further info about why it got permabanned.
It is obvious something is broken but they are quite good at blocking you from accessing any possible avenue of support once the account is in this state.
On the off chance someone from Meta is reading: Please unban the account "rareboc" :-)
When a xiaomi 15 phone asks to scan your face for phone unlock, it specifically warns that a photo of you may be sufficient to unlock the phone. Not sure how it works with other brands/models, but i don’t think the way they are doing face verification is the right way to do it
That happened to me to! A similar moment of weakness: I got tired of being locked out of like half of small business profiles. A local brewery (very small brewery, but top tier beers) posts on instagram if they’ll even be open that day.
Caved, tried to sign up, asked for my face, then rejected me forever.
Same thing happened to me. Except I created a new Facebook account using my work email. I had to use my personal Facebook account. Meta has become so awful.
we programmatically created a system with implicit trust and now that trust is washing away. business logic should probably be guaranteed and have to pass a series of tests in order to provide expected service
There are cases where it's sufficient to find a leader with sufficient moral fiber to resist corruption, but I don't think this is one of them.
Zuck was a scumbag to start with, but being the kind of admin that gets to jerk people around on the basis of their biology is a corrupting kind of power. Even a well meaning individual, given a few decades at the helm of a company based around treating user's faces like they're the company's intellectual property, would have become a scumbag by now.
Maybe biometrics as a convenience, where they don't leave the device they're captured on and are secondary to some other credential which the user can change, are alright. But any central registry of people's body parts is gonna be a short cut to bad juju. It's an architecture we should work to prevent because it'll create Zuck-a-likes.
At the very least, we need to outlaw the method of corporate governance that Meta (and increasingly, other tech companies) use.
Mark has an absolute majority of shares at Meta at around 61% [0]. It is literally impossible for the board or other shareholders to cause him to do anything he doesn't want to do or to make him work in the best interests of others, whether they be other shareholders or the public. Meta is more-or-less a sole proprietorship with window dressing.
If no one can force a company to change by anything short of a person's passing or their loss of interest, then it's not really governed, and cannot be trusted to operate within the market and society at large. We need to make these organizations accountable to others in the systems in which they participate.
To the downvoter: please note Facebook used email passwords. Zuckerberg hacked Crimson reporters who were investigating him circa 2003. I mean what I said. Why do you have the 500 karma necessary to do that?
I'd push back on your theory that the problem is your biometrics having been abused by a third party (rather than merely being abused by Faceboot...). I'd say the base incentive is that they really don't care about adding new users, so their false positive rate is set way too high. They think you need them more than they need you. And for Faceboot Marketplace they're probably right (about 3-4x the selection of Craigslist IME, and a corresponding difference in interested buyers). I'll still browse and post things on Craigslist, and when I see something for sale on both I'll respond with the Craigslist method to support its mindshare (also straightforward email/SMS is a heck of a lot easier than having to use Faceboot Messenger and then nudge the conversation over to SMS for the actual meetup).
It ends with "The platforms need you far more than you need them".
And I think this is the misconception. No, they don't. The amount of people who will sign this, is a fraction of a fraction of a "platform"'s users. They will not care if they lose 50,000 users out of 2 Billion. A drop in the ocean. Not the target audience anyway.
And that is the real shame. Because I don't want to have to give my face or do age verification but I know when the time comes, and If I need to use a service now, I will give them whatever they want to get past the hurdle and use the service. It sucks, but I don't think a petition will help. Unless of course you get the 50 million to sign the petition AND stick to it.
You are correct that your data isn't particularly impactful for these platforms - but you're also overestimating the value that many of these services have. A fair few of them have competitors with better features and privacy offerings so the only reason you need them is purely for the network effect of everyone else using them.
And increasingly, everyone isn’t using them, even if they’re on them.
I’m on Insta and WhatsApp and I use them a few times per year. I’m on Messenger and have seen a dramatic dropoff in messages. I’m on FB frequently and notice only a small fraction of my friends bother anymore and it’s become an interest platform to make up the lack, so I’m trending toward less time there. I’m on Twitter/X but check in maybe once a month.
I may not be a typical user, but I’m probably not unique either.
Add to that, FB is no longer people...it's viewing entertainment...and I turn it off a bunch.
Threads is the new time sink and a lot of times I open it and close it shortly thereafter because it's all the same...someone with a 20 part diatribe, someone repeating the news, someone telling you to be outraged, engagement bait.
At this point I purely use it to log in on my birthday to pass pleasantries with relatives that don't use any other platform and then turn it off again for a year.
I was one of the earliest on FB. It's mostly an address book for me now. I'm sad sooooo many acquaintances and relatives are there, and yes, it would be a lot of effort to get their contact info or get them to use other messaging platform (but I've started doing that).
For 15+ years, I've thought long and hard countless times about what could sustainably replace social media platforms that do not serve us well. I know a paid app is not super likely to succeed, although WhatsApp did use to cost a dollar! It seems like a nonprofit wouldn't be that great, and so I wonder about a mission-driven public benefit corporation (not to be confused with a B corp, though it could be one of those too). Of course it has to be cool or no one would use it. Not a fuddy duddy wannabe social network. Anyway, to sustain itself, would ads or paid offerings (that don't harvest personal data) be successful?
I'm very much like you. There are several apps that I use to communicate with a handful (or less) of people in the world. I see people on travel sites saying "Just use WhatsApp" and I'm more or less, yes it's installed on my phone and I use it with a couple people but it's certainly not something that most people I know use.
Probably something of a demographic (geography/age) thing.
I think that's probably true although I've had even US people argue with me that "everyone they know" uses WhatsApp. I do think it's the case that SMS became basically free in the US sooner than other places and therefore it became the default in the US whatever encryption or other details.
No, I don't think you're unique at all. I think this all tracks and applies to more and more of the general population.
These mainstream services no longer provide what people signed up for: life updates, pictures of kids and dogs, etc. These value-add posts are becoming less frequent because of/and are being replaced by streams of posts from people _you should follow_ or content they're pretty sure will rile you up about ... whatever. Generally, the people who are still active and whose posts slip through (because it's their only outlet) are effectively monkeys slinging shit (e.g. uncles posting AI slop memes about Barack Obama's suits).
It seems like younger generations have moved on to more silo'd experiences. I don't use TikTok but it's my understanding that it's more about connecting with people who share common interests (more akin to HN or Reddit) and not as much about connecting with your high school Spanish teacher who has gone full MAGA and whose posts you don't care to see and/or who you don't want seeing your posts and trolling you in the comments. This same cohort also seems to be spending much more time in private group chats and, for the most part, the platform doesn't seem to matter; it's just a message broker.
Concept of SNS changed from “audience of my friends and acquaintances” to “audience of potentially anyone in the world” around 2017ish, when every feed became algo-feed. And users like it, because it is akin to “endless Reddit scrolling”, but more tailored to things you might find interesting. And posters like it too, because of potential reach and attention.
Instagram Reels has 2B+ monthly users. Even if we say 50% are bots, not active and etc., that’s still roughly 1B users. It really tracks if you stand up on a busy subway train, almost in any city, and just look around. You’ll see full screens of TikTok, IG, YouTube shorts. The younger generation’s “private group chats” aren’t some sort of replacement to endless scrolling. A good chunk of messages are links to posts in one of those platforms.
If there is a substitute and I am not time constrained 100% i'm switching. But I've been in a situation already where a platform I'm using required me to face-up. I can't even remember which to be honest but I had no alternative or recourse to refuse. In addition, in the UK company directors are legaly required to face-up to Companies House and confirm their identity, so they have my face too. Ah, and so is every single CCTV camera around London. I don't know how to fight this particular battle.
I don't disagree. I still use facebook once a year for contact with relatives but if the only thing keeping you is the network effect then hopefully people will migrate off - maybe you can help them do so!
I think this kind of comment where you share the sentiment that you will ultimately admit defeat emboldens the factions that are hoping for people to be like you. I also think these kinds of comments may also bring doubt to people considering resisting these kinds of concessions.
In other words I think the people pushing these kinds of "identification" methods would love you for spreading their silent message of this being unavoidable knowingly or unknowingly.
Even if what you say is correct let's not make it easier for people wanting to enshittify the future, yeah?
Are you really advocating for suppressing rational assessments for the likelihood of success because you think the analysis is too discouraging?
If you already agree the resistance will ultimately lead nowhere, why not focus that energy on something with a better chance of success? Best guess would be partnering with someone like the EFF for a solution through lobbying And the courts.
Cynicism isn't knowledge. Cynicism isn't an assessment.
Cynicism is an assumption. Cynicism is emotional armor because the thought of caring again and the risk of it not panning out is more painful than not caring at all.
The only rational aspect of cynicism is that it makes you feel better. It isn't relevant about one's actual ability to change the world.
If efforts in the past didn't work to affect political change? Change what you do. Change your tactics. Clearly many groups - including ones with little-to-no-money - can and do succeed to influence policy on a regular basis.
The worst thing you can do is to convince others not to do anything about it. And right after that is to do nothing about it yourself.
When has this tactic (opting out to force change) ever worked on problems of any meaningful scale before? Please don’t say the civil rights movement, because those boycotts were not effective on their own. Pressure is required to force change, and opting out does not produce the necessary pressure unless it is genuinely a significant portion of users and lasts years.
These strategies have been tried time and time again and have proved not to be strong enough to overcome economic forces.
If everyone thinks so, then surely yes, but if people realize, that change starts in the small and they can be part of the change, perhaps at some personal cost, but that it might be worth it, then suddenly change is possible.
How have the EFF and the courts worked so far? We do need an EFF, but they're clearly not all that effective. And the courts just won't do anything unless someone does something illegal.
Compared to “resist by opting out”, the EFF has been much more successful. So far I’m not aware of any meaningful change in tech enshitification from grassroots opting out (could certainly be missing some instances, though, happy to be told about any). The EFF has at least had some notable wins in crypto export, fighting copyright enforcement abuses, limiting certain types of surveillance (license plate readers in California for example), and right to repair.
I’m not saying they have been enough to prevent things from getting worse, but they have actually done things that have staying power, and affect policy to this day, which is better than the track record of opting out as far as I know.
I just wanted to tell you that I wholeheartedly agree with your statement and that you shouldn’t be discouraged by some of the nay-sayers in the replies. I feel that HN has many users who are techno-optimist, but are very pessimistic of the role of individuals and the possibilities of the society overall.
Even in the replies someone tries to appeal to some ideal of „rationalism“ which is nothing but defeatism to the status quo. They see any kind of passion, emotion or values as „irrational“ and categorically as something lesser.
But what is reason without values? Logic without axioms? Just treading in the trivial waters.
If I have no choice, and no alternative, what can I do? I will never use an OS that require it on the OS level, and nobody can mandate it, not to a Linux user as myself - there will always be "another distro". But as a company director I have a legal requirement to verify my identity with my face. That's one. Every CCTV camera I pass by London, I assume is likely to have some soft of potential face recognition. Every transfer type transaction I do with my bank app requires me to face-up. So fine, I will skip Facebook or Instagram, but where will I get my cat-video dopamine fix?
I don't see myself as admitting defeat here. I'm choosing my battles. The gov here will drive this through as we're stuck with them until 2029.
I'm considering (with a heavy heart) to leave the UK and this is just one nail in a coffin full of nails.
Where else to go? AFAIK most developed countries are increasing surveillance efforts. I’m not aware of many that aren’t involved in pushing some kind of anti-E2EE or facial recognition at airports or VPN regulation or most any other issue de jour.
Regardless, no matter where you are (besides China or Russia) you’re at least partially subject to USA jurisdiction as demonstrated by their Executive Order 14203 which implemented asset freezes and travel bans on ICC officials, judges, and prosecutors — effectively unilaterally “de-banking” EU bureaucrats over the objections of the EU.
They won’t be emboldened by this comment, they will be emboldened when their internal data shows they aren’t losing users at a rate high enough to change their behavior.
I find it strange for these people to accept such a defeatist attitude because I'm the opposite.
I mean I will just not use the service and I'll seek out alternatives that are open source or create my own. I'll do anything possible until I'm the last one standing if that's what it comes down too.
I tried to sign up to Telnyx and they had the same crap from an unreliable data-breach and being-litigated persona identifier. I passed on that.
I've already been going down this road as I've abandoned Google and some of the big cloud providers in favor of smaller companies who aren't pushing these policies.
It isn't hard to click cancel. It's just people favor convenience over their own freedom because they have never experienced not having freedom like our founder's did 250 years ago. The problem is once freedom is gone, getting it back requires blood spilled and political reforms and revolutions based on what history teaches us.
The British crown never gave away the control, it is just obfuscated through the British-owned offshore financial networks. The Epstein files make this abundantly clear.
We are currently ruled by the third generation of post-WW2 five eyes nepo kids, with all problems this entails. The feel-good narrative about US was spun by Hollywood, but the old money of British aristocracy never went away. All the "self-made billionaires" who receive a Lordship title from the King just so the commoners work even more because they think they have a fair shot.
If someone like Ghislaine Maxwell applies for a visa in their colony USA, she receives a vanity social security number "Leet Babe" (1337 84883).
Most people use social media such as discord or whatsapp in order to make social activities and communities simple with the majority of their friends. A majority of people do not give a shit about integrity. The only group I have ever managed to convince and actually use Signal for messaging out of all my groups of friends and peers is the Computer Science Dept PhD students.
For most people, it's not realistic to give up their social bonds, they are too far in. If you are hoping for some revolution or change in this aspect is way too late. You can have small fringe groups engaging in this, but at the end of the day you are overestimating how many people actually give a shit.
I think the kind of comment you're making here is wishful thinking. Raging into the void and then getting mad when everyone doesn't do the same is not an effective way to force change. It's just an effective way to make you feel good.
A better idea would be to regulate their corporate behavior and outlaw their current system of corporate governance. It's insane that we keep passing off these companies with a majority shareholder on the board and in the C-suite as capable of being rational actors in the market. They aren't, and can't be made to be. You have to pass laws and enforce them.
and If I need to use a service now, I will give them whatever they want to get past the hurdle and use the service.
Need or want? We need very few of the services looking for our government ID. Also, this should not be the only way of pushing back. We can support the EFF and politicians who are actively fighting against this or candidates who vow to. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/rep-finke-was-right-ag...
Yes we can support the people who fight it, and also at the same time admit that I, personally, cannot fight it. Some people are driven by the fight. I am not. And want or need, what is the difference? I'm there, I need or want X, I am also busy.
Also, as a company director, I'm required by law now to verify my identity plus my face.
> I will give them whatever they want to get past the hurdle and use the service.
Why? Why not just hold firm to your principles and sacrifice convenience for your personal sovereignty. When you don't, you make the situation worse for everyone else as well by normalizing this bullshit.
It has never been about those platforms though. I could not care less if CIAbook or Instaspam or any of these other anti-social slop sites exist.
They want to force all operating systems to require age sniffing. That's the main angle right now. I am curiously watching how systemd will add more implementation details to this; probably as a first step only for commercial linux distributions.
This is a little bit of a tangent compared to the post, but can someone explain to me why it's NOW that we have multiple countries (USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and probably others that I am not aware of) all looking at age verification for a technology (the internet and all the things it lets you access) has existed for over 2 decades, and has been mature for at least 10 years? You could buy illicit drugs and watch porn on the internet since the 2000s, but it's NOW that we're legislating things (in incomprehensibly stupid and hopelessly unenforceable ways)?
The worst part is these are all stupid poorly thought out band-aid solutions to "protect the kids" from platforms that are also detrimental to adults.
Trying to put this all on Meta with a look at their 2025 lobbying spend is missing the point. The “think of the children” panic about the internet pre-dates this by years. Remember the debate around the TikTok ban? The states instituting laws about porn age checks pre-dates all of this too. I think trying to blame Meta is convenient because it’s easy to think there is just one villain coordinating everything, but the debate about children and the internet has been a spreading moral panic for years.
While the panic is indeed nothing new, Meta could have chosen a path of solidarity across the tech industry, lobbying for the ways age/identity verification makes people of all ages less safe, especially in the context of phishing and data harvesting.
Instead, its strategy has become to advocate for increasing the net levels of tracking and regulatory burden, so long as it is positioned to burden other parts of the technology stack (namely, app stores and operating systems) rather than their social networks.
> Meta spent a record $26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, deployed 86+ lobbyists across 45 states, and covertly funded a group called the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA) to advocate for the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA).
The irony that their namesake Metaverse was meant to be, itself, an operating system and app distribution platform is palpable. When ambitions shift to regulatory capture, a shark has arguably been jumped.
The next question is why alphabet, apple, even Microsoft aren't opening their purses to push back on this? They're going to be the ones in court for false negatives.
> It's all caused by a Meta lobbying initiative...
Is it really, though? As commenters on JWZ's blog pointed out (once you get around his HN link blocker, hah), the project contains very questionable LLM work.
Yes, it is. There are other sources that trace the evolution of age-verification, with Meta quitting all lobbying groups that advertise against it and forming new ones with Spotify and Match Group as well as actively financing Digital Childhood Alliance. Meta wants the verification to happen on a non-app level (read Playstores or eveb OS level) to avoid all cost and liability: https://techoversight.org/2025/07/29/bloomberg-meta-google-l...
This one-size fits all approach is built to solve problems social media platforms have with their systems while making our members, small tech companies and app developers, collateral damage,” said App Association spokesperson Jack Fleming.
It's not only Meta though. People need to stop assuming Meta controls everything via its CIAbook. You see several actors behind that; which one contributes the most is an interesting detail, but ultimately it can be simplified to them planning Evil against The People.
Successful propaganda, and political and policy intervention, as with all forms of control and intervention, rely on applying additional pressure where there's a latent interest and potential.
There's a wonderful line from a different context which I find applies quite broadly:
"The Art of ship handling involves the effective use of forces under control to overcome the effect of forces not under control."
-- Charles H. Cotter
Meta, one of the wealthiest corporations and indeed institutions on the Planet, is exploiting a long-extant tendency and proclivity in technological policy. It's doing so against long-standing traditions within the tech community, largely to serve its own interests. Meta aren't the only actor seeking greater surveillance and forced identification, but the are among the very most powerful. Culpability devolves from that, and violation of tech-community norms, alone.
Exactly, it's far bigger than Meta when the government's are pushing a larger agenda here.
The assumption is you have to control people to enforce laws. They keep pushing this notion that is a requirement to keep people safe. That somehow if we have big brother AI surveillance everyone will be on their best behavior.
Oracle, Palantir, Meta, and other mega billionaires push this agenda because who is going to stop them from controlling society and getting absurdly powerful and wealthy from it?
This has all been brewing for years. Remember the TikTok ban and all of the debates around it? We’ve been hearing news headlines about social media and kids for many years. The state level laws around porn site ID checks have been rolling in gradually for years, too.
There are always claims that is a shadowy cabal of world leaders coordinating in secret or that a specific corporation is lobbying to do it all, but the fact is that ID checking is oddly popular in theory to a lot of people who haven’t thought through the consequences. Check any thread on this topic on Hacker News where the idea is discussed in a way that makes it feel like it’s only for kids or only for Facebook and there’s a huge outpouring of support for the idea.
The topic only becomes unpopular when the actual consequences become apparent. For the Hacker News audience the popularity of these ideas does a complete U-turn as soon as the concept of ID checking extends to platforms we might use, like Reddit, Discord, or YouTube. When commenters think it’s only going to impact Facebook and TikTok they welcome ID checking laws with enthusiastic support.
Global meetings (whether secret or not) where select people decide what to do next to minimize potential threats to their power. There isn't much more to it, really.
Not just minimize threats, but often to maximize their power.
Lobbyists do not just try to convince a politician that X is a good idea. Lobbyists give the politician money to introduce already drafted legislation, and then give other politicians money to support it. And if they can get the legislation passed in one place, they'll try it again.
The result is that suspiciously similar legislation appears in many places close in time, due to it being pushed by particular interests.
I'm not convinced this is about money as much as it is about blackmail, given how centralized data collection has become and how many intelligence agencies appear to have access to numerous 0-days for routinely gathering additional information. It could be both things as well.
What bothers me most isn't their corruption, but their apparent belief that it won't eventually affect them or their families - perhaps sooner than they think.
I feel the exact same way. Haven't those government officials who voted for these laws ever considered that, one day, their own family members or closest friends might appear on a leaked list on the dark net? I don't believe these officials can exempt themselves from data breaches. Even if they maintain high-standard personal security, what about their loved ones? Unless they remain lonely and single for their entire lives, this double-edged sword will eventually backfire on them.
Rich people are panicking because they’ve seen a capital-poor country win a war with cheap drones and want to lock down as many technologies as they can, lest the ruled realize they can actually do something about their rulers.
I don't know if they have that level of coordination. To me it seems that they just want to grab as much money and power for themselves while it's possible before considering any interests of their social class.
I don't know if the ruled can really do anything. All these countries, even if they are poorer on paper, are still nation-level actors with power that regular people can't even dream of matching.
I agree that "they" are panicking, but I think it's more towards that they mashed pay-to-skip-classes button only to realize that they ended up being without skills or connections, rather than that it has to do with Ukraine at all, frankly
Imo it definitely has to do with politicians and governments trying to appear strong on the topic of protecting kids from the harms of social media. I also believe a lot of it is well intentioned, albeit poorly executed
But it's not a question of poor execution -- there is simply no way to execute this. There is no way to achieve the goal (age-restricting websites) without identity verification. There are any number of half solutions that will solve 80% of the problem, but to move the needle past that requires identity verification. Even then, as the article points out, we only move to 90%.
What has changed is that there's now a market for data that maps addresses to apparent ethnicities (for use by palantir to sell to governments, in support of ethnic cleansing programmes).
I think you are right on the big picture : what has changed is Big Tech has recognized that comprehensive data on individuals is valuable. I think the biggest value category however is in the area of highly-targeted opinion manipulation. Build a model of what are the current beliefs of each individual, get paid by marketing or political candidates or whoever to generate an optimized media feed to manipulate that person's beliefs to match some target set of beliefs.
And froidpink could have obviated that 30s investment multiplied by however-many readers, and clarified just how the reference applies, with ... another 30 or seconds investment on their part.
Lazy contribution to group comms is its own minor evil.
Do not for a split second operate under the assumption that there aren't coordinating forces working on this. I know this trips the "conspiracy theories!!1!" flag in most people, but you can literally come up with organizations dedicated to things like this in mere seconds of googling. Here's a comment about US state-level coordination I made earlier, with a challenge to produce some examples that I then produced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065492
It happens at the national level too. I just did a simple Google search for "united nations committee to harmonize" [1] (no quotes in my search itself) and I count 5 or 6 committees explicitly dedicated to "harmonization" in the first ten results. And that's just the committees, you can count on each of them to have factions within (because politics, politics never changes) and outside forces competing and vying to get the "harmonizations" to favor them and disfavor their competitors. And as politics, politics never changes, paging Ron Perlman, these harmonization committees are unlikely to flinch away from "harmonizing" entirely new rules into existence... which, again, with not all that much searching you can easily find examples of them stating outright.
And the forces trying to influence those committees, are not all just sitting out in the public with some .org website with their true mission stated clearly above the fold. And I just use these UN committees, which are themselves literally the result of one search and a few seconds scrolling through the search page and anything but a complete list, as plain and obvious public examples operating in public for at least nominally good purposes. Nothing stops anyone from buying politicians in multiple countries at a time to push through something like age verification directly, without being open about who they are.
I personally don't think there are many people left yelling "conspiracy" when you say that globalized decisions are being pushed, especially if you've been alive for the last 10 years. Nowadays it's more about who is actually making these decisions and that discussion gets muddy quickly.
Yes, it screams "conspiracy theories" because it is literally a theory that involves malign conspiracies. And yes, this is repellent to many people.
It is most repellent, I think, to people who genuinely hold the belief ("I want to prevent minors from using websites that are generally agreed to be harmful to minors"). When you tell these people "no, you actually want a totalitarian state that controls what adults are allowed to believe", they think you're crazy, because they don't believe this.
That this is an inevitable consequence of the solution to the problem that they want to solve is a question of tradeoffs that people are not generally aware of, and I think it's way more important for people to be aware of those tradeoffs without being told that it is the illuminati and the freemasons and George Soros and Fox News trying to Orwell their way into a global police state.
I need to figure out some way to communicate how these things really work.
I think lots of people around here would agree that "the rich" are doing nefarious things. But people get real fuzzy on what those things really are and how they work. Like, the rich don't just stand around in a well-apportioned fancy study with a big wooden desk, smoking a cigar and ambiently shouting into the void "GEE I SURE HOPE THINGS GOOD FOR ME HAPPEN" before checking their pocketwatch for the time and pouring themselves an expensive alcoholic beverage... and then, in entirely unrelated news, it so happens that for no reason the government loosens some environmental restrictions that was bothering the billionaire, and some worker's rights get rolled back.
They hire people who know how to build organizations, and give those people money, and those people hire other people who know how to build those sorts of things, and then they hire lawyers and managers and line workers and people who know how to outsource and contract and do whatever it needs to get it done.
And none of these people are going to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times outlining exactly how they're doing all this. Even if they aren't actively trying to be secretive, they don't run around telling people all about it.
You can see a public and frequent example of how this works when a politician spins up a major election campaign, like for President or Governor. An entire organization of thousands of people with one explicitly political goal spun up, grown, expanded with volunteers, and then shut down again in a matter of months. It's much closer to how this stuff looks than the unexamined ideas people seem to have in their heads. It's no problem for a billionaire to spin something like that up for a cross-country law push.
Or, to put it simply, the way the rich accomplish their goals is basically with "conspiracies", specifically in the form of these sorts of organizations built to accomplish their goals. They don't just hope and wish. They use money to pay people to do things. If your view of the world doesn't have room for that, if your brain flips out at the idea that rich people pay people to do things, that's not a sophisticated and refined view of the world that is so much better than the ones held by those people who keep falling for those theories... it's hopelessly naive. Things mostly happen because people take actions. The way you and your buddies may get together to clean up a park on a weekend, a billionaire or a collection of them create organizations to do things.
That doesn't even remotely mean every conspiracy is therefore true. But things like a coordinated push across multiple countries for almost the exact same law is plainly obviously the result of some organization that has been built to accomplish that goal. That is by far the most likely outcome. No other one makes even slightly as much sense. I don't have to know what that organization is for that to be my most dominant hypothesis.
> I think lots of people around here would agree that "the rich" are doing nefarious things
I'm sorry, while it may be true that many people around here believe this, you have lost me in particular at this line.
It may be true that some rich people, like people from all walks of life, are occasionally doing nefarious things. I think generalizing this to an entire group, "The Rich", sounds as off-kilter as people talking about crystal energy or pyramid aliens or bigfoot to my ears.
To put another way, the supply of rich people who desperately want to change the world to support their desires vastly exceeds the ability of the world to meet that demand. For every rich person who successfully bankrolls and gets a person elected there are 10,000 or 100,000 who fail to do so at early and late stages of this process, and imagining that "The Rich" have access to some facility to change the world is just untenable.
There's a reason "the rich" were scare quoted. I also think it's an oversimplification. It suffices merely that there is some well-resourced entity that appears to want to use "child age verification" as an obvious trojan horse for increased power and control over the internet.
If you have trouble imagining who might want "increased power and control over the internet", I don't know how to help you. People aren't all nice.
"imagining that "The Rich" have access to some facility to change the world is just untenable."
It's called money. I literally just laid out how to use it and gave an open, public example of it in use that you can use as a template of understanding it. It seems you may be one of the people I'm talking about. Even when presented with what is basically a blueprint and an example of a building that it builds over and over again, on a schedule, you're still unable to process the idea.
I'll try one more time -- how many people, that is, individual human beings, do you believe have this capacity and the desire to use it? Is that number, like, 5? Is it 50? Or, more likely, is it 50,000? Of those people, how many successfully do anything with this?
None of the pattern you describe is at all effective in a democracy unless you can get people to support your candidate or support your issues or whatever. You can't just buy that. There's no direct path to spending money to make people support you or believe in you or excuse your actions. There is no formula or process that works. All of this hinges on the individual, and I'm extremely unconvinced that personal wealth is an interesting axis. Where personal wealth intersects with power is another matter, but that powerful people can wield power is not an interesting or astute observation.
I'm not a fan of age verification(++) discussed here, but it's also extremely obvious that social media is a more significant danger to our society (children and non-) than gas station drugs.
I'm maybe a bit of an outlier here in that I do think that this is a genuine grassroots good faith effort to "protect the children" that does not have sinister ulterior motives. I know plenty of parents who have expressed enthusiasm for the idea of age-restricting websites.
"Why now" I think is pretty obvious -- the age limitations that exist currently are easily circumvented, but have given enough of a plausible deniability aspect that politicians have been able to skate by. There has been increasing research and media dedicated to the idea that there are aspects of the internet which we should be shielding children from. While many of this research is dubious, there's a rising moral panic around it.
The core of the problem is that there is no possible implementation of age verification that does not also require identity verification. In this I am in strong agreement with the article, but the use of paranoid and dramatic language as in this article only alienates people who find the conspiratorial tone to be reverse polarizing.
I agree only in the sense that Meta wants the OS to tell them the user’s age - BOTH for the ulterior motive of better ad targeting / fingerprinting, but also because shifting the liability gets the numerous current and future child safety lawsuits off the back.
This would be fine if it was actually done perfectly - ie. Devices get a signed ticket from the government identity provider, device can provides a cryptographically verifiable ticket to the site that its a valid identity and their age is within the $x age range but not tied to the user’s actual identity / document, and the device doesn’t ask the government identity provider to mint a new ticket each time it needs to attest (maybe 500 tickets are minted at a time and you auto renew 500 more each month)
However the likelihood of this actually being done correctly is slim to none.
There is no "done correctly". Intrinsically you simply cannot do this, and you have to accept this as almost axiomatic.
If the online age token is not attached to a human identity in a strong way, then it can be transferred to others without friction. The only way we can make it sticky is a mix of technological solutions (how we tie to identity) and real-world systems -- having the ability to prosecute misuse and to link to a physical identity.
If you mean this to say "this is probably the best we as a society can do on balance from a 'worse-is-better' approach" then I'm pretty much in agreement.
But obviously this doesn't "solve the problem". It's another bandaid with an extensive list of failure modes and tradeoffs. It falls into the class of "the age limitations that exist currently are easily circumvented" type of solution.
In my opinion it is fine to leave it there and accept the tradeoffs. We could mandate better website marking, and mandate better device or app-level mechanisms, and improve monitoring and restricting tools, or we could do even less and keep it more or less heterogenous.
But I do not agree that it is "moatism" to talk about it on the website side. There is a real and genuine desire to actually have the kinds of age restrictions that are only possible with strong user identity broadly deployed. Refusing to engage because of imputation of malign motives on the other party's part is not going to persuade anyone, especially if they do not personally have those malign motives.
It won’t work, it’s just another crank of the enshittification ratchet that will make everyone’s life worse. Well, everyone except those who control a lot of wealth and power, they’ll still be comfortably isolated from the people they abuse.
The <meta name="rating"> html tag has existed since like the 90s. If you legitimately just want to 'protect the children' just enact legislation saying that adult content is responsible for setting this tag. Then parents can decide what their children can and can't see via browser settings. No giant biometric database, no invasive user mapping, no leaks, no creeping techno-feudalist state.
Collecting user biometric data and trying it to a nominally anonymous user identity is not required here.
This is 100% 'won't someone please think of the children' pearl clutching to hide what's actually going on - furthering control of the online exchange of ideas.
Crowd-based analysis of "the files" nearly went out of control, and they noticed how hard it is to identify social media users.
Only trust fund nepo kids from old money are allowed to have vanity social security numbers, multiple identities and scrubbed Wikipedia articles. The plebeians shall have only a single ID and use it to authenticate with every website.
I really want to know who else has a SSN starting with 1337.
Honestly? I think it's because Elon Musk pissed a bunch of bureaucrats off by buying X and being more permissive about what was allowed. Then came claims that AI porn or something was on X which is a vague claim. People say it was Meta lobbying but that's not it. Meta lobbied to have ID done at the operating system. The lobby for ID was already effective and on its way before that. The actual lobby doesn't seem to be popular at all. It's just some NGOs no one has heard of that support restrictions for porn. The same language popped up on three continents at once. I just don't think this is a grass roots campaign and I don't think corporations drove it either. Ultimately, I think governments decided that unregulated information/anonymity is a threat to their power.
FB IPO was over a decade ago, and was on the internet years before that. So only now we decide that we "must act!" and that this is the only way to do it, and all countries are doing it in the same way with no evidence if it even works or not? Why not ten years ago? Heck why not 20 years ago when MySpace was a thing? This whole thing seems extremely manufactured to me.
Because it’s been building for a while, and (in my opinion) because it’s not a major traffic generating topic on builder focused sites like HN.
The most proximate domino was the Australian social media ban. Australia was already a country known to experiment with ways to deal with social media - see the news fee they imposed on platforms.
Behind that was the build up of negative outcomes from social media for kids, and adults.
The harms are not something I tend to find actively discussed on HN; I assume because more people are interested in building the next thing, not digging into the trust and safety details.
Customer safety and support are also not going to get anyone promoted in tech. These are cost centers and will often stand in the way of addictive design.
Meta executives were nailed precisely for greenlighting designs their own teams told them were harmful for teens.
At the same time, there is lobbying going on by these firms, to push the burden of verification to someone else.
However, the degree of harm being caused by social media meant we were always going to see voter backlash.
Social media was unleashed onto the world with no harm studies or thought for the long term impact.
Now we’re catching up and realizing how bad it is.
For a similar case, see tasers in Canada after a handcuffed immigrant was killed by one. The question came up “how were tasers certified safe for humans?”.
The answer was “they weren’t. A private company just started selling them to police forces who just started using them.”
> Social media was unleashed onto the world with no harm studies or thought for the long term impact.
To require a safety study for anything someone might "unleash" as a public product would be bonkers: nobody would be able to release anything at all.
But I do not think social media as such — when originally it came to prominence — was anything that caused significant harm. Things like internet forums, BBs and blogs did have some troublesome elements rooted in privacy of the participants (allowing harrasement, for instance). In all though, it was a positive for society though — I have learned so much as a kid by exploring areas where experts out their expertise out and discussed challenges with you.
While the trend of this continued with the birth of modern social media like MySpace, Facebook, Orkut/Google Wave/Google Plus, Twitter, Instagram, Digg, Reddit, Flickr... originally they were a significant net positive for society too — they opened up the world for many to express themselves (just like blogs did for the more technically savy).
At some point, trying to monetize attention, the winning social media companies started applying well established (from traditional media), arguably immoral marketing tactics: leveraging psychological research to keep people engaged and sell ads for their financial gain.
I believe targeting these practices regardless of the media type is what needs to be regulated.
Harassment is already well regulated, but with kids (and adults), they do not always take it seriously or are not able to detect it: I am acknowledging this needs work too.
These lobbyists were dumb. You can be certain that some lobbyists are so efficient that detecting them reliably is very difficult. Even more so when private media is controlled by a few billionaires who are "in" on the system.
> ... but can someone explain to me why it's NOW that we have multiple countries (USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and probably others that I am not aware of) all looking at age verification for a technology
I don't know why but governments, nearly worldwide, all teaming up on x continents to push the exact same narrative is recent but not totally new: remember the "masks do not work against SaRS-COV-2" to only then lock us all up and then force people to wear face masks?
Media all pushing the "if you believe it possibly can be a lab-leak, you're just as nuts as conspiracy theorists who believe the moon landing was faked" was honestly quite scary to witness too.
And the speed at which virtually everybody, including on HN, started to then push for that propaganda was quite scary too.
For the record, the report mandated (under Biden) by US Congress concludes that the virus has non-zootropic features and the biggest "expert" on the matter, Peter Daszak, has been debarred and cannot ever again receive funding from the US to work on gain-of-function research on viruses.
I stand my case: the "you're a conspiracy nut if you believe the virus could be man-made" was a coordinated setup.
You're asking why, now, they're teaming up to require face verification.
I'm asking why they all sang the same fake tunes about Covid-19 / SaRS-COV2: "Masks do not work" was repeated worldwide, to then forcing us to wear masks was a lie (one of the two was a complete lie).
And of course the incessant propaganda machine, hard at work, to explain everywhere that it couldn't possibly have leaked from a lab tied to Peter Daszak's research doing gain-of-function research on bat viruses, in the very FUCKING CITY, where it all started, was a gigantic lie.
The absolute worst in all of this is the people believing the lies even when the evidence is right in front of their eyes.
I kept posting here on HN back then about how it was folly to not open your eyes and make your mind work two seconds and I posted about that one independent journalist who found the Peter Daszak link very early on and fought for the truth. But the herds, worldwide, were way too pleased to buy the governments' lies.
Years after the fact we got proven the governments, worldwide, lied and teamed up to hide the truth.
"Despite congressional mandates requiring the declassification of COVID-origin intelligence under both the 2023 law and last year’s National Defense Authorization Act of 2026, substantial portions of the newly released records remain blacked out."
This, like Goebbels' propaganda technique in nazi Germany, should be studied for years and years: how Goebbels' techniques were used, worldwide, to try to hide the governments' responsibilities in the countless deaths resulting from the virus they funded.
It's the same, worldwide-coordinated, "think of the humans" propaganda they're using for face ID.
Im sure a lot of people know about tor on this site...but let me remind everyone.
Tor is not for criminals. It's for you and me. And happens to be good enough that criminals use it too. This is the two sided nature of technology.
Tor is a networks of peers across the globe volunteering their network bandwidth to support people under oppression by their government.
The amount of privacy that can be gained from tor is proportional to the amount of people using it. The more that people utilize the technology, the more that everyone looks the same, and protects the people that need it the most.
Tor enables me to say no to these things and carry on, without permission.
I think you overestimates the protection Tor provides. We have seen multiple cases of people getting caught on there, and CIA probably owns half the exit nodes anyways.
My guess my point is that it's not foolproof, and this is known. You can get unlucky and even if it's based on a side channel, and not Tor itself, it can still get serious if you though you were 100% safe.
>We have seen multiple cases of people getting caught on there
as far as i am aware, no one has been caught due to something technical in relation to tor.
it's always something dumb like logging into an email that has the person's real name in it, using a credit card, leaving javascript on, or otherwise making some opsec failure.
It's increasingly difficult to accomplish much on the Internet without JavaScript, though. This is an era where literal image hosting sites won't show you an image without it; where it's used to reinvent <details> tags, forms, even ordinary hyperlinks.
There is another angle not a lot of people consider. There was a Defcon video I recall watching from 10-15 years ago where the speaker referenced a case where police managed to arrest someone because the Tor traffic on the network (maybe a university) was so unusual as a one time event at a specific location, the police managed to tie the individual to specific Tor activity. The speaker's conclusion was essentially we should all be using Tor to create and normalise a higher volume of Tor traffic which can in turn help protect other Tor user's anonymity.
"Reading the criminal complaint, it seems that the FBI got itself a list of Harvard users that accessed the Tor network, and went through them one by one to find the one who sent the threat, [...]"
"The FBI didn't have to break Tor; they just used conventional police mechanisms to get Kim to confess," Schneier wrote. "Tor didn't break; Kim did.""
iCloud private relay has done more in just a few years than Tor ever has, by being opt-out for iOS users instead of opt-in like Tor. Now platforms can’t rely on IP based reputation, instead relying on either a computational challenge (Cloudflare, Anubis) or de-anonymization (recaptcha relying on being signed into a Google account more than anything, especially when using private relay).
That wasn't meant to be an argument against other privacy protecting technologies. I'll take them all. Although you can't just compare apples to apples when you speak of close sources technology. I applaud apple for the long held stance of privacy protections.
And to be fair, tor comes at the price of speed. But convince isn't the only thing in the math equation here. Privacy basically boils down to a three part equation these days with the variables being Speed/Convenience.
A lot of that speed and convince can be made up for with being familiar with the tools and adapting to a new norm. The actual network speed isn't really that bad comparatively.
Everyone should study the basics on a server backend and full stack web.
If you can master what it takes to design and run your site on localhost....you are literally one step away from sharing it with anyone on the planet who has internet access for zero dollars because of the power of tor, and the global network that supports it.
The reality is, there is no gate there, just the knowledge of how to do it.
Tor is first and foremost a router.
Sites that block tor IP's do happen, this is because of the dual use nature of the technology. Its also well suited for abuse.
No. Tor is for the CIA. It won't work for them unless we use it as well. Criminals also find it useful.
It's easy to verify this. Tor was originally written by Paul Syverson, Michael G. Reed, and David Goldschlag. While all three were working at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
These are the origins of Tor yes. The same technology that protects the spy, protects the journalist, or the citizen whose government blocked them, or placed a wall of ID verification checks.
I have yet to receive my federal tax refund because I submitted my taxes through a preparation service and, thinking that physical checks were still an option (the tax software didn't tell me otherwise), I did not give the federal government an ACH account number for direct deposit. The IRS then told me I'd have to open an account to update/provide direct deposit info, which in turn requires me to register with ID.me to create an account. ID.me has an obnoxious signup policy which includes sending them a boatload of documentation, and a headshot. I'm not doing it. So to date, I have yet to receive my federal refund.
Somewhere on the IRS website I had found buried in an article that if they can't submit my refund via direct deposit after some period of time, they are supposed to mail me a physical check. Yet so far, nada.
While I agree that this is annoying, you're trying to interact with the federal government which actually does require IDENTITY verification and not age verification in order to perform its duties. That id.me account allows you to take actions on behalf of a citizen, so they need to confirm some things first.
It's not great, but it's not what the original poster is against.
The frustration, I suppose, is that the government doesn't seem to demand this level of scrutiny to take my money, in the event that I owed on my tax returns for that year. But when they have money to give to me, suddenly it's 12 interviews and a colonoscopy to get approved.
My issue with it is that it's a vendor. The need for identification is fair, and I'm not worried about the govt having it. I'm worried about _id.me_ having it.
I was in a similar situation this year. Miapplied a rule, overpaid slightly, IRS owed a refund on the difference. It took a while, but they did eventually send me a physical check.
Just went through this myself. I gave in and made the account, only to then find out I was too late to give them my direct deposit info anyway. (If it's any peace of mind, I did eventually get that check.)
There is actually a way to prove the age anonymously. Yubikey-like devices support attestation - they can have a private key proving authenticity of a device.
So some organization could release Yubikeys with a certain private key and distribute them in stores that allow only adult customers - like liquor stores or sex shops. Owning a key proves that one is adult without disclosing identity. Keys support USB and bluetooth and can be easily supported on any device.
Also, OS developers should implement simple parent mode - such that parents only need to flip a switch and set a password, and do not have to whitelist apps or websites - the OS should use government-provided lists. You might not like the government, but 99% of parents do not want to bother compiling white lists manually.
I can already generate a QR code that proofs my age anonymously. It's signed by the goverment. There are libraries to check the QR code. No extra device needed.
When I was 8 or 9, my Father would often give me 50p to go down to the nearby pub to get him 20 cigarettes and a half-pound bar of chocolate, which came to 48p. Always "and where's my change then?" when I returned. Tight git.
Also, let's be honest, outside of some loud privacy concerned voices, most people don't care and they will prefer to scan their faces with the phone they have at home which is an action they are already used to do than to spend money to buy some nerdy device.
This is underselling it -- an adult can sell these yubikeys untraceably, pocket the cash, and never think about it again in their life.
If we tie the person's identity to the token (THIS IS A BAD IDEA) then if underage use is detected, the adult who sold the token can be prosecuted for selling adult tokens to minors.
Adults can be prosecuted for selling alcohol to minors (I mean, they can be prosecuted for selling drugs to other adults even). Because there is a physical handoff, there is risk in doing so, and thus there is high friction, which we deem to be sufficient to curtail the risk.
No such friction or accountability can possibly exist when we're talking about a bunch of yubikeys, unless we attach identity to them (THIS IS A BAD IDEA).
It is the easiest thing in the world to make it illegal. But while making the sale of alcohol to minors has some teeth, as above, the sale of these "tokens" is so low friction as to be laughable.
This is another of the many many solutions in the "the age limitations that exist currently are easily circumvented" class. While it may be effective in some limited ways, it's not clear that it's better than say parental controls. And it is obviously deficient compared to identity verification solutions that do not preserve anonymity. You can't pretend that this solution is "just as good" when it isn't. The identity verification solution is bad not because it is ineffective at its direct aims but because it has disastrous side effects.
No, I think there are parents who would find a long enough webcam cable to point the cam at themselves while Jeff Epstein is grooming their kids in roblox.
The core point is that it isn't my responsiblity to take care of your children. When less than half of millennials (40% men, 55% women) have children, the "think of the children" catchphrase really starts to fall flat. Why should I think of the children? I don't even have children. It's the parents' problem, not mine. Stop making it my problem.
You're missing the point. The complaints are consistently that age/children is just an excuse for control. Your comment is ironically, "offtopic". The rage is about forced identification.
Although, pointing out how actual age verification would work won't hurt. It helps to make it more clear that these pending laws are draconian.
That's just one of dozens of ways it could be done, hundreds probably. But ultimately proving that you're an adult is not the point, the point has always been profiling people with the excuse of that. Most of these verifications are done by Palantir shell corps even.
I agree 100% with the message and think we should strive to reject this kind of gathering wherever possible, but it feels like the horse is already out of the barn insofar as each and every one of our faces being out there. Hell, we have entire states where people can't watch porn without uploading their ID. The inertia is such that (I'm in the U.S.) we really need a constitutional amendment at this point to stop this.
New privacy legislation is about 20 years overdue. Between age verification, privately owned national camera networks, and above all else, data brokers, citizens need to reassert their right to anonymity.
In the face of government hostility, at least we here can make more tools like Signal or at least choose not to feed customer data to the beast.
> We run background checks on people who want to buy a gun, but we do not background check everyone at all times just in case.
And the other thing is, you can use a gun to murder people. If you try to use a porn site to murder someone, you're fundamentally hitting them with a laptop.
A major reason nobody can think clearly about this anymore is that there are people out there that genuinely believe porn sites and social media are as dangerous to human health as assault rifles and cigarettes. I'm almost as disturbed that people can't differentiate between harm risks as I am about horrible internet age checking laws.
> Name the places now demanding "age verification," and see how many will accept a plain government document that says only that you are over eighteen — and nothing else. Almost none will. Because age was never the point.
Name the physical places that would accept a plain government document that says only that you are over eighteen and nothing else? None will, not because 'age was never the point', or because every bar or casino is stealing your face - but because a plain document doesn't offer any proof you are it's owner. Photo ID has been standard as age verification because it's the best way to prove the official ID actually links to the person holding it.
There are more concerns in a digital world with giving your ID / face, but the idea that the demand for photo ID proves it's all a big data grab not remotely about age is a conclusion looking for evidence.
(Plus they acknowledge some sites have done age verification where all they want is your face to confirm you look over 18 - which they then ignore, claiming it's all really a ploy to get your documents. So why isn't the site 'Never give them your documents'?)
Age assurance is the law in California and age verification is illegal in California. We should push more jurisdictions to adopt this model. While many age verification laws are malicious mass surveillance, some are because politicians didn't see a better option.
Let's describe it simply: in the name of children protection, pushed by govs and parents, the companies found the chance to pass full identification of all. They use the former as a Trojan horse for the latter.
The sollution is simply to decouple the two processes. Now it'seasy as it's still early. The first step is for the people to realise the sneaky link and for the govs to stop any lobbying.
I just have obs with a video of mkbhd downloaded playing in a loop, whenever I am asked for age verification I just start the virtual camera, select it at the age verification website and it immediately passes it (most of the time). MKBHD was just the first person that I could come up with that records extremely high res video.
idk, youtube worked a lot better than any avatar. I tried avatars at first with little success.
and you don't need any guide it's dead simple:
add video source
path: path/to/your/video
loop video checkmark: yes
Start Virtual Camera
then just select it when prompted in browser.
The left/right movements are sort of a meme for most checkers and just pass randomly, the ones that need you to open your mouth get bypassed by them talking in the video.
Who runs this site? There doesn't appear to be any information on this. A whois search returns nothing illuminating.
So... is it part of the parable they're trying to tell that they're seeing who will go against the exact sort of advice they're giving? Or does this -just happen to be- the kind of shady data gathering that they're warning against?
to quote the site itself, "We spent a generation teaching people the first rule of the internet: never give out your real identity to strangers."
And don't handwaive away the real problem with children on social media. It's not good enough, not gonna cut it, there's strong consensus around fixing this big societal problem. Go ahead and blame the parents all you want - to a critical mass of people nowadays, it reads like the equivalent of blaming them for a 10 year old being let into a casino and getting addicted to slot machines. The debate will then just move on right past you because you're not being serious.
We need privacy-respecting age verification. It's not rocket science, it's just a matter of implementation. The bad actors - which are mostly bad by virtue of being ignorant - will win the debate if we're throwing hissy fits and telling parents to fuck off instead of coming up with constructive criticism of this approach to age verification.
I have kids, and I don't think we need age verification. I'm not blaming the websites for content my kids access, and I have to work to make sure I'm tracking what my kids are doing.
Not saying we should stop trying to verify age in a privacy-respecting way, but the current incentive structure means that we cannot really EXPECT this in the near term.
If we cannot expect it, then we should not legislate or require it until the right solution has been found and we need to encourage our lawmakers to FUND the right way to do this.
I'm not handwaving the problems of children on social media, but it is within parental control to a certain extent, and preventing access with age verification will not prevent access in other places, nor help them deal with the onslaught when they are of age to make decisions.
The phrase "people will not just [...]" comes to mind here.
The amount of people that let the TSA take a scan of their face when going through airport security - even when the signage clearly says you can opt out - proves that this effort, while noble, will fail.
I (and the family members I am with) always opt-out, but every time I look around, I am the only one doing it. If I had to guess, I'd put a compliance figure somewhere around 98%+.
Good heavens, the comments on that article make me want to vomit:
"Thanks to people with your mindset our streets and borders are not as safe as they should be."
This option is made freely available to passengers, but by choosing it you're signaling that you hate your country and public safety? It's no wonder people are scared to push back on invasive and discriminatory practices.
Here in the US, there’s a giant database of faces the government uses to ID people with an app. In the UK, they want this same level of invasive policing. Technology will always be used nefariously by police agencies until someone stops them, which no one will. No one, politically, wants to come out and “restrain policing” but that’s how the rich will position it so they can sell more flock cameras, more app platforms, more tech to the ever bottomless pockets of government. We are in a Thiel world.
Your face is already everwhere. Your supermarket records it as you check out. Every retailer records it as you enter the store. The state has it. The Federal government has it if you have a passport or other federal ID. Your mortgage company probably required it when you digitally "signed" your loan application. Socials have it from all the selfies you've posted. It's a lost cause.
I was going to say the same. Also, if you go to shops like Screwfix or Toolstation (in the UK), you have to give your postcode and name to them before they sell to you. I tried opting out once and they refused to sell to me. I give them fake postcodes and names instead now, but it's very invasive and completely unnecessary.
Yeah, I was going to say that as well. Your face is extremely easy to capture, and except if you permanently live under a mask, there's 0% chance to avoid it. Don't get me wrong, I like "fight the system" vibes but we need to be realistic. This fight is a lost one.
Perhaps we should distinguish between institutions that require strong identity (phone networks shouldn't be in this list but are, which is a separate argument) and institutions that really shouldn't, like random websites.
A pointless distinction for OP's (heavy handed, LLM-generated) point:
>The database you are helping build for a trustworthy government does not stay in trustworthy hands. Administrations change. A registry that merely catalogs who you are today becomes, under a future government, a map of who to find.
This is an objection to driver license databases, to passports; they don't want face scans at airports, much less for banking or insurance. They want off-the-grid, untrackable anonymity. This is incompatible with much of modern life, at least in the mainstream.
I hate that banks do that, right after that asinine Apple/Google monopoly proliferation. But “giving my face” to an institute where I was, since forever, required to submit a photo ID to join is a far cry from handing it over to earn the privilege of being exposed to whatever brainrotting garbage infests antisocial media these days…
So does this mean that, say, Apple actually doesn't have access to our FaceID data? Otherwise there'd be no need for no laws: just force Apple, Google, etc to share face information with "the government". Well, I guess technically "they" would probably need some kind of law to do this anyway. I feel like tons of people use various kinds of FaceID-type technologies for unlocking their phones, laptops, etc. So it would make sense if "they" already had all of our faces.
I personally don't use FaceID because I'm not thrilled about having my face scanned with utmost precision. BTW, I'm looking at my phone typing this and I know my phone has its face-scanning device pointed right at me. Is it sending "them" my face data all the time? Or sometimes? I can't tell. What if I'm showing something on my phone to another person? Is it going to scan their face too? Maybe, maybe not.
love the idea, but if you aren't from a Shengen country you can't get into Shengen countries without a fingerprint scan and a face photo at the airport:
Those face scans are matching to the biometrics you’ve already provided to your own government when you obtained your modern passport.
My passport currently has a broken chip and I’ve been traveling extensively, so I need to go into the border guard queue every time I enter. It’s very annoying. And they take the face scan each time and their computer compares it to past images of my entry.
You can actually opt out of it. The guards will be a bit miffed but it is your right. In the EU the face scans are mandatory and the data will be retained.
Gah - this is unfortunate. This will have me quit as well - I wonder when they will begin to enforce this on the Claude Code front. I remember when OpenAI tried (maybe they still are?) putting this in for GPT 5 and this had me switch from them to Anthropic.
> They are built to know who you are: your name, your date of birth, your document number, your face. This is not age verification at all. It is forced identity tracking.
This doesn't have to be the case. https://www.w3.org/TR/digital-credentials/ seems a sensible system where you can have a single identity provider (hopefully someone you trust) who can then verify things like "is this person over 18?" without givin away any excessive information to a third party. Hopefully it gains some traction.
A sensible system would require no trust. You could trust no provider would collude or be hacked ever. But to prevent governments to demand records requires records not exist.
I wouldn’t mind as much if it was entirely in house gov run. They realistically know a lot about me already - incl blood donations so could get dna even.
Outsourcing this to random ass for profits is a problem though.
They've got mine... Fly to Canada and your face gets scanned. I forgot this event and was surprised, walking through an American airport flying to another domestic location, that my picture and name appeared on an airline's screen without input. Not a government screen, mind you. I forget the exact context but the feeling persists. Very unnerving.
If it's the same system I saw, it's branded with the airline, but hooked to the government passport database. And if you read the disclosure, the airline promised to delete your data within some small number of minutes or face stiff penalties. Stiff enough that I believe that there is no additional information on you from using that system.
An unpopular opinion for this site probably, but all the same arguments apply to gun control and civil liberties in general.
In the united states, the first amendment (what this post is primarily concerned about) and the second amendment are equally important rights, and we should be just as judicious about applying restrictions to the second as the first.
Instead, you see attacks on the 2nd in the name of "safety, verification, age assurance. A small step to protect children". The exact same playbook used against civilian gun ownership will be rolled out against the first amendment, the 4th amendment, etc.
Civil rights and protections should be expanding, not contracting, and the primary focus point for the last 30 years (and the playbooks that will be used elsewhere) are being tested on the second amendment.
At Disneyland, there are separate park entrance lanes that don't use facial recognition software. I like that I can opt-out passively there.
At TSA checkpoints at the airport, you have to actively ask to opt-out.
I'm always worried that actively opting-out puts you on a government list and there could be later, much larger ramifications, so I passively opt-in to blend in with the masses.
Yup. Most people are going to say "I have nothing to hide" and go with the flow. The ones who don't are signalling that perhaps they do have something to hide.
Yes I do have something to hide. my face. I don't want you to own it in a data base of yours that you have a bad track record of knowing how to secure.
unless of course, you are willing to take ownership and accountability of my data and promise me minimum of $100k in compensation for data breaches and leaks indefinitely from your storage of my face. You can figure out how to pay for insurance to pay for this.
/oh you're not interested in even talking about this? Sounds like you have something to hide. (this fun conversation would not be well perceived when you that you ask for accountability for their actions and propose a solution. making a contract for this surely can't be super hard, but getting them to sign it and be accountable to it would be blocked hard)
I don't see the point of opting out at an airport, of all places. They already know (or should know) the real names of everyone who's flying. Fully agree that facial recognition at an amusement park, or any private business, is egregious.
The problem is that for most people, facial recognition is just another method of account verification. Sometimes worse than alternatives, but also sometimes more convenient, and convenience wins over privacy if people are not actively made aware of the consequences.
A while back I opened a bank account for my daughter. All that I needed was to scan my face, then the bank got everything from the department of home affairs (South Africa)
That means my goverment already has my face, with all my details associated with it. Bit Orwellian but there we are.
I wonder how the author would explain that the ID and age systems we already have – cigarette dispensers, liquor stores, club entry, driver's license, to name a few – work "kind of fine" though.
A nicer way to say that is: "I can't decide whether to up vote or down vote you!"
There is real irony that we still use non-unique-to-purpose addressing to sign up for no-need-for-our-identity newsletters. In this case, in particular.
That makes perfect sense to me. I am sure the site's motives are fine, and yet the tech we still use is ridiculously aged and unsecure. Even on pro-security sites.
To take the other side as nearly all comments agree, I'm not too worried about my face. My socials - twitter, fb, linkedin all have my face and 2/3 real name. When I do things in the real world I also have a face. Also if I want to be anonymous on social networks you can still pretty much. You can worry too much about that stuff. Not that the author worries, being an LLM.
I like that how in the same place that they have been trying to "protect the children" for like a decade [1], they have also had a real rape gang epidemic [2]. It's almost like they are, in fact, not really trying to protect the children.
Maybe this is making a slightly different point (i.e. the usage of immutable physical features as "passwords", which I agree is largely useless), I think we're just entering a post-privacy era. Being around 40, I willingly fed the machine (Facebook) with hundreds of pictures during university, and had I not, my friends would have more than made up for it. It's absolutely possible to photograph every person you pass by every day, and Facebook most certainly has the keys to identify most all of the people. That dystopian combination means that unless you're welling to move to a largely uninhabited place, each of our whereabouts can be largely resolved with technology available _today_ at a completely reasonable cost.
Not only that, almost everyone on this forum walks around with a device that shares their identity and location with unscrupulous companies (cell phone carriers) whose data is available en masse to the government. (N.B. I have an iPhone and appreciate and even _trust_ all the privacy work put into it; however, the cell phone tower thwarts location tracking, and participation in social networks thwarts face tracking.)
I've long thought that rather than try to limit the information about us, we ought to _flood_ the Internet with information about us. Make the data available untrustworthy.
Or, accept it. So long as it remains in the hands of corporations and not solely the government, it guts both ways — a senator can no longer be publicly opposed to same-sex equality legislation while engaging in a homosexual relationship themselves.
If we're going to have self-censorship due to everything we say online tied to our real identity can we at least get some shiny buildings and high speed trains out of the deal too? I've been online since early 2000s internet and for all the soapboxing about freedom of speech over the years it seems a foregone conclusion that we'll get the same surveillance state as those other "less free" countries else without anything to show for it.
Too late. I'm pretty sure it's already not allowed in many countries, including most of Europe.
They wanted to ban hijab/burka, but that would be discrimination, so they banned all face covers: ski masks, balaclavas, "V" plastic masks, motorcycle helmets when not driving one, everything.
There is a small sign in front of the facial scanner that says "Photo verification not required."
You can always say "I decline the photo verification", and they will check your license like back in the old days. This is what I have been doing for years now.
Things may not be quite so simple if your skin color is on the darker side, especially with the current administration. Doubly so if your passport shows you come from a country who's name ends in -stan.
All the previous administrations have extended the patriot act and other laws that enable warrantless spying and collecting data in the name of "security".
I verified my age with Apple by clicking one button and Apple said it assumed I was 18 based on the age of my Apple account (2011).
I guess I’m lucky to be in the cohort that avoids the face scans, and I feel a bit dirty about enabling this, but so far — even living in the UK — the privacy concerns have not manifested for me as I thought they might.
To me, the most disingenuous framing of the “protect the children” narrative is not “children can’t access the stuff,” but “adults can access the stuff, once they provide their biometrics.” The default is to deny access.
Yea u, me and few others, when they say it is must everyone will follow and give them even kids faces. cos majority of ppl are sheeps that are waiting for orders same as they did with covid vaccines. During covid at some point i had feeling that my cousins will tied me up and drag to hospital to get vaccine if authorities said yes, go, hunt unvaccinated
Why would you cite a Bloomberg reference in the article? Are you completely tone deaf on open source software and private ownership and use of 3d printers? FFS don’t direct traffic towards an opponent of free software.
Democracies building the tools of total autocracy. Real but fringe threats used to create the ultimate centralization of leverage.
Can we actually think of the children? All the children? Their future?
When democracies forget that government is the greatest natural threat to freedom, they forget and undermine the reason we have democracies.
Technical solutions to zero-knowledge proofs of age-of-adulthood without loss of anonymity are recent but available now. The strongest argument for these is to take the wind out of alternatives.
Strangely, promoters of surveillance avoid these solutions.
Even stranger: the bizarre but prevalent counter argument that anonymity protecting solutions won't work, because the surreptitious goal of other solutions is precisely to strip anonymity. We apparently shouldn't do that, because the abusers won't like the wind being taken out of their "front" problems, with real but freedom-preserving solutions!
You can just lie by using someone else's ZKP. If that's not considered to be a problem, then the California approach of just asking the device owner is much better and you still don't need the ZKP.
You are describing strong surveillance. Exactly the problem ZKP (or similar tech) solves/avoids.
And on the other issue, requiring sites to verify ages before serving adult material, isn't the same as criminalizing shared/mishandled age verification credentials. Its a mitigation issue, not a nuclear threat.
I am left wondering if you had any coherent point to make.
This article is spot on. It's a red line for me. Biometrics are not great for security but definitively bad for privacy. I would move to a federal ban on biometrics outside of intelligence agencies.
> It is not age verification. It is identity verification.
Very true. They are currently orchestrating the attack.
It is also why I call age sniffing age sniffing like that;
"age verification" is the propaganda term. We need to look
which actors are behind this push. I smell a trail of
corruption money following these actors pushing for it.
It is also fascinating to see how quickly democracies
fall victim to this. Soon age sniffing will be mandatory
everywhere. The free world wide web will be gone. Right
now people think this is hyperpole. Well, we saw that with
other technology too ...
Can't we even write a short text like this without LLMs anymore, not even when it's really important, when it's about humans against the inhumane?
I think it is great that people point out LLM generated articles here on HN. Sadly, it feels like I am slowly loosing my skill to identify LLM speak. Maybe I am getting worn out of all LLM content... So, please, list the indicators and telltale signs from the specific article or blog post (like others have done here already). At least I would appreciate it a lot.
> It is not age verification. It is identity verification.
> You can change a password. You cannot change your face.
> This is not a popularity contest, and refusal is not a vote you are trying to win
These were a couple sentences that were immediate flags to me. There've been countless articles written on this (I can dig them up if you want), but IMO there are pretty clear semantic rhythms you start to notice.
It is not foo, it is bar. You can zip, you cannot zap.
I agree that these are signs of AI, but they're also the way that people write. I use the "it's not X it's Y" framing a lot of the time because it's a quick way to get my point across. It's probably the sign of a bad writer because I can't come up with a different/better way to say the same thing, but I'm not AI.
> I agree that these are signs of AI, but they're also the way that people write
Certainly. If these were one-offs in an otherwise human written piece then we wouldn't even be discussing it.
In this case, they're just the simplest examples in an objectively LLM produced piece. I'm happy to point to more if you're skeptical; I'd happily wager cash the prose here wasn't written by human fingers.
I could tell it was AI, but it was interesting nonetheless. FWIW, I don't think AI enablement is inherently bad; this can be a game changer for an individual with an interesting thought yet difficulty expressing themselves in written word. (Obviously, it's also created a real problem with the ability to create near infinite well-written content, especially in the case of propaganda.)
I do agree with you that the quotes cited out are literary constructs used by humans, and there's a risk we get trigger-happy in calling out AI-slop. Still, those are just the most obvious tells — there were absolutely other, less notable mannerisms that confirmed it for me. If you interact enough with an LLM, you can become quite good at detecting their output through subtle subconscious cues that are hard to put to words.
I do wonder where some of the tropes came from. Claude tends to say "____ is doing a lot of work in this sentence", yet I don't recognize that as a common construction for humans overall or even a specific community (e.g. journalists). Perhaps I'm just unfamiliar with some vernaculars found in training data. Yet sometimes, it legitimately feels like they've actually developed a lingo of their own — an emergent property.
I find it all truly fascinating (along with other feelings…), and I never expected computers to be able to "understand" language anywhere near the degree we see today. Will it soon plateau, requiring another breakthrough? Or is there plenty of juice left to squeeze?
If anyone uses a couple of these red flags to dismiss the entire article and the underlying idea, that says a lot more about them than the author.
I personally don't like reading text written by LLMs, I'd rather just read the prompt itself. I suspect you feel differently. I imagine this says a lot about the reader :)
At least the article makes you be curious about what the prompt was. That's already better than people dismissing the entire thing.
Tons of people write that way.
Did people used to do it 5 times every 10 sentences?
These are normal patterns in US English. The zeal to accuse limits the scope of possible responses. There are all sorts of things humans do when writing that LLMs mimic — em-dashes for instance — that are entirely legitimate ways to communicate but get shouted down for… reasons?
Surely you’re aware that LLMs were trained on the ways humans write specifically to mimic them? Yes? So what’s the gripe? Someone cranked out a “thought piece” with no effort or actual thinking on their own?
But thats the promise of AI.
So are you advocating doing away with AI tools and research? Maybe we start asking “should we” not “can we”? Now that is a position I might get behind.
But really how the hell am I supposed to write at all when nearly ANYTHING I write could be interpreted as AI-generated and then shouted down in some quasi-ad-hominem attack on me while not engaging with any points made?
It is the utter end of written discussion.
I'm advocating that if people present a written text for others to consume, they should specify whether an LLM or a human produced it.
I think that's super reasonable, you don't?
it's like AI-generated images, though those tend to be more obvious than AI-generated text due to the "average" effect being visually obvious. Yes, these are normal patterns in English, but it is not normal to use them with the frequency that triggers people's llm-lese senses.
I don't see a way out of it until either generated content is either completely unable to be distinguished from authored content (unlikely?), or there's a silver bullet for identifying generated content (also unlikely?)
Are you saying that people are being tricked to being anti-intellectuals? If even the smart people are anti-intellectual, society loses.
Although these are indicators, real people also use these sometimes.
My brain skims the entire blog before reading it and if I see two short sentences with dots and negation or even one single em dash, I ctrl+w out
>>Sadly, it feels like I am slowly loosing my skill to identify LLM speak. Maybe I am getting worn out of all LLM content...
Its quite simple, at least by HN rules. If you dont like an article, post "This is LLM" and move on. Within 5 minute your post will be voted t o the top.
Easy karma farming!
Straight quotes were my first clue, followed by “it’s not this it’s that” and subheads.
Straight quotes? I thought an LLMs thing was always using the curly ones?
I know, right? It used to be easy: just look for writing in a very long-winded style, almost as if the author is being paid per word, in a place where that sort of writing didn't belong. I think it was because that type of writing represented a disproportionate fraction of the tokens in the training data due to the long-winded-ness. Somewhere around a year ago, they figured out some way to deal with that problem.
The em-dashes
The multiple uses of "it's worth X" made me question the authorship, for one
> Sadly, it feels like I am slowly loosing my skill to identify LLM speak.
Just read a few fiction books written in 2026 in Amazon Kindle Unlimited. Your brain will be trained to recognize AI-Slop Speak in No Time.
I think it will become pretty simple. Does the author say somewhere on their site that they don't use AI for writing? If yes, then great. Otherwise, it's very likely LLM-generated — particularly if the author spends a lot of time writing positively about AI. (And what if they lie? They will be discovered eventually, at which point they can be blacklisted.)
Specific article aside, you may be interested in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AISIGNS
https://github.com/blader/humanizer/blob/main/SKILL.md#conte...
I hear you — and the problem is real
This comment is load-bearing − the LLM-generated text was the smoking gun. (Claude)
Oh my god. I’m triggered. Opus 4.8 thinks everything is load-bearing, arguments, functions, classes, you name it, there’s always a few load-bearing things in every conversation.
Your comment fills a genuine gap
Honest answer -- you're right.
This comment isn't just about resisting LLM usage ⸻ it's a genuine rejection of hypocrisy.
Its not insult. It is injury. You are not alone with that being added to your wound.
Your observation is spot on. (Gemini Pro)
it's wild to me how many AI written articles get front page on HN
You're on Y-Combinator here, a start-up incubator all about AI and launching new things, that literally used to be run by Sam Altman, and that was the launching pad of OpenAI.
And you're surprised there is a lot of AI content?
bots are like 50% of the internet now brah: https://cybersecuritynews.com/bots-surpass-humans-in-web-tra...
I'm always amazed too. I waste so much time clicking on links like that only to find slop that just wastes my time.
I'm guessing a huge number of people never even bother to click on the article and just comment based on the title, so there's that. Then there's cases where they are sympathetic to the subject or opinion and talk about that in the comments and ignore that the machine-written article doesn't actually contribute to the conversation at all.
Yeah. If the "don't post AI generated comments" guideline was extended to cover posts, I wonder what % of recent front page articles would be impacted.
Either way how could that even be enforced? Even if it's "painfully obvious", that's not proof.
It is upsetting. Is it worth surrendering one's practice of thinking and communicating effectively in order to resist corporate overreach? Or is such a neglect doomed to result in the very problem of passivity that this post pushes back against?
FWIW it has one thing pointing it to be human written; the typo worthles
I think the trouble is the LLM is quite catchy and so gets more upvotes. We are losing to the clankers!
Here is the trick:
Exactly. I stopped reading part way through. The first thought was ... this seems like quite a lot of words to say not an awful lot of contents. And then the sentences started jumping out.
> A verification regime does not need your approval — it needs your participation
Ugh
I also will not take any article or website seriously if it uses AI generated graphics/art.
I quit facebook over a decade ago. Then, a few months back, I was under some pressure to sell something, and the facebook marketplace appears to be the way to go locally. So I tried to create a facebook account.
They wanted to scan my face, and in a moment of weakness, I performed the ritual. Thirty seconds later, they suspended my account due to violations of their terms of service: "this decision cannot be appealed". So now they have my face and I still can't use the marketplace.
I can only assume I'm suspended due to the behavior of somebody who tried to use my identity for something during the decade when I had no facebook account. Apparently not even my face is strong enough authentication for me to convince them that I'm not whoever it was that caused whatever the problem was.
This is why biometrics will never make sense. They're too immutable. Maintaining multiple accounts is not a bug, it's a debugging mechanism. Since I have only the face that I do, I can't even figure out why I'm banned.
We need to instead stop trusting people merely because they have an account. 10k upvotes/likes/5-star-reviews should mean nothing if I don't explicitly or transitively trust the upvoters/likers/reviewers. We have to build things that make decisions by traversing the trust graph so instead of being banned with no recourse, I can create a no-trust identity and elevate it back to personhood status by convincing my meatspace friends to trust it by having a conversation with them in meatspace.
I don't think you can assume your identity was compromised. I know the Facebook denial dialog suggests that "unusual activity" was detected and you need to access it via your mobile device. Of course as you know that doesn't help.
I signed on for Meta enhanced support for a month (nb, don't bother doing this, it's a waste of money) and had numerous voice calls with pandering support people who assured me it had nothing to do with identity and everything to do with vague "Community Standards violations" that can't be identified. FWIW the restrictions are indefinite and can't be appealed.
FB is set up like it's based on the film "Brazil" mated with Sartre's "No Exit."
> Meta enhanced support
I’m sorry am I reading this right? You now have to pay for the privilege of getting support so you can participate in Zuck’s infostealer so that he can then sell your data and make money off it? I think I’m getting too old for tech.
Yes, you read it right. I wrote inelegantly though. There is no actual support provided by the "enhanced support." It's a scam.
"hell is other people's social media posts"
I do strange things, so it's possible that the cause has to do with some quirk of my behavior while closing the account in 2011, or while attempting to reopen it in 2026, and not somebody else's behavior in the interim.
I don't really care about facebook, I found a buyer for the thing. I'm just saying that the use of biometrics is bad engineering because it amplifies the severity of adjacent bugs to "blocker". Starting over with a new identity should be painful enough to discourage bad behavior, but it should be possible to enable users who do strange things sometimes to navigate the system.
I tried to make an account while forgetting my VPN was engaged. Another US IP address but one from a block of IPs I’m sure is used for nefarious purposes. So because I briefly shared an IP block with ne’erdowells, I am, without an option to appeal, banned from interacting with Facebook forever.
Google Ads is ghosting me too. I really could get behind legislation that requires companies to have a human point of contact in these cases, but I guess a private company has the right to ignore people they don’t want as customers.
I made an account on LinkedIn while forgetting my VPN was enabled and set up my profile. They immediately flagged me as suspicious and restricted my account, and demanded I upload an ID to remove the restriction, to which I complied and they lifted the restriction. Then about a month later I tried to add my sibling as a connection and they didn't get any notification, then my sibling tried to search up my name to add me and I wasn't showing as a search result. Seems I was shadowbanned even after providing my ID, which seems insane to me that the main professional social network can just do that to someone without due process or any indication. This type of thing could sabotage someone's entire professional career or ruin their self-confidence as everyone ignores all of their messages and activity
This is what the EU has: https://www.eu-digital-services-act.com/Digital_Services_Act...
I have the same problem with my actual residential ISP. You wouldn't think sites like Etsy would ban entire IPs, but they apparently have; can't view the site at all, just a generic "you are blocked" message.
At least half the sites I try to visit are endless captcha loops, mostly from cloudflare. Trying to make online orders with a credit card often gets the order automatically flagged or canceled. Many sites give a generic cloudflare "you are blocked" message, when I've never visited them before.
I recently tried to download some manuals from the RICOH website, and all four different residential ISPs I tried from were blocked, and these were family members' connections that aren't part of any sort of proxy botnet or similar.
Meta, obviously the same company, has four separate pages that handle the creation of a “page” for a business.
They all prompt for the same information to do the same job.
You are required to make one of these “pages” to be able to advertise on any Meta property.
None of them work, and they have non-functional error handling. And if you keep trying, getting zero feedback about what’s wrong, you get the “scan your face and give us your biometric data” wall.
As such I cannot advertise on Instagram. Like, I can’t give them money, even when I try. It’s impossible that I’m the only one in the world, and it’s costing them money. Directly.
You would think that with their infinite AI resources they would be able to recognize problems, identify the source, and unfuck themselves… right?
In days, not years… right?
At least that’s what we’re told. But it seems reality doesn’t quite agree.
It's actually real that a ton of businesses must resort to shady providers of "Ads account" for legitimate stuff, nowadays it's very hard to join Facebook, if you didn't have an account made the past years, it's likely that you can't signup and run your business on it, you have to use illegal methods.
What illegal methods work? I'd like to post again (non-commercially)
I bought my last car on Craigslist. It was quite pleasant and I like the car. Not that there isn't garbage/scams there, but there's garbage on marketplace too (more, to my eye). I make a point to always go to Craigslist first. It still exists, and it's kicking!
OfferUp also has a ton, as does AutoTempest and even good old fashioned AutoTrader. I'm currently shopping for my son.
Facebook seems to have the lowest cost cars, but it also seems to be the least successful way of contacting people. When I bought a car for my sister in April, I contacted (no exaggeration) 70+ sellers and heard back from about ten of them. And yes, I changed the default "Is it still available?" message to something demonstrating urgency e.g. "I have cash and would like to buy." But with persistence, I found her the right car through Marketplace. Really hate the FBook search interface though, it's total garbage.
I spend most of my time looking on CList and OfferUp.
> I'm currently shopping for my son.
Same! I recommend an old (2017-) Nissan Leaf. I got one for very cheap when gas was at a local peak, and now that's it's going down, I'm seeing even better deals. The low range can be a plus when it's a 16-year-old driver whom you have no interest in seeing drive out of the city. haha
I had the exact same experience. Never used Facebook. Wanted to create a page for a product. Suspended. Did the face scan. Now they have my face and I'm still suspended. Absolute joke. Zuckerberg can go suck a fat one.
I had the same thing, tried to set up an instagram account for a website I run. It locked me out instantly and asked for a face photo; after I uploaded it it went to review; after about 40 minutes that brand new instagram account was permanently suspended for posting content which breaches the terms of service, with no appeal possible. It did let me download the full account data which of course had nothing in it and no further info about why it got permabanned.
It is obvious something is broken but they are quite good at blocking you from accessing any possible avenue of support once the account is in this state.
On the off chance someone from Meta is reading: Please unban the account "rareboc" :-)
When a xiaomi 15 phone asks to scan your face for phone unlock, it specifically warns that a photo of you may be sufficient to unlock the phone. Not sure how it works with other brands/models, but i don’t think the way they are doing face verification is the right way to do it
Apple's devices use an IR depth scanner, not the camera, and do not expose the data to software.
That happened to me to! A similar moment of weakness: I got tired of being locked out of like half of small business profiles. A local brewery (very small brewery, but top tier beers) posts on instagram if they’ll even be open that day.
Caved, tried to sign up, asked for my face, then rejected me forever.
Same thing happened to me. Except I created a new Facebook account using my work email. I had to use my personal Facebook account. Meta has become so awful.
> Meta has become so awful.
It’s been a while already, and they started from pretty unethical so it’s not like it was ever great.
we programmatically created a system with implicit trust and now that trust is washing away. business logic should probably be guaranteed and have to pass a series of tests in order to provide expected service
It should also be noted Facebook does nothing in good faith because Zuckerberg's core personality is what it is
It isn't that biometrics might never make sense but when it comes to Facebook? He's a black hat hacker who deserves prison
There are cases where it's sufficient to find a leader with sufficient moral fiber to resist corruption, but I don't think this is one of them.
Zuck was a scumbag to start with, but being the kind of admin that gets to jerk people around on the basis of their biology is a corrupting kind of power. Even a well meaning individual, given a few decades at the helm of a company based around treating user's faces like they're the company's intellectual property, would have become a scumbag by now.
Maybe biometrics as a convenience, where they don't leave the device they're captured on and are secondary to some other credential which the user can change, are alright. But any central registry of people's body parts is gonna be a short cut to bad juju. It's an architecture we should work to prevent because it'll create Zuck-a-likes.
Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks.
At the very least, we need to outlaw the method of corporate governance that Meta (and increasingly, other tech companies) use.
Mark has an absolute majority of shares at Meta at around 61% [0]. It is literally impossible for the board or other shareholders to cause him to do anything he doesn't want to do or to make him work in the best interests of others, whether they be other shareholders or the public. Meta is more-or-less a sole proprietorship with window dressing.
If no one can force a company to change by anything short of a person's passing or their loss of interest, then it's not really governed, and cannot be trusted to operate within the market and society at large. We need to make these organizations accountable to others in the systems in which they participate.
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/082216/top-9-...
To the downvoter: please note Facebook used email passwords. Zuckerberg hacked Crimson reporters who were investigating him circa 2003. I mean what I said. Why do you have the 500 karma necessary to do that?
Hmm, that also happened to me. Scan face, account lost forever?
I'd push back on your theory that the problem is your biometrics having been abused by a third party (rather than merely being abused by Faceboot...). I'd say the base incentive is that they really don't care about adding new users, so their false positive rate is set way too high. They think you need them more than they need you. And for Faceboot Marketplace they're probably right (about 3-4x the selection of Craigslist IME, and a corresponding difference in interested buyers). I'll still browse and post things on Craigslist, and when I see something for sale on both I'll respond with the Craigslist method to support its mindshare (also straightforward email/SMS is a heck of a lot easier than having to use Faceboot Messenger and then nudge the conversation over to SMS for the actual meetup).
It ends with "The platforms need you far more than you need them". And I think this is the misconception. No, they don't. The amount of people who will sign this, is a fraction of a fraction of a "platform"'s users. They will not care if they lose 50,000 users out of 2 Billion. A drop in the ocean. Not the target audience anyway.
And that is the real shame. Because I don't want to have to give my face or do age verification but I know when the time comes, and If I need to use a service now, I will give them whatever they want to get past the hurdle and use the service. It sucks, but I don't think a petition will help. Unless of course you get the 50 million to sign the petition AND stick to it.
You are correct that your data isn't particularly impactful for these platforms - but you're also overestimating the value that many of these services have. A fair few of them have competitors with better features and privacy offerings so the only reason you need them is purely for the network effect of everyone else using them.
And increasingly, everyone isn’t using them, even if they’re on them.
I’m on Insta and WhatsApp and I use them a few times per year. I’m on Messenger and have seen a dramatic dropoff in messages. I’m on FB frequently and notice only a small fraction of my friends bother anymore and it’s become an interest platform to make up the lack, so I’m trending toward less time there. I’m on Twitter/X but check in maybe once a month.
I may not be a typical user, but I’m probably not unique either.
Add to that, FB is no longer people...it's viewing entertainment...and I turn it off a bunch.
Threads is the new time sink and a lot of times I open it and close it shortly thereafter because it's all the same...someone with a 20 part diatribe, someone repeating the news, someone telling you to be outraged, engagement bait.
They have plateaued on number of users/engagement. They are instead increasing ad impressions and jacking up the prices of ads. (source: https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...)
Revenue is up 33% year over year. Not sure how that is sustainable.
I visit my facebook once a year and always regret it
At this point I purely use it to log in on my birthday to pass pleasantries with relatives that don't use any other platform and then turn it off again for a year.
I was one of the earliest on FB. It's mostly an address book for me now. I'm sad sooooo many acquaintances and relatives are there, and yes, it would be a lot of effort to get their contact info or get them to use other messaging platform (but I've started doing that).
For 15+ years, I've thought long and hard countless times about what could sustainably replace social media platforms that do not serve us well. I know a paid app is not super likely to succeed, although WhatsApp did use to cost a dollar! It seems like a nonprofit wouldn't be that great, and so I wonder about a mission-driven public benefit corporation (not to be confused with a B corp, though it could be one of those too). Of course it has to be cool or no one would use it. Not a fuddy duddy wannabe social network. Anyway, to sustain itself, would ads or paid offerings (that don't harvest personal data) be successful?
Happy to discuss with anyone interested!
I'm very much like you. There are several apps that I use to communicate with a handful (or less) of people in the world. I see people on travel sites saying "Just use WhatsApp" and I'm more or less, yes it's installed on my phone and I use it with a couple people but it's certainly not something that most people I know use.
Probably something of a demographic (geography/age) thing.
WhatsApp is very much a geography thing; it's pretty ubiquitous in many countries but relatively unknown in the US.
I think that's probably true although I've had even US people argue with me that "everyone they know" uses WhatsApp. I do think it's the case that SMS became basically free in the US sooner than other places and therefore it became the default in the US whatever encryption or other details.
No, I don't think you're unique at all. I think this all tracks and applies to more and more of the general population.
These mainstream services no longer provide what people signed up for: life updates, pictures of kids and dogs, etc. These value-add posts are becoming less frequent because of/and are being replaced by streams of posts from people _you should follow_ or content they're pretty sure will rile you up about ... whatever. Generally, the people who are still active and whose posts slip through (because it's their only outlet) are effectively monkeys slinging shit (e.g. uncles posting AI slop memes about Barack Obama's suits).
It seems like younger generations have moved on to more silo'd experiences. I don't use TikTok but it's my understanding that it's more about connecting with people who share common interests (more akin to HN or Reddit) and not as much about connecting with your high school Spanish teacher who has gone full MAGA and whose posts you don't care to see and/or who you don't want seeing your posts and trolling you in the comments. This same cohort also seems to be spending much more time in private group chats and, for the most part, the platform doesn't seem to matter; it's just a message broker.
Well, kinda yes, but not really.
Concept of SNS changed from “audience of my friends and acquaintances” to “audience of potentially anyone in the world” around 2017ish, when every feed became algo-feed. And users like it, because it is akin to “endless Reddit scrolling”, but more tailored to things you might find interesting. And posters like it too, because of potential reach and attention.
Instagram Reels has 2B+ monthly users. Even if we say 50% are bots, not active and etc., that’s still roughly 1B users. It really tracks if you stand up on a busy subway train, almost in any city, and just look around. You’ll see full screens of TikTok, IG, YouTube shorts. The younger generation’s “private group chats” aren’t some sort of replacement to endless scrolling. A good chunk of messages are links to posts in one of those platforms.
If there is a substitute and I am not time constrained 100% i'm switching. But I've been in a situation already where a platform I'm using required me to face-up. I can't even remember which to be honest but I had no alternative or recourse to refuse. In addition, in the UK company directors are legaly required to face-up to Companies House and confirm their identity, so they have my face too. Ah, and so is every single CCTV camera around London. I don't know how to fight this particular battle.
Move from London, you have all of Europe to... nevermind.
Your pessimism is warranted. But there are places that are more welcoming still.
The competitors will be also regulated. It’s a slippery slope.
Just because the network effect is why you need them doesn’t make that need go away.
It represents an increase in cost to use the service. Most such services have a wealth of competitors for your time and attention.
"Need" is an extremely strong word that is not appropriate for many Internet services where facial recognition is being pushed for.
I don't disagree. I still use facebook once a year for contact with relatives but if the only thing keeping you is the network effect then hopefully people will migrate off - maybe you can help them do so!
I think this kind of comment where you share the sentiment that you will ultimately admit defeat emboldens the factions that are hoping for people to be like you. I also think these kinds of comments may also bring doubt to people considering resisting these kinds of concessions.
In other words I think the people pushing these kinds of "identification" methods would love you for spreading their silent message of this being unavoidable knowingly or unknowingly.
Even if what you say is correct let's not make it easier for people wanting to enshittify the future, yeah?
Are you really advocating for suppressing rational assessments for the likelihood of success because you think the analysis is too discouraging?
If you already agree the resistance will ultimately lead nowhere, why not focus that energy on something with a better chance of success? Best guess would be partnering with someone like the EFF for a solution through lobbying And the courts.
Cynicism isn't knowledge. Cynicism isn't an assessment.
Cynicism is an assumption. Cynicism is emotional armor because the thought of caring again and the risk of it not panning out is more painful than not caring at all.
The only rational aspect of cynicism is that it makes you feel better. It isn't relevant about one's actual ability to change the world.
If efforts in the past didn't work to affect political change? Change what you do. Change your tactics. Clearly many groups - including ones with little-to-no-money - can and do succeed to influence policy on a regular basis.
The worst thing you can do is to convince others not to do anything about it. And right after that is to do nothing about it yourself.
When has this tactic (opting out to force change) ever worked on problems of any meaningful scale before? Please don’t say the civil rights movement, because those boycotts were not effective on their own. Pressure is required to force change, and opting out does not produce the necessary pressure unless it is genuinely a significant portion of users and lasts years.
These strategies have been tried time and time again and have proved not to be strong enough to overcome economic forces.
Is it all that rational?
If everyone thinks so, then surely yes, but if people realize, that change starts in the small and they can be part of the change, perhaps at some personal cost, but that it might be worth it, then suddenly change is possible.
How have the EFF and the courts worked so far? We do need an EFF, but they're clearly not all that effective. And the courts just won't do anything unless someone does something illegal.
Compared to “resist by opting out”, the EFF has been much more successful. So far I’m not aware of any meaningful change in tech enshitification from grassroots opting out (could certainly be missing some instances, though, happy to be told about any). The EFF has at least had some notable wins in crypto export, fighting copyright enforcement abuses, limiting certain types of surveillance (license plate readers in California for example), and right to repair.
I’m not saying they have been enough to prevent things from getting worse, but they have actually done things that have staying power, and affect policy to this day, which is better than the track record of opting out as far as I know.
I just wanted to tell you that I wholeheartedly agree with your statement and that you shouldn’t be discouraged by some of the nay-sayers in the replies. I feel that HN has many users who are techno-optimist, but are very pessimistic of the role of individuals and the possibilities of the society overall.
Even in the replies someone tries to appeal to some ideal of „rationalism“ which is nothing but defeatism to the status quo. They see any kind of passion, emotion or values as „irrational“ and categorically as something lesser.
But what is reason without values? Logic without axioms? Just treading in the trivial waters.
There is a term for what you describe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
If I have no choice, and no alternative, what can I do? I will never use an OS that require it on the OS level, and nobody can mandate it, not to a Linux user as myself - there will always be "another distro". But as a company director I have a legal requirement to verify my identity with my face. That's one. Every CCTV camera I pass by London, I assume is likely to have some soft of potential face recognition. Every transfer type transaction I do with my bank app requires me to face-up. So fine, I will skip Facebook or Instagram, but where will I get my cat-video dopamine fix?
I don't see myself as admitting defeat here. I'm choosing my battles. The gov here will drive this through as we're stuck with them until 2029. I'm considering (with a heavy heart) to leave the UK and this is just one nail in a coffin full of nails.
Leaving is unfortunately kind of the only option, but I worry other countries are just going to follow this process too.
Where else to go? AFAIK most developed countries are increasing surveillance efforts. I’m not aware of many that aren’t involved in pushing some kind of anti-E2EE or facial recognition at airports or VPN regulation or most any other issue de jour.
Regardless, no matter where you are (besides China or Russia) you’re at least partially subject to USA jurisdiction as demonstrated by their Executive Order 14203 which implemented asset freezes and travel bans on ICC officials, judges, and prosecutors — effectively unilaterally “de-banking” EU bureaucrats over the objections of the EU.
https://courthousenews.com/cut-off-by-their-banks-and-even-i...
They won’t be emboldened by this comment, they will be emboldened when their internal data shows they aren’t losing users at a rate high enough to change their behavior.
Which will be partly because of this comment.
I find it strange for these people to accept such a defeatist attitude because I'm the opposite.
I mean I will just not use the service and I'll seek out alternatives that are open source or create my own. I'll do anything possible until I'm the last one standing if that's what it comes down too.
I tried to sign up to Telnyx and they had the same crap from an unreliable data-breach and being-litigated persona identifier. I passed on that.
I've already been going down this road as I've abandoned Google and some of the big cloud providers in favor of smaller companies who aren't pushing these policies.
It isn't hard to click cancel. It's just people favor convenience over their own freedom because they have never experienced not having freedom like our founder's did 250 years ago. The problem is once freedom is gone, getting it back requires blood spilled and political reforms and revolutions based on what history teaches us.
The British crown never gave away the control, it is just obfuscated through the British-owned offshore financial networks. The Epstein files make this abundantly clear.
We are currently ruled by the third generation of post-WW2 five eyes nepo kids, with all problems this entails. The feel-good narrative about US was spun by Hollywood, but the old money of British aristocracy never went away. All the "self-made billionaires" who receive a Lordship title from the King just so the commoners work even more because they think they have a fair shot.
If someone like Ghislaine Maxwell applies for a visa in their colony USA, she receives a vanity social security number "Leet Babe" (1337 84883).
Most people use social media such as discord or whatsapp in order to make social activities and communities simple with the majority of their friends. A majority of people do not give a shit about integrity. The only group I have ever managed to convince and actually use Signal for messaging out of all my groups of friends and peers is the Computer Science Dept PhD students.
For most people, it's not realistic to give up their social bonds, they are too far in. If you are hoping for some revolution or change in this aspect is way too late. You can have small fringe groups engaging in this, but at the end of the day you are overestimating how many people actually give a shit.
Smart and driven people wasting time on ideas that have been tested time and time through to be ineffective is not net good for society.
I think the kind of comment you're making here is wishful thinking. Raging into the void and then getting mad when everyone doesn't do the same is not an effective way to force change. It's just an effective way to make you feel good.
Bitter truth :(
A better idea would be to regulate their corporate behavior and outlaw their current system of corporate governance. It's insane that we keep passing off these companies with a majority shareholder on the board and in the C-suite as capable of being rational actors in the market. They aren't, and can't be made to be. You have to pass laws and enforce them.
You don't need 50 million people to do that.
and If I need to use a service now, I will give them whatever they want to get past the hurdle and use the service.
Need or want? We need very few of the services looking for our government ID. Also, this should not be the only way of pushing back. We can support the EFF and politicians who are actively fighting against this or candidates who vow to. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/rep-finke-was-right-ag...
Yes we can support the people who fight it, and also at the same time admit that I, personally, cannot fight it. Some people are driven by the fight. I am not. And want or need, what is the difference? I'm there, I need or want X, I am also busy.
Also, as a company director, I'm required by law now to verify my identity plus my face.
They arguably don't need any users as long as they can maintain the delusion of being important and especially present that delusion to politicians.
s/politicians/the stock market/, yes.
> I will give them whatever they want to get past the hurdle and use the service.
Why? Why not just hold firm to your principles and sacrifice convenience for your personal sovereignty. When you don't, you make the situation worse for everyone else as well by normalizing this bullshit.
It has never been about those platforms though. I could not care less if CIAbook or Instaspam or any of these other anti-social slop sites exist.
They want to force all operating systems to require age sniffing. That's the main angle right now. I am curiously watching how systemd will add more implementation details to this; probably as a first step only for commercial linux distributions.
This is a little bit of a tangent compared to the post, but can someone explain to me why it's NOW that we have multiple countries (USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and probably others that I am not aware of) all looking at age verification for a technology (the internet and all the things it lets you access) has existed for over 2 decades, and has been mature for at least 10 years? You could buy illicit drugs and watch porn on the internet since the 2000s, but it's NOW that we're legislating things (in incomprehensibly stupid and hopelessly unenforceable ways)?
The worst part is these are all stupid poorly thought out band-aid solutions to "protect the kids" from platforms that are also detrimental to adults.
It's all caused by a Meta lobbying initiative across multiple countries as documented in https://tboteproject.com/ (sadly, the website is down right now), but you can find references e.g. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/the-tbote-project/
> ...jwz.org...
Holy fuck, man, visiting that with a HN referer serves up a rather NSFW rude image, and evidently sets a cookie to make sure it happens next time too.
replacement link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260401175031/https://www.jwz.o...
Jamie Zawinski is a perfect example of intellectual intelligence unfortunately not translating to emotional intelligence.
https://groups.google.com/g/linux.debian.bugs.dist/c/ItL6xJm...
Not that NSFW, could do with a trim though ...
Make it your desktop, put it on a t-shirt and wear it to work. See how long until you're ask to remove it
Oh neat, it's just for redirects from here. Fair enough!
Art.
Based jwz novice
Archive of first link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260429210901/https://tboteproj...
NB: don't link jwz.org directly from HN. It plays poorly from both ends.
I feel like HN should ban linking to the domain. After all, no good-faith commenter intends the result that happens.
Trying to put this all on Meta with a look at their 2025 lobbying spend is missing the point. The “think of the children” panic about the internet pre-dates this by years. Remember the debate around the TikTok ban? The states instituting laws about porn age checks pre-dates all of this too. I think trying to blame Meta is convenient because it’s easy to think there is just one villain coordinating everything, but the debate about children and the internet has been a spreading moral panic for years.
While the panic is indeed nothing new, Meta could have chosen a path of solidarity across the tech industry, lobbying for the ways age/identity verification makes people of all ages less safe, especially in the context of phishing and data harvesting.
Instead, its strategy has become to advocate for increasing the net levels of tracking and regulatory burden, so long as it is positioned to burden other parts of the technology stack (namely, app stores and operating systems) rather than their social networks.
From the link from a sibling commenter: https://web.archive.org/web/20260429210901/https://tboteproj...
> Meta spent a record $26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, deployed 86+ lobbyists across 45 states, and covertly funded a group called the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA) to advocate for the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA).
The irony that their namesake Metaverse was meant to be, itself, an operating system and app distribution platform is palpable. When ambitions shift to regulatory capture, a shark has arguably been jumped.
The next question is why alphabet, apple, even Microsoft aren't opening their purses to push back on this? They're going to be the ones in court for false negatives.
They get to scan people's faces?
Ad companies are data collection companies.
They don't particularly mind.
> It's all caused by a Meta lobbying initiative...
Is it really, though? As commenters on JWZ's blog pointed out (once you get around his HN link blocker, hah), the project contains very questionable LLM work.
Yes, it is. There are other sources that trace the evolution of age-verification, with Meta quitting all lobbying groups that advertise against it and forming new ones with Spotify and Match Group as well as actively financing Digital Childhood Alliance. Meta wants the verification to happen on a non-app level (read Playstores or eveb OS level) to avoid all cost and liability: https://techoversight.org/2025/07/29/bloomberg-meta-google-l...
This one-size fits all approach is built to solve problems social media platforms have with their systems while making our members, small tech companies and app developers, collateral damage,” said App Association spokesperson Jack Fleming.
Also: article in Reuters https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630804
It's not only Meta though. People need to stop assuming Meta controls everything via its CIAbook. You see several actors behind that; which one contributes the most is an interesting detail, but ultimately it can be simplified to them planning Evil against The People.
Successful propaganda, and political and policy intervention, as with all forms of control and intervention, rely on applying additional pressure where there's a latent interest and potential.
There's a wonderful line from a different context which I find applies quite broadly:
"The Art of ship handling involves the effective use of forces under control to overcome the effect of forces not under control."
-- Charles H. Cotter
Meta, one of the wealthiest corporations and indeed institutions on the Planet, is exploiting a long-extant tendency and proclivity in technological policy. It's doing so against long-standing traditions within the tech community, largely to serve its own interests. Meta aren't the only actor seeking greater surveillance and forced identification, but the are among the very most powerful. Culpability devolves from that, and violation of tech-community norms, alone.
Exactly, it's far bigger than Meta when the government's are pushing a larger agenda here.
The assumption is you have to control people to enforce laws. They keep pushing this notion that is a requirement to keep people safe. That somehow if we have big brother AI surveillance everyone will be on their best behavior.
Oracle, Palantir, Meta, and other mega billionaires push this agenda because who is going to stop them from controlling society and getting absurdly powerful and wealthy from it?
This has all been brewing for years. Remember the TikTok ban and all of the debates around it? We’ve been hearing news headlines about social media and kids for many years. The state level laws around porn site ID checks have been rolling in gradually for years, too.
There are always claims that is a shadowy cabal of world leaders coordinating in secret or that a specific corporation is lobbying to do it all, but the fact is that ID checking is oddly popular in theory to a lot of people who haven’t thought through the consequences. Check any thread on this topic on Hacker News where the idea is discussed in a way that makes it feel like it’s only for kids or only for Facebook and there’s a huge outpouring of support for the idea.
The topic only becomes unpopular when the actual consequences become apparent. For the Hacker News audience the popularity of these ideas does a complete U-turn as soon as the concept of ID checking extends to platforms we might use, like Reddit, Discord, or YouTube. When commenters think it’s only going to impact Facebook and TikTok they welcome ID checking laws with enthusiastic support.
This has all been brewing for years. Remember the TikTok ban and all of the debates around it?
Tiktok? I remember when people were freaking out about porn games on the Atari 2600.
Now I'm curious-- if I do an image capture of my face on an Atari 2600, can AI recreate a recognizable image of my face from that data?
Edit: by "data" I mean only the screencapture of the Atari 2600 output at some point in time.
Global meetings (whether secret or not) where select people decide what to do next to minimize potential threats to their power. There isn't much more to it, really.
Not just minimize threats, but often to maximize their power.
Lobbyists do not just try to convince a politician that X is a good idea. Lobbyists give the politician money to introduce already drafted legislation, and then give other politicians money to support it. And if they can get the legislation passed in one place, they'll try it again.
The result is that suspiciously similar legislation appears in many places close in time, due to it being pushed by particular interests.
I'm not convinced this is about money as much as it is about blackmail, given how centralized data collection has become and how many intelligence agencies appear to have access to numerous 0-days for routinely gathering additional information. It could be both things as well.
What bothers me most isn't their corruption, but their apparent belief that it won't eventually affect them or their families - perhaps sooner than they think.
I feel the exact same way. Haven't those government officials who voted for these laws ever considered that, one day, their own family members or closest friends might appear on a leaked list on the dark net? I don't believe these officials can exempt themselves from data breaches. Even if they maintain high-standard personal security, what about their loved ones? Unless they remain lonely and single for their entire lives, this double-edged sword will eventually backfire on them.
That apparent belief is common. People with current access to power, seldom anticipate what might happen in the future if it is turned against them.
Nefarious actors will always attempt to institute these programs via well-meaning stooges
AI coming along is another “great opportunity” to try and force these programs
Rich people are panicking because they’ve seen a capital-poor country win a war with cheap drones and want to lock down as many technologies as they can, lest the ruled realize they can actually do something about their rulers.
I don't know if they have that level of coordination. To me it seems that they just want to grab as much money and power for themselves while it's possible before considering any interests of their social class.
I don't know if the ruled can really do anything. All these countries, even if they are poorer on paper, are still nation-level actors with power that regular people can't even dream of matching.
I agree that "they" are panicking, but I think it's more towards that they mashed pay-to-skip-classes button only to realize that they ended up being without skills or connections, rather than that it has to do with Ukraine at all, frankly
Imo it definitely has to do with politicians and governments trying to appear strong on the topic of protecting kids from the harms of social media. I also believe a lot of it is well intentioned, albeit poorly executed
I'm with you on the well-intentioned aspect.
But it's not a question of poor execution -- there is simply no way to execute this. There is no way to achieve the goal (age-restricting websites) without identity verification. There are any number of half solutions that will solve 80% of the problem, but to move the needle past that requires identity verification. Even then, as the article points out, we only move to 90%.
What has changed is that there's now a market for data that maps addresses to apparent ethnicities (for use by palantir to sell to governments, in support of ethnic cleansing programmes).
I think you are right on the big picture : what has changed is Big Tech has recognized that comprehensive data on individuals is valuable. I think the biggest value category however is in the area of highly-targeted opinion manipulation. Build a model of what are the current beliefs of each individual, get paid by marketing or political candidates or whoever to generate an optimized media feed to manipulate that person's beliefs to match some target set of beliefs.
It's because of Jonathan Haidt's book
By all means don't provide any additional information on what you mean, what book, what it's about, what it has to do with this, or anything else.
It took me 30s to Google this guy's name and find his latest book on Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxious_Generation
And froidpink could have obviated that 30s investment multiplied by however-many readers, and clarified just how the reference applies, with ... another 30 or seconds investment on their part.
Lazy contribution to group comms is its own minor evil.
I don't know who that is or which book you are talking about, because he has written many, it seems.
But 1 since 8 years. The Anxious Generation.
Do not for a split second operate under the assumption that there aren't coordinating forces working on this. I know this trips the "conspiracy theories!!1!" flag in most people, but you can literally come up with organizations dedicated to things like this in mere seconds of googling. Here's a comment about US state-level coordination I made earlier, with a challenge to produce some examples that I then produced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065492
It happens at the national level too. I just did a simple Google search for "united nations committee to harmonize" [1] (no quotes in my search itself) and I count 5 or 6 committees explicitly dedicated to "harmonization" in the first ten results. And that's just the committees, you can count on each of them to have factions within (because politics, politics never changes) and outside forces competing and vying to get the "harmonizations" to favor them and disfavor their competitors. And as politics, politics never changes, paging Ron Perlman, these harmonization committees are unlikely to flinch away from "harmonizing" entirely new rules into existence... which, again, with not all that much searching you can easily find examples of them stating outright.
And the forces trying to influence those committees, are not all just sitting out in the public with some .org website with their true mission stated clearly above the fold. And I just use these UN committees, which are themselves literally the result of one search and a few seconds scrolling through the search page and anything but a complete list, as plain and obvious public examples operating in public for at least nominally good purposes. Nothing stops anyone from buying politicians in multiple countries at a time to push through something like age verification directly, without being open about who they are.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=united+nations+committ...
I personally don't think there are many people left yelling "conspiracy" when you say that globalized decisions are being pushed, especially if you've been alive for the last 10 years. Nowadays it's more about who is actually making these decisions and that discussion gets muddy quickly.
Yes, it screams "conspiracy theories" because it is literally a theory that involves malign conspiracies. And yes, this is repellent to many people.
It is most repellent, I think, to people who genuinely hold the belief ("I want to prevent minors from using websites that are generally agreed to be harmful to minors"). When you tell these people "no, you actually want a totalitarian state that controls what adults are allowed to believe", they think you're crazy, because they don't believe this.
That this is an inevitable consequence of the solution to the problem that they want to solve is a question of tradeoffs that people are not generally aware of, and I think it's way more important for people to be aware of those tradeoffs without being told that it is the illuminati and the freemasons and George Soros and Fox News trying to Orwell their way into a global police state.
I need to figure out some way to communicate how these things really work.
I think lots of people around here would agree that "the rich" are doing nefarious things. But people get real fuzzy on what those things really are and how they work. Like, the rich don't just stand around in a well-apportioned fancy study with a big wooden desk, smoking a cigar and ambiently shouting into the void "GEE I SURE HOPE THINGS GOOD FOR ME HAPPEN" before checking their pocketwatch for the time and pouring themselves an expensive alcoholic beverage... and then, in entirely unrelated news, it so happens that for no reason the government loosens some environmental restrictions that was bothering the billionaire, and some worker's rights get rolled back.
They hire people who know how to build organizations, and give those people money, and those people hire other people who know how to build those sorts of things, and then they hire lawyers and managers and line workers and people who know how to outsource and contract and do whatever it needs to get it done.
And none of these people are going to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times outlining exactly how they're doing all this. Even if they aren't actively trying to be secretive, they don't run around telling people all about it.
You can see a public and frequent example of how this works when a politician spins up a major election campaign, like for President or Governor. An entire organization of thousands of people with one explicitly political goal spun up, grown, expanded with volunteers, and then shut down again in a matter of months. It's much closer to how this stuff looks than the unexamined ideas people seem to have in their heads. It's no problem for a billionaire to spin something like that up for a cross-country law push.
Or, to put it simply, the way the rich accomplish their goals is basically with "conspiracies", specifically in the form of these sorts of organizations built to accomplish their goals. They don't just hope and wish. They use money to pay people to do things. If your view of the world doesn't have room for that, if your brain flips out at the idea that rich people pay people to do things, that's not a sophisticated and refined view of the world that is so much better than the ones held by those people who keep falling for those theories... it's hopelessly naive. Things mostly happen because people take actions. The way you and your buddies may get together to clean up a park on a weekend, a billionaire or a collection of them create organizations to do things.
That doesn't even remotely mean every conspiracy is therefore true. But things like a coordinated push across multiple countries for almost the exact same law is plainly obviously the result of some organization that has been built to accomplish that goal. That is by far the most likely outcome. No other one makes even slightly as much sense. I don't have to know what that organization is for that to be my most dominant hypothesis.
> I think lots of people around here would agree that "the rich" are doing nefarious things
I'm sorry, while it may be true that many people around here believe this, you have lost me in particular at this line.
It may be true that some rich people, like people from all walks of life, are occasionally doing nefarious things. I think generalizing this to an entire group, "The Rich", sounds as off-kilter as people talking about crystal energy or pyramid aliens or bigfoot to my ears.
To put another way, the supply of rich people who desperately want to change the world to support their desires vastly exceeds the ability of the world to meet that demand. For every rich person who successfully bankrolls and gets a person elected there are 10,000 or 100,000 who fail to do so at early and late stages of this process, and imagining that "The Rich" have access to some facility to change the world is just untenable.
There's a reason "the rich" were scare quoted. I also think it's an oversimplification. It suffices merely that there is some well-resourced entity that appears to want to use "child age verification" as an obvious trojan horse for increased power and control over the internet.
If you have trouble imagining who might want "increased power and control over the internet", I don't know how to help you. People aren't all nice.
"imagining that "The Rich" have access to some facility to change the world is just untenable."
It's called money. I literally just laid out how to use it and gave an open, public example of it in use that you can use as a template of understanding it. It seems you may be one of the people I'm talking about. Even when presented with what is basically a blueprint and an example of a building that it builds over and over again, on a schedule, you're still unable to process the idea.
I'll try one more time -- how many people, that is, individual human beings, do you believe have this capacity and the desire to use it? Is that number, like, 5? Is it 50? Or, more likely, is it 50,000? Of those people, how many successfully do anything with this?
None of the pattern you describe is at all effective in a democracy unless you can get people to support your candidate or support your issues or whatever. You can't just buy that. There's no direct path to spending money to make people support you or believe in you or excuse your actions. There is no formula or process that works. All of this hinges on the individual, and I'm extremely unconvinced that personal wealth is an interesting axis. Where personal wealth intersects with power is another matter, but that powerful people can wield power is not an interesting or astute observation.
It is particularly bizarre given the increasingly frightening array of designer drugs available at gas stations and convenience stores.
You probably have seen them if you live in the US, and had little idea about them.
I'm not a fan of age verification(++) discussed here, but it's also extremely obvious that social media is a more significant danger to our society (children and non-) than gas station drugs.
I live in Canada so I don't know about this. What are gas stations and convenience stores carrying now?
An article I read said kratom, 7-OH, tianeptine.
Synthetic THC as well. Also "Bath salts":
https://www.dea.gov/factsheets/bath-salts
damn I had to look up what all of these even are, I'd never heard of these. Hope it doesn't become opioid epidemic 2.0
I'm maybe a bit of an outlier here in that I do think that this is a genuine grassroots good faith effort to "protect the children" that does not have sinister ulterior motives. I know plenty of parents who have expressed enthusiasm for the idea of age-restricting websites.
"Why now" I think is pretty obvious -- the age limitations that exist currently are easily circumvented, but have given enough of a plausible deniability aspect that politicians have been able to skate by. There has been increasing research and media dedicated to the idea that there are aspects of the internet which we should be shielding children from. While many of this research is dubious, there's a rising moral panic around it.
The core of the problem is that there is no possible implementation of age verification that does not also require identity verification. In this I am in strong agreement with the article, but the use of paranoid and dramatic language as in this article only alienates people who find the conspiratorial tone to be reverse polarizing.
I agree only in the sense that Meta wants the OS to tell them the user’s age - BOTH for the ulterior motive of better ad targeting / fingerprinting, but also because shifting the liability gets the numerous current and future child safety lawsuits off the back.
This would be fine if it was actually done perfectly - ie. Devices get a signed ticket from the government identity provider, device can provides a cryptographically verifiable ticket to the site that its a valid identity and their age is within the $x age range but not tied to the user’s actual identity / document, and the device doesn’t ask the government identity provider to mint a new ticket each time it needs to attest (maybe 500 tickets are minted at a time and you auto renew 500 more each month)
However the likelihood of this actually being done correctly is slim to none.
There is no "done correctly". Intrinsically you simply cannot do this, and you have to accept this as almost axiomatic.
If the online age token is not attached to a human identity in a strong way, then it can be transferred to others without friction. The only way we can make it sticky is a mix of technological solutions (how we tie to identity) and real-world systems -- having the ability to prosecute misuse and to link to a physical identity.
I've been able to age restrict websites with my childrens' devices for years? Privately, on the device. The website side is pure moatism.
Yes but your approach requires parenting, which is unacceptable to many people with children.
If you mean this to say "this is probably the best we as a society can do on balance from a 'worse-is-better' approach" then I'm pretty much in agreement.
But obviously this doesn't "solve the problem". It's another bandaid with an extensive list of failure modes and tradeoffs. It falls into the class of "the age limitations that exist currently are easily circumvented" type of solution.
In my opinion it is fine to leave it there and accept the tradeoffs. We could mandate better website marking, and mandate better device or app-level mechanisms, and improve monitoring and restricting tools, or we could do even less and keep it more or less heterogenous.
But I do not agree that it is "moatism" to talk about it on the website side. There is a real and genuine desire to actually have the kinds of age restrictions that are only possible with strong user identity broadly deployed. Refusing to engage because of imputation of malign motives on the other party's part is not going to persuade anyone, especially if they do not personally have those malign motives.
It won’t work, it’s just another crank of the enshittification ratchet that will make everyone’s life worse. Well, everyone except those who control a lot of wealth and power, they’ll still be comfortably isolated from the people they abuse.
The <meta name="rating"> html tag has existed since like the 90s. If you legitimately just want to 'protect the children' just enact legislation saying that adult content is responsible for setting this tag. Then parents can decide what their children can and can't see via browser settings. No giant biometric database, no invasive user mapping, no leaks, no creeping techno-feudalist state.
Collecting user biometric data and trying it to a nominally anonymous user identity is not required here.
This is 100% 'won't someone please think of the children' pearl clutching to hide what's actually going on - furthering control of the online exchange of ideas.
there's an epidemic of authoritarianism in a lot of countries these days. didn't use to be quite this bad in the last couple of decades.
Crowd-based analysis of "the files" nearly went out of control, and they noticed how hard it is to identify social media users.
Only trust fund nepo kids from old money are allowed to have vanity social security numbers, multiple identities and scrubbed Wikipedia articles. The plebeians shall have only a single ID and use it to authenticate with every website.
I really want to know who else has a SSN starting with 1337.
Combination of factors, but mostly because Meta is pushing it globally: https://www.reuters.com/world/meta-lobbies-congress-protecti...
One would think that after the Burma genocide the millionaires at Meta would have learned a lesson and keep their fingers out of politics.
I don't think they could tell you where it was on a map, unfortunately. Probably not something that they've ever thought about.
Making it more difficult to access social media for Adults to access social media isn't detrimental.
Honestly? I think it's because Elon Musk pissed a bunch of bureaucrats off by buying X and being more permissive about what was allowed. Then came claims that AI porn or something was on X which is a vague claim. People say it was Meta lobbying but that's not it. Meta lobbied to have ID done at the operating system. The lobby for ID was already effective and on its way before that. The actual lobby doesn't seem to be popular at all. It's just some NGOs no one has heard of that support restrictions for porn. The same language popped up on three continents at once. I just don't think this is a grass roots campaign and I don't think corporations drove it either. Ultimately, I think governments decided that unregulated information/anonymity is a threat to their power.
I don't think you have spent much time researching. TLDR: Social media bad for kids.
Facebook was never allowed to let in kids under 13. It's now only being enforced.
FB IPO was over a decade ago, and was on the internet years before that. So only now we decide that we "must act!" and that this is the only way to do it, and all countries are doing it in the same way with no evidence if it even works or not? Why not ten years ago? Heck why not 20 years ago when MySpace was a thing? This whole thing seems extremely manufactured to me.
Because it’s been building for a while, and (in my opinion) because it’s not a major traffic generating topic on builder focused sites like HN.
The most proximate domino was the Australian social media ban. Australia was already a country known to experiment with ways to deal with social media - see the news fee they imposed on platforms.
Behind that was the build up of negative outcomes from social media for kids, and adults.
The harms are not something I tend to find actively discussed on HN; I assume because more people are interested in building the next thing, not digging into the trust and safety details.
Customer safety and support are also not going to get anyone promoted in tech. These are cost centers and will often stand in the way of addictive design.
Meta executives were nailed precisely for greenlighting designs their own teams told them were harmful for teens.
At the same time, there is lobbying going on by these firms, to push the burden of verification to someone else.
However, the degree of harm being caused by social media meant we were always going to see voter backlash.
> The harms are not something I tend to find actively discussed on HN;
Define actively. They are discussed often. In discussions of age restrictions especially.
Any time in the past 5 years would be a guide line.
I work in the safety side of things, and I've seen the difference in conversations in comment threads here.
Social media was unleashed onto the world with no harm studies or thought for the long term impact.
Now we’re catching up and realizing how bad it is.
For a similar case, see tasers in Canada after a handcuffed immigrant was killed by one. The question came up “how were tasers certified safe for humans?”. The answer was “they weren’t. A private company just started selling them to police forces who just started using them.”
> Social media was unleashed onto the world with no harm studies or thought for the long term impact.
To require a safety study for anything someone might "unleash" as a public product would be bonkers: nobody would be able to release anything at all.
But I do not think social media as such — when originally it came to prominence — was anything that caused significant harm. Things like internet forums, BBs and blogs did have some troublesome elements rooted in privacy of the participants (allowing harrasement, for instance). In all though, it was a positive for society though — I have learned so much as a kid by exploring areas where experts out their expertise out and discussed challenges with you.
While the trend of this continued with the birth of modern social media like MySpace, Facebook, Orkut/Google Wave/Google Plus, Twitter, Instagram, Digg, Reddit, Flickr... originally they were a significant net positive for society too — they opened up the world for many to express themselves (just like blogs did for the more technically savy).
At some point, trying to monetize attention, the winning social media companies started applying well established (from traditional media), arguably immoral marketing tactics: leveraging psychological research to keep people engaged and sell ads for their financial gain.
I believe targeting these practices regardless of the media type is what needs to be regulated.
Harassment is already well regulated, but with kids (and adults), they do not always take it seriously or are not able to detect it: I am acknowledging this needs work too.
Tasers are bad is your example? cops should go back to clubbing people over the head I suppose? - Remember all metaphors are bad.
> can someone explain to me why it's NOW that we have multiple countries
Because there are actors pushing for this. And they let money flow, so the lobbyists work.
People think lobbyists don't do this? Well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...
These lobbyists were dumb. You can be certain that some lobbyists are so efficient that detecting them reliably is very difficult. Even more so when private media is controlled by a few billionaires who are "in" on the system.
> ... but can someone explain to me why it's NOW that we have multiple countries (USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and probably others that I am not aware of) all looking at age verification for a technology
I don't know why but governments, nearly worldwide, all teaming up on x continents to push the exact same narrative is recent but not totally new: remember the "masks do not work against SaRS-COV-2" to only then lock us all up and then force people to wear face masks?
Media all pushing the "if you believe it possibly can be a lab-leak, you're just as nuts as conspiracy theorists who believe the moon landing was faked" was honestly quite scary to witness too.
And the speed at which virtually everybody, including on HN, started to then push for that propaganda was quite scary too.
For the record, the report mandated (under Biden) by US Congress concludes that the virus has non-zootropic features and the biggest "expert" on the matter, Peter Daszak, has been debarred and cannot ever again receive funding from the US to work on gain-of-function research on viruses.
I stand my case: the "you're a conspiracy nut if you believe the virus could be man-made" was a coordinated setup.
You're asking why, now, they're teaming up to require face verification.
I'm asking why they all sang the same fake tunes about Covid-19 / SaRS-COV2: "Masks do not work" was repeated worldwide, to then forcing us to wear masks was a lie (one of the two was a complete lie).
And of course the incessant propaganda machine, hard at work, to explain everywhere that it couldn't possibly have leaked from a lab tied to Peter Daszak's research doing gain-of-function research on bat viruses, in the very FUCKING CITY, where it all started, was a gigantic lie.
The absolute worst in all of this is the people believing the lies even when the evidence is right in front of their eyes.
I kept posting here on HN back then about how it was folly to not open your eyes and make your mind work two seconds and I posted about that one independent journalist who found the Peter Daszak link very early on and fought for the truth. But the herds, worldwide, were way too pleased to buy the governments' lies.
Years after the fact we got proven the governments, worldwide, lied and teamed up to hide the truth.
"Despite congressional mandates requiring the declassification of COVID-origin intelligence under both the 2023 law and last year’s National Defense Authorization Act of 2026, substantial portions of the newly released records remain blacked out."
The CIA stated they now believe it's a lab leak.
Oh really?
https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19...
This, like Goebbels' propaganda technique in nazi Germany, should be studied for years and years: how Goebbels' techniques were used, worldwide, to try to hide the governments' responsibilities in the countless deaths resulting from the virus they funded.
It's the same, worldwide-coordinated, "think of the humans" propaganda they're using for face ID.
Im sure a lot of people know about tor on this site...but let me remind everyone.
Tor is not for criminals. It's for you and me. And happens to be good enough that criminals use it too. This is the two sided nature of technology.
Tor is a networks of peers across the globe volunteering their network bandwidth to support people under oppression by their government.
The amount of privacy that can be gained from tor is proportional to the amount of people using it. The more that people utilize the technology, the more that everyone looks the same, and protects the people that need it the most.
Tor enables me to say no to these things and carry on, without permission.
I think you overestimates the protection Tor provides. We have seen multiple cases of people getting caught on there, and CIA probably owns half the exit nodes anyways.
Maybe provide sources, or point out a specific claim on the Tor project website that you feel overestimates the capabilities or protections.
BGP attacks are largely defeated by onionservices.
And while governments have the ability to create exit nodes, so does anybody.
My guess my point is that it's not foolproof, and this is known. You can get unlucky and even if it's based on a side channel, and not Tor itself, it can still get serious if you though you were 100% safe.
>We have seen multiple cases of people getting caught on there
as far as i am aware, no one has been caught due to something technical in relation to tor.
it's always something dumb like logging into an email that has the person's real name in it, using a credit card, leaving javascript on, or otherwise making some opsec failure.
It's increasingly difficult to accomplish much on the Internet without JavaScript, though. This is an era where literal image hosting sites won't show you an image without it; where it's used to reinvent <details> tags, forms, even ordinary hyperlinks.
On the other hand, it's never been easier to design a place that doesn't need those things, or be confident the javascript is on your side.
javascript, like tor, is powerful in both directions depending on what it's used for.
There is another angle not a lot of people consider. There was a Defcon video I recall watching from 10-15 years ago where the speaker referenced a case where police managed to arrest someone because the Tor traffic on the network (maybe a university) was so unusual as a one time event at a specific location, the police managed to tie the individual to specific Tor activity. The speaker's conclusion was essentially we should all be using Tor to create and normalise a higher volume of Tor traffic which can in turn help protect other Tor user's anonymity.
i believe that case is this one from 2013: https://www.informationweek.com/cyber-resilience/fbi-traces-...
"Reading the criminal complaint, it seems that the FBI got itself a list of Harvard users that accessed the Tor network, and went through them one by one to find the one who sent the threat, [...]"
"The FBI didn't have to break Tor; they just used conventional police mechanisms to get Kim to confess," Schneier wrote. "Tor didn't break; Kim did.""
This could be true. But law enforcers lied how they found evidence in other cases.[1] They could have lied in Tor cases.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
iCloud private relay has done more in just a few years than Tor ever has, by being opt-out for iOS users instead of opt-in like Tor. Now platforms can’t rely on IP based reputation, instead relying on either a computational challenge (Cloudflare, Anubis) or de-anonymization (recaptcha relying on being signed into a Google account more than anything, especially when using private relay).
That wasn't meant to be an argument against other privacy protecting technologies. I'll take them all. Although you can't just compare apples to apples when you speak of close sources technology. I applaud apple for the long held stance of privacy protections.
And to be fair, tor comes at the price of speed. But convince isn't the only thing in the math equation here. Privacy basically boils down to a three part equation these days with the variables being Speed/Convenience.
A lot of that speed and convince can be made up for with being familiar with the tools and adapting to a new norm. The actual network speed isn't really that bad comparatively.
I'm using Tor right now! Everyone should. It's too bad that many websites block it, but most of those websites are slop anyway.
Everyone should study the basics on a server backend and full stack web.
If you can master what it takes to design and run your site on localhost....you are literally one step away from sharing it with anyone on the planet who has internet access for zero dollars because of the power of tor, and the global network that supports it.
The reality is, there is no gate there, just the knowledge of how to do it.
Tor is first and foremost a router.
Sites that block tor IP's do happen, this is because of the dual use nature of the technology. Its also well suited for abuse.
Tor is very much for US overseas intelligence operatives, among other things.
That is who it was created for.
Yet the same technology that protects them, protects the everyday Joe.
The binaries do not discriminate.
Tor is not for criminals. It's for you and me.
No. Tor is for the CIA. It won't work for them unless we use it as well. Criminals also find it useful.
It's easy to verify this. Tor was originally written by Paul Syverson, Michael G. Reed, and David Goldschlag. While all three were working at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
These are the origins of Tor yes. The same technology that protects the spy, protects the journalist, or the citizen whose government blocked them, or placed a wall of ID verification checks.
I encourage everyone to learn about the origins. Even study these people and what they have said in the past. Don't for get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Mathewson.
Yes, that's what it was created for. The internet was created by DARPA and happened to be useful for other things
Nah, those people use plaintext Gmail as Epstein demonstrated.
I have yet to receive my federal tax refund because I submitted my taxes through a preparation service and, thinking that physical checks were still an option (the tax software didn't tell me otherwise), I did not give the federal government an ACH account number for direct deposit. The IRS then told me I'd have to open an account to update/provide direct deposit info, which in turn requires me to register with ID.me to create an account. ID.me has an obnoxious signup policy which includes sending them a boatload of documentation, and a headshot. I'm not doing it. So to date, I have yet to receive my federal refund.
Somewhere on the IRS website I had found buried in an article that if they can't submit my refund via direct deposit after some period of time, they are supposed to mail me a physical check. Yet so far, nada.
While I agree that this is annoying, you're trying to interact with the federal government which actually does require IDENTITY verification and not age verification in order to perform its duties. That id.me account allows you to take actions on behalf of a citizen, so they need to confirm some things first.
It's not great, but it's not what the original poster is against.
The frustration, I suppose, is that the government doesn't seem to demand this level of scrutiny to take my money, in the event that I owed on my tax returns for that year. But when they have money to give to me, suddenly it's 12 interviews and a colonoscopy to get approved.
My issue with it is that it's a vendor. The need for identification is fair, and I'm not worried about the govt having it. I'm worried about _id.me_ having it.
I was in a similar situation this year. Miapplied a rule, overpaid slightly, IRS owed a refund on the difference. It took a while, but they did eventually send me a physical check.
Just went through this myself. I gave in and made the account, only to then find out I was too late to give them my direct deposit info anyway. (If it's any peace of mind, I did eventually get that check.)
A few years ago I tried the old cheque method to get a refund and it took well into September to arrive...
When given the option (like this case), I recommend Login.gov over ID.me.
A lot of them got fired by Trump, it likely did get lost. Depending on how much it is, it might be worth dedicating an hour a month to following up.
There is actually a way to prove the age anonymously. Yubikey-like devices support attestation - they can have a private key proving authenticity of a device.
So some organization could release Yubikeys with a certain private key and distribute them in stores that allow only adult customers - like liquor stores or sex shops. Owning a key proves that one is adult without disclosing identity. Keys support USB and bluetooth and can be easily supported on any device.
Also, OS developers should implement simple parent mode - such that parents only need to flip a switch and set a password, and do not have to whitelist apps or websites - the OS should use government-provided lists. You might not like the government, but 99% of parents do not want to bother compiling white lists manually.
I can already generate a QR code that proofs my age anonymously. It's signed by the goverment. There are libraries to check the QR code. No extra device needed.
How can you be sure that it is anonymous? And why it is not used instead of selfies?
The problem with that is, parents be like:
>Here kid, take my key, go get me some beer.
Everyone everywhere gets forced to deal with bullshit, then the people it is supposed to be protecting circumvent it directly.
When I was 8 or 9, my Father would often give me 50p to go down to the nearby pub to get him 20 cigarettes and a half-pound bar of chocolate, which came to 48p. Always "and where's my change then?" when I returned. Tight git.
Sounds like your father would have noticed a missing cigarette.
Also, let's be honest, outside of some loud privacy concerned voices, most people don't care and they will prefer to scan their faces with the phone they have at home which is an action they are already used to do than to spend money to buy some nerdy device.
The same can happen with any type of authentication, unless you are ok with someone pointing a webcam and authenticating you non stop.
This is underselling it -- an adult can sell these yubikeys untraceably, pocket the cash, and never think about it again in their life.
If we tie the person's identity to the token (THIS IS A BAD IDEA) then if underage use is detected, the adult who sold the token can be prosecuted for selling adult tokens to minors.
An adult could also sell alcohol or drugs to minors so what? Should we add a code to every bottle and require passport to buy them?
Adults can be prosecuted for selling alcohol to minors (I mean, they can be prosecuted for selling drugs to other adults even). Because there is a physical handoff, there is risk in doing so, and thus there is high friction, which we deem to be sufficient to curtail the risk.
No such friction or accountability can possibly exist when we're talking about a bunch of yubikeys, unless we attach identity to them (THIS IS A BAD IDEA).
It it not difficult to make selling age verification tokens to minors illegal.
It is the easiest thing in the world to make it illegal. But while making the sale of alcohol to minors has some teeth, as above, the sale of these "tokens" is so low friction as to be laughable.
This is another of the many many solutions in the "the age limitations that exist currently are easily circumvented" class. While it may be effective in some limited ways, it's not clear that it's better than say parental controls. And it is obviously deficient compared to identity verification solutions that do not preserve anonymity. You can't pretend that this solution is "just as good" when it isn't. The identity verification solution is bad not because it is ineffective at its direct aims but because it has disastrous side effects.
No, I think there are parents who would find a long enough webcam cable to point the cam at themselves while Jeff Epstein is grooming their kids in roblox.
The core point is that it isn't my responsiblity to take care of your children. When less than half of millennials (40% men, 55% women) have children, the "think of the children" catchphrase really starts to fall flat. Why should I think of the children? I don't even have children. It's the parents' problem, not mine. Stop making it my problem.
You're missing the point. The complaints are consistently that age/children is just an excuse for control. Your comment is ironically, "offtopic". The rage is about forced identification.
Although, pointing out how actual age verification would work won't hurt. It helps to make it more clear that these pending laws are draconian.
That's just one of dozens of ways it could be done, hundreds probably. But ultimately proving that you're an adult is not the point, the point has always been profiling people with the excuse of that. Most of these verifications are done by Palantir shell corps even.
I agree 100% with the message and think we should strive to reject this kind of gathering wherever possible, but it feels like the horse is already out of the barn insofar as each and every one of our faces being out there. Hell, we have entire states where people can't watch porn without uploading their ID. The inertia is such that (I'm in the U.S.) we really need a constitutional amendment at this point to stop this.
New privacy legislation is about 20 years overdue. Between age verification, privately owned national camera networks, and above all else, data brokers, citizens need to reassert their right to anonymity.
In the face of government hostility, at least we here can make more tools like Signal or at least choose not to feed customer data to the beast.
New people are born every day whose faces necessarily are not out there.
> We run background checks on people who want to buy a gun, but we do not background check everyone at all times just in case.
And the other thing is, you can use a gun to murder people. If you try to use a porn site to murder someone, you're fundamentally hitting them with a laptop.
A major reason nobody can think clearly about this anymore is that there are people out there that genuinely believe porn sites and social media are as dangerous to human health as assault rifles and cigarettes. I'm almost as disturbed that people can't differentiate between harm risks as I am about horrible internet age checking laws.
> Name the places now demanding "age verification," and see how many will accept a plain government document that says only that you are over eighteen — and nothing else. Almost none will. Because age was never the point.
Name the physical places that would accept a plain government document that says only that you are over eighteen and nothing else? None will, not because 'age was never the point', or because every bar or casino is stealing your face - but because a plain document doesn't offer any proof you are it's owner. Photo ID has been standard as age verification because it's the best way to prove the official ID actually links to the person holding it.
There are more concerns in a digital world with giving your ID / face, but the idea that the demand for photo ID proves it's all a big data grab not remotely about age is a conclusion looking for evidence.
(Plus they acknowledge some sites have done age verification where all they want is your face to confirm you look over 18 - which they then ignore, claiming it's all really a ploy to get your documents. So why isn't the site 'Never give them your documents'?)
Age assurance is the law in California and age verification is illegal in California. We should push more jurisdictions to adopt this model. While many age verification laws are malicious mass surveillance, some are because politicians didn't see a better option.
< age verification is illegal in California
What law?
AB1043. Age signals shall not contain more data than required.
The law will take effect next year. And it would not cover web sites. Another bill would expand the law.
Let's describe it simply: in the name of children protection, pushed by govs and parents, the companies found the chance to pass full identification of all. They use the former as a Trojan horse for the latter.
The sollution is simply to decouple the two processes. Now it'seasy as it's still early. The first step is for the people to realise the sneaky link and for the govs to stop any lobbying.
I just have obs with a video of mkbhd downloaded playing in a loop, whenever I am asked for age verification I just start the virtual camera, select it at the age verification website and it immediately passes it (most of the time). MKBHD was just the first person that I could come up with that records extremely high res video.
Please post how to do this. Maybe we can combine it with something like https://this-person-does-not-exist.com/en and video generation?
idk, youtube worked a lot better than any avatar. I tried avatars at first with little success.
and you don't need any guide it's dead simple:
then just select it when prompted in browser.The left/right movements are sort of a meme for most checkers and just pass randomly, the ones that need you to open your mouth get bypassed by them talking in the video.
Who runs this site? There doesn't appear to be any information on this. A whois search returns nothing illuminating.
So... is it part of the parable they're trying to tell that they're seeing who will go against the exact sort of advice they're giving? Or does this -just happen to be- the kind of shady data gathering that they're warning against?
to quote the site itself, "We spent a generation teaching people the first rule of the internet: never give out your real identity to strangers."
> Or does this -just happen to be- the kind of shady data gathering that they're warning against?
How? There are no forms on the website.
Wouldn't it actually be logical for a person advocating for privacy not disclosing his identity?
> whois search returns nothing illuminating
Which is something you should expect from someone intent on privacy
This and every post like it hurts the cause. Don't argue "Resist!" like a child, argue with an alternative.
You're not bringing anything to the table other than teenage angst, ensuring nobody takes the _very valid and terrifying concerns_ seriously.
Instead, suggest a feasible alternative. Bonus points if it works better, cheaper, and safer.
And don't handwaive away the real problem with children on social media. It's not good enough, not gonna cut it, there's strong consensus around fixing this big societal problem. Go ahead and blame the parents all you want - to a critical mass of people nowadays, it reads like the equivalent of blaming them for a 10 year old being let into a casino and getting addicted to slot machines. The debate will then just move on right past you because you're not being serious.
We need privacy-respecting age verification. It's not rocket science, it's just a matter of implementation. The bad actors - which are mostly bad by virtue of being ignorant - will win the debate if we're throwing hissy fits and telling parents to fuck off instead of coming up with constructive criticism of this approach to age verification.
I have kids, and I don't think we need age verification. I'm not blaming the websites for content my kids access, and I have to work to make sure I'm tracking what my kids are doing.
Not saying we should stop trying to verify age in a privacy-respecting way, but the current incentive structure means that we cannot really EXPECT this in the near term.
If we cannot expect it, then we should not legislate or require it until the right solution has been found and we need to encourage our lawmakers to FUND the right way to do this.
I'm not handwaving the problems of children on social media, but it is within parental control to a certain extent, and preventing access with age verification will not prevent access in other places, nor help them deal with the onslaught when they are of age to make decisions.
The phrase "people will not just [...]" comes to mind here.
The amount of people that let the TSA take a scan of their face when going through airport security - even when the signage clearly says you can opt out - proves that this effort, while noble, will fail.
I (and the family members I am with) always opt-out, but every time I look around, I am the only one doing it. If I had to guess, I'd put a compliance figure somewhere around 98%+.
Here is a good article on it: https://medium.com/womenintechnology/you-can-and-should-opt-...
Good heavens, the comments on that article make me want to vomit:
"Thanks to people with your mindset our streets and borders are not as safe as they should be."
This option is made freely available to passengers, but by choosing it you're signaling that you hate your country and public safety? It's no wonder people are scared to push back on invasive and discriminatory practices.
I found the signs to be hard to find and poorly placed.
But since I knew about it before traveling, I just said no photo please and it was pretty frictionless.
The people behind me did not even realize you could say no, and no one really wants to be late for their flight.
Make the sign bigger. Its not a good test in my view.
The signage is not clear and also, you're directly faced in an environment that's not friendly so yeah, it will fail.
I just say "no, I am opting out" and that's the end of it. They literally don't care.
The TSA already knows what your face looks like, though.
They have photos, but not a voluntary full face scan.
Here in the US, there’s a giant database of faces the government uses to ID people with an app. In the UK, they want this same level of invasive policing. Technology will always be used nefariously by police agencies until someone stops them, which no one will. No one, politically, wants to come out and “restrain policing” but that’s how the rich will position it so they can sell more flock cameras, more app platforms, more tech to the ever bottomless pockets of government. We are in a Thiel world.
Your face is already everwhere. Your supermarket records it as you check out. Every retailer records it as you enter the store. The state has it. The Federal government has it if you have a passport or other federal ID. Your mortgage company probably required it when you digitally "signed" your loan application. Socials have it from all the selfies you've posted. It's a lost cause.
I was going to say the same. Also, if you go to shops like Screwfix or Toolstation (in the UK), you have to give your postcode and name to them before they sell to you. I tried opting out once and they refused to sell to me. I give them fake postcodes and names instead now, but it's very invasive and completely unnecessary.
Yeah, I was going to say that as well. Your face is extremely easy to capture, and except if you permanently live under a mask, there's 0% chance to avoid it. Don't get me wrong, I like "fight the system" vibes but we need to be realistic. This fight is a lost one.
I completely agree with this, but my banking apps, my broker, my health insurance, my simcard provider all already require my face for identification.
Perhaps we should distinguish between institutions that require strong identity (phone networks shouldn't be in this list but are, which is a separate argument) and institutions that really shouldn't, like random websites.
A pointless distinction for OP's (heavy handed, LLM-generated) point:
>The database you are helping build for a trustworthy government does not stay in trustworthy hands. Administrations change. A registry that merely catalogs who you are today becomes, under a future government, a map of who to find.
This is an objection to driver license databases, to passports; they don't want face scans at airports, much less for banking or insurance. They want off-the-grid, untrackable anonymity. This is incompatible with much of modern life, at least in the mainstream.
FYI the processing for FaceID on iPhones is entirely offline. I think the Samsung androids have offline face id as well.
I hate that banks do that, right after that asinine Apple/Google monopoly proliferation. But “giving my face” to an institute where I was, since forever, required to submit a photo ID to join is a far cry from handing it over to earn the privilege of being exposed to whatever brainrotting garbage infests antisocial media these days…
So does this mean that, say, Apple actually doesn't have access to our FaceID data? Otherwise there'd be no need for no laws: just force Apple, Google, etc to share face information with "the government". Well, I guess technically "they" would probably need some kind of law to do this anyway. I feel like tons of people use various kinds of FaceID-type technologies for unlocking their phones, laptops, etc. So it would make sense if "they" already had all of our faces.
I personally don't use FaceID because I'm not thrilled about having my face scanned with utmost precision. BTW, I'm looking at my phone typing this and I know my phone has its face-scanning device pointed right at me. Is it sending "them" my face data all the time? Or sometimes? I can't tell. What if I'm showing something on my phone to another person? Is it going to scan their face too? Maybe, maybe not.
Face unlock on iPhone is completely on-device. This is why you have to set it up again every time you buy a new device.
I.....
love the idea, but if you aren't from a Shengen country you can't get into Shengen countries without a fingerprint scan and a face photo at the airport:
https://travel-europe.europa.eu/ees/data-held-by-ees
No way to opt out of the scan.
Those face scans are matching to the biometrics you’ve already provided to your own government when you obtained your modern passport.
My passport currently has a broken chip and I’ve been traveling extensively, so I need to go into the border guard queue every time I enter. It’s very annoying. And they take the face scan each time and their computer compares it to past images of my entry.
Same in the USA I believe.
You can actually opt out of it. The guards will be a bit miffed but it is your right. In the EU the face scans are mandatory and the data will be retained.
Thank you, ChatGPT, very interesting.
I agree with the article, but the LLM-isms cheapen it by two orders of magnitude.
I'm quitting Claude AI because of https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14328960-identity-ver... .
Gah - this is unfortunate. This will have me quit as well - I wonder when they will begin to enforce this on the Claude Code front. I remember when OpenAI tried (maybe they still are?) putting this in for GPT 5 and this had me switch from them to Anthropic.
> They are built to know who you are: your name, your date of birth, your document number, your face. This is not age verification at all. It is forced identity tracking.
This doesn't have to be the case. https://www.w3.org/TR/digital-credentials/ seems a sensible system where you can have a single identity provider (hopefully someone you trust) who can then verify things like "is this person over 18?" without givin away any excessive information to a third party. Hopefully it gains some traction.
A sensible system would require no trust. You could trust no provider would collude or be hacked ever. But to prevent governments to demand records requires records not exist.
I wouldn’t mind as much if it was entirely in house gov run. They realistically know a lot about me already - incl blood donations so could get dna even.
Outsourcing this to random ass for profits is a problem though.
As a European with a digital-ID passport that supports age verification without identification, the lack of technical support for this infuriates me.
Maybe once we have the euro-wide digital wallet and make it compulsory to support it.
How is this different from sending my government ID to access things like Stripe, Robin Hood, etc?
It seems that without legal obligation things will continue to go this route.
They've got mine... Fly to Canada and your face gets scanned. I forgot this event and was surprised, walking through an American airport flying to another domestic location, that my picture and name appeared on an airline's screen without input. Not a government screen, mind you. I forget the exact context but the feeling persists. Very unnerving.
If it's the same system I saw, it's branded with the airline, but hooked to the government passport database. And if you read the disclosure, the airline promised to delete your data within some small number of minutes or face stiff penalties. Stiff enough that I believe that there is no additional information on you from using that system.
An unpopular opinion for this site probably, but all the same arguments apply to gun control and civil liberties in general.
In the united states, the first amendment (what this post is primarily concerned about) and the second amendment are equally important rights, and we should be just as judicious about applying restrictions to the second as the first.
Instead, you see attacks on the 2nd in the name of "safety, verification, age assurance. A small step to protect children". The exact same playbook used against civilian gun ownership will be rolled out against the first amendment, the 4th amendment, etc.
Civil rights and protections should be expanding, not contracting, and the primary focus point for the last 30 years (and the playbooks that will be used elsewhere) are being tested on the second amendment.
At Disneyland, there are separate park entrance lanes that don't use facial recognition software. I like that I can opt-out passively there.
At TSA checkpoints at the airport, you have to actively ask to opt-out.
I'm always worried that actively opting-out puts you on a government list and there could be later, much larger ramifications, so I passively opt-in to blend in with the masses.
Yup. Most people are going to say "I have nothing to hide" and go with the flow. The ones who don't are signalling that perhaps they do have something to hide.
best anonymization would have been "hide in plain sight". If you really are a perpetrator: you would use a mask to perform the said fellony.
So face is just on factor: now they look at gait, and other body parts that can serve for identification.
Yes I do have something to hide. my face. I don't want you to own it in a data base of yours that you have a bad track record of knowing how to secure.
unless of course, you are willing to take ownership and accountability of my data and promise me minimum of $100k in compensation for data breaches and leaks indefinitely from your storage of my face. You can figure out how to pay for insurance to pay for this.
/oh you're not interested in even talking about this? Sounds like you have something to hide. (this fun conversation would not be well perceived when you that you ask for accountability for their actions and propose a solution. making a contract for this surely can't be super hard, but getting them to sign it and be accountable to it would be blocked hard)
Last time I opted out at the (edit: TSA) scan, a number of people behind me followed suit.
I enjoyed that. I will remember to opt out again.
I don't see the point of opting out at an airport, of all places. They already know (or should know) the real names of everyone who's flying. Fully agree that facial recognition at an amusement park, or any private business, is egregious.
The problem is that for most people, facial recognition is just another method of account verification. Sometimes worse than alternatives, but also sometimes more convenient, and convenience wins over privacy if people are not actively made aware of the consequences.
The battle is lost, technological determinism is an unstoppable force.
Once the camera was invented the die was cast.
"Technological determinism is the theory that a society's technology drives the development of its social structure, cultural values, and history."
A while back I opened a bank account for my daughter. All that I needed was to scan my face, then the bank got everything from the department of home affairs (South Africa)
That means my goverment already has my face, with all my details associated with it. Bit Orwellian but there we are.
That's kind of a bleak vision.
I wonder how the author would explain that the ID and age systems we already have – cigarette dispensers, liquor stores, club entry, driver's license, to name a few – work "kind of fine" though.
I will give them faces, just not my faces.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45081323
I particularly like the form at the bottom for collecting your email address and adding it to a big list.
EDIT: looks like it's gone now. Gonna count that as a win.
Don't be fucking stupid equating these 2 things together
A nicer way to say that is: "I can't decide whether to up vote or down vote you!"
There is real irony that we still use non-unique-to-purpose addressing to sign up for no-need-for-our-identity newsletters. In this case, in particular.
I would personally be much happier sharing that link with others if it did not have the information-collecting form.
That makes perfect sense to me. I am sure the site's motives are fine, and yet the tech we still use is ridiculously aged and unsecure. Even on pro-security sites.
To take the other side as nearly all comments agree, I'm not too worried about my face. My socials - twitter, fb, linkedin all have my face and 2/3 real name. When I do things in the real world I also have a face. Also if I want to be anonymous on social networks you can still pretty much. You can worry too much about that stuff. Not that the author worries, being an LLM.
Who is the author?
Either Claude van Code or Chad McGpt.
Wow both of these guys are prolific writers. I see them everywhere
I'm not the author
I like that how in the same place that they have been trying to "protect the children" for like a decade [1], they have also had a real rape gang epidemic [2]. It's almost like they are, in fact, not really trying to protect the children.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_age_verification_in_the...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooming_gangs_scandal
Hilariously, a commenter asked me for a citation for the epidemic. Commenter: you're not mr current events are you?
Citation was provided for "protect the children" but not for rape gang epidemic?
But suppose there was a rape gang epidemic - wouldn't that be a good reason to want to protect the children?
It's import to solve the meta-issues here:
1 you didn't google current events before asking the first Q. Try that before asking someone else to.
2 mid-tier LLMs are capable of reasoning through your second Q. Go ahead try that next time.
3 you haven't accepted that 2 is true and the ramifications thereof.
the meta-meta issue is that you did not provide any response other than "just google it" and "just chatgpt it"
I'm sympathetic to this but this page is preaching to the choir. You didn't sell me in the first paragraph.
Maybe this is making a slightly different point (i.e. the usage of immutable physical features as "passwords", which I agree is largely useless), I think we're just entering a post-privacy era. Being around 40, I willingly fed the machine (Facebook) with hundreds of pictures during university, and had I not, my friends would have more than made up for it. It's absolutely possible to photograph every person you pass by every day, and Facebook most certainly has the keys to identify most all of the people. That dystopian combination means that unless you're welling to move to a largely uninhabited place, each of our whereabouts can be largely resolved with technology available _today_ at a completely reasonable cost.
Not only that, almost everyone on this forum walks around with a device that shares their identity and location with unscrupulous companies (cell phone carriers) whose data is available en masse to the government. (N.B. I have an iPhone and appreciate and even _trust_ all the privacy work put into it; however, the cell phone tower thwarts location tracking, and participation in social networks thwarts face tracking.)
I've long thought that rather than try to limit the information about us, we ought to _flood_ the Internet with information about us. Make the data available untrustworthy.
Or, accept it. So long as it remains in the hands of corporations and not solely the government, it guts both ways — a senator can no longer be publicly opposed to same-sex equality legislation while engaging in a homosexual relationship themselves.
AI seems to be pushing us down the former road.
If we're going to have self-censorship due to everything we say online tied to our real identity can we at least get some shiny buildings and high speed trains out of the deal too? I've been online since early 2000s internet and for all the soapboxing about freedom of speech over the years it seems a foregone conclusion that we'll get the same surveillance state as those other "less free" countries else without anything to show for it.
You can have all that if you immigrate to China.
this would be more convincing if it wasn't ai written.
Can we start a trend of wearing ski masks and other face coverings in public?
Too late. I'm pretty sure it's already not allowed in many countries, including most of Europe.
They wanted to ban hijab/burka, but that would be discrimination, so they banned all face covers: ski masks, balaclavas, "V" plastic masks, motorcycle helmets when not driving one, everything.
Sounds miserable in summer. Let's start a trend of removing cameras from public spaces instead.
I saw food delivery couriers on scooters having a balaclava-style mask (only eyes visible).
...when driving.
Today I saw one who also had kind of snowboard goggles in addition to a mask.
Are you allowed to do this in places like airports?
I was just at a US airport and there were a bunch of signs saying you can opt out of having your face scanned at security, you just have to tell them.
Though, if you have a passport or driver's license, its not like they don't already have your face...
Is there even an option at the airport to refuse face scanning? I assume that signs you up for a one way trip to a cavity search.
TSA does it, Customs does it when entering the USA after a trip too.
There is a small sign in front of the facial scanner that says "Photo verification not required."
You can always say "I decline the photo verification", and they will check your license like back in the old days. This is what I have been doing for years now.
Things may not be quite so simple if your skin color is on the darker side, especially with the current administration. Doubly so if your passport shows you come from a country who's name ends in -stan.
All the previous administrations have extended the patriot act and other laws that enable warrantless spying and collecting data in the name of "security".
Yep but only this one has teams of people roaming the streets to round up unauthorized black people and concentrate them in camps.
Pure conjecture, Reddit-coded, seal-clapping bait.
Tell that to Omar Artan.
So far I’ve been fine politely declining. Haven’t been back to the US in a while though.
it may benefit: children, social media, marketing, police state, ai, data brokers, and many others
does it benefit you?
Who's "they?"
I verified my age with Apple by clicking one button and Apple said it assumed I was 18 based on the age of my Apple account (2011).
I guess I’m lucky to be in the cohort that avoids the face scans, and I feel a bit dirty about enabling this, but so far — even living in the UK — the privacy concerns have not manifested for me as I thought they might.
To me, the most disingenuous framing of the “protect the children” narrative is not “children can’t access the stuff,” but “adults can access the stuff, once they provide their biometrics.” The default is to deny access.
Yeah. Suddenly those piles of Apple accounts lying around seem a bit more useful.
Yea u, me and few others, when they say it is must everyone will follow and give them even kids faces. cos majority of ppl are sheeps that are waiting for orders same as they did with covid vaccines. During covid at some point i had feeling that my cousins will tied me up and drag to hospital to get vaccine if authorities said yes, go, hunt unvaccinated
sry but at first, I thought it was about Anthropic's authentication.
Why would you cite a Bloomberg reference in the article? Are you completely tone deaf on open source software and private ownership and use of 3d printers? FFS don’t direct traffic towards an opponent of free software.
Democracies building the tools of total autocracy. Real but fringe threats used to create the ultimate centralization of leverage.
Can we actually think of the children? All the children? Their future?
When democracies forget that government is the greatest natural threat to freedom, they forget and undermine the reason we have democracies.
Technical solutions to zero-knowledge proofs of age-of-adulthood without loss of anonymity are recent but available now. The strongest argument for these is to take the wind out of alternatives.
Strangely, promoters of surveillance avoid these solutions.
Even stranger: the bizarre but prevalent counter argument that anonymity protecting solutions won't work, because the surreptitious goal of other solutions is precisely to strip anonymity. We apparently shouldn't do that, because the abusers won't like the wind being taken out of their "front" problems, with real but freedom-preserving solutions!
You can just lie by using someone else's ZKP. If that's not considered to be a problem, then the California approach of just asking the device owner is much better and you still don't need the ZKP.
I am fine with device vouched sessions. That protect my and my devices' identities.
> You can just lie by using someone else's ZKP.
Yes, it is trivial to share access/identity, purposely or carelessly.
Not sure what point you are making, since that isn't specific to ZKP.
If it's not ZK you can get arrested for sharing it
I assume you mean more likely arrested? Since legal liability would be the same.
Logs of identity vs. access history being useful for investigating sharing? What kind of logs does California State keep?
None, presumably, since age verification is illegal there.
> If it's not ZK you can get arrested for sharing it
What is the scenario where not using ZKP's gets you arrested. Who is collecting what information?
I am John Smith, I give out my non-ZK age tokens, I get arrested because 200 people logged in as me today
You didn't answer who is collating all that arrest-targeting information.
It isn't news that adults can be irresponsible with age-verification credentials.
Letting children use adult's credit cards isn't criminalized either.
Adult sites not default-serving underage users does not require fine-grained surveillance or criminalizing clueless parents/adults.
The government, obviously, when the sites call it to check their tokens
You are describing strong surveillance. Exactly the problem ZKP (or similar tech) solves/avoids.
And on the other issue, requiring sites to verify ages before serving adult material, isn't the same as criminalizing shared/mishandled age verification credentials. Its a mitigation issue, not a nuclear threat.
I am left wondering if you had any coherent point to make.
ZKP: Zero Knowledge Proof, for the unfamiliar.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof>
Okay, but then they lock my bank login behind face verification.
Now what?
I am against this but acting like LinkedIn isn’t basically a database of pictures is naive.
You want to date your pic ends up on a server.
That’s just the way this works.
This article is AI slop
This article is spot on. It's a red line for me. Biometrics are not great for security but definitively bad for privacy. I would move to a federal ban on biometrics outside of intelligence agencies.
Only regulation can solve such issue.
However, our government is very weak....
Well-monied providers will steal it, perhaps with the courtesy of a buried and penalized opt-out.
> It is not age verification. It is identity verification.
Very true. They are currently orchestrating the attack.
It is also why I call age sniffing age sniffing like that; "age verification" is the propaganda term. We need to look which actors are behind this push. I smell a trail of corruption money following these actors pushing for it. It is also fascinating to see how quickly democracies fall victim to this. Soon age sniffing will be mandatory everywhere. The free world wide web will be gone. Right now people think this is hyperpole. Well, we saw that with other technology too ...
Has it ever occurred to you that this is intentional?
All those Bilderberg and WEF forums and Peter Thiel's Dialog Club are not for nothing
Peter Thiel's Dialog Club
Off topic but I was really astonished to find Ezra Klein on the list of permanent members.
They already have your face.
Yeah, "they" probably simply have our FaceID data that we're willingly collecting ourselves, supposedly for our own security.
Would be rather difficult for "them" to get it off my $80 CAD vertical flip phone, I dare say.
Face ID is entirely on device and it is cryptographically difficult to extract the data even with a jailbroken device.
Well, hopefully this is indeed the case!
i mean so they say? but really?