>An FTC spokesperson told CNBC that companies must limit how collected information is used. [...] The agency pointed to existing rules requiring firms to retain personal information only as long as reasonably necessary and to safeguard its confidentiality and integrity.
the very same rules that have allowed literally every single piece of my data to be leaked several separate times, and now i have free credit monitoring instead of privacy? and all of those companies still operate normally, as if nothing ever happened? very neat.
>Discord said it is using the additional time this year to add more verification options, including credit cards, more transparency on vendors and technical detail of how age verification will work
and why didnt we start with credit cards? instead of facial recognition with peter thiel? (this is a rhetorical question)
I have gotten several notices of medical data being leaked over the last two years. I thought HIPPA law had very harsh fines for this, but I guess they just look the other way.
Probably because the transfer of accounts (typically for reasons of better spamming, but in this case for adult access) is possible.
However, that makes me wonder what mechanism might "unverify" an account holder's age upon transfer. I suppose it's simply a need to re-verify (take a new photo) upon every login, but then folks could transfer the session cookie to avoid needing the new owner to perform a login (unless a new device ID/fingerprint makes the old cookie useless).
Since you don't have to verify every time you use the account, transfer of verified accounts will still be a "problem" though. It's just a CYA to be able to say "we verified this account owner."
But… You could transfer the account after age verification too. The only way to be sure is to ask for ID every time people use the website / application, then children will be truly finally safe from the horrors of the Internet.
"TransUnion and Experian, two of the three major credit bureaus, have started dismissing a larger share of consumer complaints without help since the Trump administration began dismantling the CFPB."
And one would hope that the purpose of the CFPB would be to dissuade lenders from wronging consumers in the first place, meaning the net benefit to consumers was likely much higher.
The real problem with age verification isn't the method (facial recognition vs credit cards) — it's that deterministic verification requires high-value PII and creates honeypots. Credit cards are just identity by proxy with slightly different attack surface.
Probabilistic verification using behavioral signals and metadata (device age, account age, interaction patterns) doesn't perfectly verify age but massively reduces the privacy trade-off. Most platforms optimize for regulatory compliance, not actual safety.
The fact that these tools are 'active' centric, i.e : You must perform an action to validate you're NOT a child, these will never protect children. A predator simply needs not to verify anything and appear benign and ironically more anonymous than law abiding people.
I'm not saying the inverse is the answer either, just that if anyone without an agenda of surveillance looked at this for a second, the penny would have dropped. So I can only assume that this was the purpose the whole time.
whats incredible to me are how many useful idiots out there STILL fall for it.
___ said hamas beaheaded 40 babies and that turned out to be a complete fabrication. That fake info was used in part to justify killing thousands of kids in ____
meanwhile the recent strike on Iran resulted in 80 little girls getting killed (with plenty of evidence) and its swept under the rug while we get blasted about the 7 soldiers that died.
More useful idiots are born every day, most of them never are educated and do not see their past blunders as anything wrong happening, they are completely blind to the real implication of their actions.
Exactly my point.. And all the industry experts who they must have consulted in to write the laws are coincidently invested in personal data harvesting. Who could have foreseen this happening.
The entire point is to de-anonymise adults. Especially in countries that are escalating the policing of online speech.
If it was actually about kids, we'd have done it a long time ago. With more focus on things like porn and gambling (including 'loot box' gambling in games) rather than social media.
The EU is rolling out the EUDI system this year where citizens can verify their age (>16, >18, >21) without revealing any personal information. This is a solved problem over there.
My default reaction to the introduction of any age-verification for any service is the closing account. Goodbye Discord, account closed out of protest.
The second option is ignoring the verification request. Goodbye online-gaming-with-strangers on Xbox. (I see this as a positive). Same goes for Ubisoft who aggressively wanted my secret papers to verify my identity.
I've yet to come across anything I want or need outside banking or government use where age verification benefits me, or is so useful/important that I would willingly hand over critical secret documents. I've not even needed to use a VPN for anything. It doesn't mean it won't happen, but when it does, option #1 or #2 is going to cover everything.
Which circles back to the main point here - if I ignore it, then effectively I get identified as a non-adult. How does this protect anybody?
Age verification inherently requires identity verification.
The UK's Online Safety Act originally had a proposal that would allow users to purchase an ID code anonymously in cash from a corner store, presenting only ID to the cashier the same way as buying alcohol. This was never implemented, because it's more useful for the government and corporations to link all online usage to a government ID.
This is probably fantastic news for the VPN providers. Lots of people who otherwise wouldn't have bothered are now likely incorporating VPN connectivity into their daily routine. This very obviously includes kids.
I also wouldn't be surprised if there were plenty of people only dimly aware of the idea of a VPN who are now sitting up and taking note.
The uncomfortable part is that they try to solve a real problem (protecting minors) by requiring universal identification. In practice this means every adult has to prove who they are just to access any part of the internet. Once that infrastructure exists, it’s hard to imagine it not expanding beyond its original purpose.
Its hard to imagine that it won't launch _already_ expanded beyond it's original purpose. My expectation is that there will be precisely 0 seconds between it and it being abused. The people building it will plan the abuse before it's even launched.
> Social media company Discord announced plans in February to roll out mandatory age verification globally,
Discord’s age verification is optional and only required to disable the image content filter, join adult servers, and a couple other features. I’m not saying it’s a good decision, but I am getting tired of the repeated claim that it’s mandatory to go do age verification to use the service.
This lazy reporting is hurting the messaging because readers will believe that mandatory age verification was implemented and everything is fine, so new laws will not change anything for the worse. It needs to be clear that age verification laws would change the situation considerably, not be a nothingburger.
I don’t plan to do the Discord age verification and neither do most of the people I interact with on Discord. It’s not mandatory.
I don’t recommend anyone rush to do the Discord age verification unless you really need to for some reason. Don’t believe all of the lazy articles saying it’s mandatory.
You're downplaying it in the same way that others are overplaying it.
- There are servers that are labelled adult only because it's simpler to label _everything_ as causing cancer than it is to only label the correct things. I can't join channels for some games because they're "adult"; even though they're not
- There are servers that are getting rid of content because they don't want some automatic system to label them as adult, even though they're not. There's a game server that got rid of it's meme channel, because people could (but don't) post content that some system might see as adult.
So it is a bigger deal than you're making it out to be. It's negatively impacting people and servers that have no interest in having anything adult on them.
No? I’m against age verification too. Please re-read my comment above for why the Discord example with wrong information is counterproductive to arguments against age verification.
And I am too! My comment above was that the claim that Discord’s age verification is mandatory was false.
It’s also misleading in the context of this journalism because it makes it look like it’s already done and therefore new laws wouldn’t change anything.
It will be when everyone starts leaking from the big players. Age verification will make software development impossible or be impossible to implement without huge investment.
You know that none of those things actually protect children from predators which is the supposed reason for these changes. So when they inevitably don't work Discord will take the next step of requiring age verification from everyone.
I literally gain from using their services for communication and voice chat with friends.
“Literally no gain whatsoever” is completely wrong.
I’ve tried Matrix/Element for years. I’m still in some IRC channels. I know what the alternatives are I can confidently say I’m gaining value from the ease in which Discord allows us to voice chat, screen share, and invite less technical people to join.
You will gain nothing relative to the status quo today. You're giving up your identity in order to just... stay the same. This is a textbook definition of no upside.
They are extorting your identity from you and you're somehow OK with that.
no shit, this was obviously the point. the people who said so all along were correct, the people who insisted it wasn't were not speaking in good faith.
we, as a society, need to stop taking companies at their word when they say that the obvious harms that are right around the corner are overblown.
>An FTC spokesperson told CNBC that companies must limit how collected information is used. [...] The agency pointed to existing rules requiring firms to retain personal information only as long as reasonably necessary and to safeguard its confidentiality and integrity.
the very same rules that have allowed literally every single piece of my data to be leaked several separate times, and now i have free credit monitoring instead of privacy? and all of those companies still operate normally, as if nothing ever happened? very neat.
>Discord said it is using the additional time this year to add more verification options, including credit cards, more transparency on vendors and technical detail of how age verification will work
and why didnt we start with credit cards? instead of facial recognition with peter thiel? (this is a rhetorical question)
I have gotten several notices of medical data being leaked over the last two years. I thought HIPPA law had very harsh fines for this, but I guess they just look the other way.
Seems like if you just disclose and make assurances that "you take security seriously" then it's fine.
unfortunately, even if the fine seems harsh, if it is less than the profits generated the fine is an operating expense and not a deterrent.
Some of the accounts being blocked from certain access are themselves 18! You would think Reddit would consider that, but nope it doesn't.
Probably because the transfer of accounts (typically for reasons of better spamming, but in this case for adult access) is possible.
However, that makes me wonder what mechanism might "unverify" an account holder's age upon transfer. I suppose it's simply a need to re-verify (take a new photo) upon every login, but then folks could transfer the session cookie to avoid needing the new owner to perform a login (unless a new device ID/fingerprint makes the old cookie useless).
Since you don't have to verify every time you use the account, transfer of verified accounts will still be a "problem" though. It's just a CYA to be able to say "we verified this account owner."
But… You could transfer the account after age verification too. The only way to be sure is to ask for ID every time people use the website / application, then children will be truly finally safe from the horrors of the Internet.
The website will only function when webcam is turned on with passport next to your face. Session is immeditely revoked on failure.
10 years was enough for Tom Fulp.
https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1549829/1
https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1555753/1
> now i have free credit monitoring
Might not even matter ...
"TransUnion and Experian, two of the three major credit bureaus, have started dismissing a larger share of consumer complaints without help since the Trump administration began dismantling the CFPB."
https://www.propublica.org/article/credit-report-mistakes-cf...
It's not like they were really doing a very good job anyway. My data has been leaking for two decades now.
How much money did the CFPB actually give back to wronged consumers?
Pre-trump's attempts to eliminate the department, almost $20 billion.
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/enforcement/enforcement-by-t...
And one would hope that the purpose of the CFPB would be to dissuade lenders from wronging consumers in the first place, meaning the net benefit to consumers was likely much higher.
It's by design. Pedonazis have been used as the justification for the surveillance apparatus for decades now.
[0] "Cypherpunks Uncut." https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xt3hpb
The real problem with age verification isn't the method (facial recognition vs credit cards) — it's that deterministic verification requires high-value PII and creates honeypots. Credit cards are just identity by proxy with slightly different attack surface.
Probabilistic verification using behavioral signals and metadata (device age, account age, interaction patterns) doesn't perfectly verify age but massively reduces the privacy trade-off. Most platforms optimize for regulatory compliance, not actual safety.
The fact that these tools are 'active' centric, i.e : You must perform an action to validate you're NOT a child, these will never protect children. A predator simply needs not to verify anything and appear benign and ironically more anonymous than law abiding people.
I'm not saying the inverse is the answer either, just that if anyone without an agenda of surveillance looked at this for a second, the penny would have dropped. So I can only assume that this was the purpose the whole time.
Sob stories about children are always weaponized for oppression.
It was used to bash interracial marriage, gay rights, suppress dissent, attack the first amendment, and now this.
Whenever you hear some dramatic story involving kids about how you have to live a little less free, know the tactic.
whats incredible to me are how many useful idiots out there STILL fall for it.
___ said hamas beaheaded 40 babies and that turned out to be a complete fabrication. That fake info was used in part to justify killing thousands of kids in ____
meanwhile the recent strike on Iran resulted in 80 little girls getting killed (with plenty of evidence) and its swept under the rug while we get blasted about the 7 soldiers that died.
More useful idiots are born every day, most of them never are educated and do not see their past blunders as anything wrong happening, they are completely blind to the real implication of their actions.
Age verification doesn't stop determined bad actors, it just builds a database of everyone who cooperated...........
Know they sheep, the better to keep them penned.
Exactly my point.. And all the industry experts who they must have consulted in to write the laws are coincidently invested in personal data harvesting. Who could have foreseen this happening.
The entire point is to de-anonymise adults. Especially in countries that are escalating the policing of online speech.
If it was actually about kids, we'd have done it a long time ago. With more focus on things like porn and gambling (including 'loot box' gambling in games) rather than social media.
The EU is rolling out the EUDI system this year where citizens can verify their age (>16, >18, >21) without revealing any personal information. This is a solved problem over there.
Doesn't the act of notifying >16 today and >18 tomorrow leak birthdates?
My default reaction to the introduction of any age-verification for any service is the closing account. Goodbye Discord, account closed out of protest.
The second option is ignoring the verification request. Goodbye online-gaming-with-strangers on Xbox. (I see this as a positive). Same goes for Ubisoft who aggressively wanted my secret papers to verify my identity.
I've yet to come across anything I want or need outside banking or government use where age verification benefits me, or is so useful/important that I would willingly hand over critical secret documents. I've not even needed to use a VPN for anything. It doesn't mean it won't happen, but when it does, option #1 or #2 is going to cover everything.
Which circles back to the main point here - if I ignore it, then effectively I get identified as a non-adult. How does this protect anybody?
(UK-based, might not be the same everywhere)
Age verification inherently requires identity verification.
The UK's Online Safety Act originally had a proposal that would allow users to purchase an ID code anonymously in cash from a corner store, presenting only ID to the cashier the same way as buying alcohol. This was never implemented, because it's more useful for the government and corporations to link all online usage to a government ID.
This is probably fantastic news for the VPN providers. Lots of people who otherwise wouldn't have bothered are now likely incorporating VPN connectivity into their daily routine. This very obviously includes kids.
I also wouldn't be surprised if there were plenty of people only dimly aware of the idea of a VPN who are now sitting up and taking note.
And kids will do very stupid things to get "free" VPN access.
Such as following directions from a YouTube video that instructs them to do sketchy things.
It's curious why there are no reverse systems where, when accessing an adult resource, you have to prove that you are a child?
The uncomfortable part is that they try to solve a real problem (protecting minors) by requiring universal identification. In practice this means every adult has to prove who they are just to access any part of the internet. Once that infrastructure exists, it’s hard to imagine it not expanding beyond its original purpose.
Its hard to imagine that it won't launch _already_ expanded beyond it's original purpose. My expectation is that there will be precisely 0 seconds between it and it being abused. The people building it will plan the abuse before it's even launched.
> Social media company Discord announced plans in February to roll out mandatory age verification globally,
Discord’s age verification is optional and only required to disable the image content filter, join adult servers, and a couple other features. I’m not saying it’s a good decision, but I am getting tired of the repeated claim that it’s mandatory to go do age verification to use the service.
This lazy reporting is hurting the messaging because readers will believe that mandatory age verification was implemented and everything is fine, so new laws will not change anything for the worse. It needs to be clear that age verification laws would change the situation considerably, not be a nothingburger.
I don’t plan to do the Discord age verification and neither do most of the people I interact with on Discord. It’s not mandatory.
I don’t recommend anyone rush to do the Discord age verification unless you really need to for some reason. Don’t believe all of the lazy articles saying it’s mandatory.
You're downplaying it in the same way that others are overplaying it.
- There are servers that are labelled adult only because it's simpler to label _everything_ as causing cancer than it is to only label the correct things. I can't join channels for some games because they're "adult"; even though they're not
- There are servers that are getting rid of content because they don't want some automatic system to label them as adult, even though they're not. There's a game server that got rid of it's meme channel, because people could (but don't) post content that some system might see as adult.
So it is a bigger deal than you're making it out to be. It's negatively impacting people and servers that have no interest in having anything adult on them.
>I don’t plan to do the Discord age verification and neither do most of the people I interact with on Discord.
until it becomes law, like it is (or in the process of becoming) ~everywhere.
Okay? Then we’ll deal with that if it happens. If it does happen then other services will have the same requirements.
The baby eating machine is busy telling us that it's coming to eat our babies and your best answer is "wait and see"?
No? I’m against age verification too. Please re-read my comment above for why the Discord example with wrong information is counterproductive to arguments against age verification.
It’s important to get facts right.
>If it does happen then other services will have the same requirements.
that is exactly what everyone is angry about.
And I am too! My comment above was that the claim that Discord’s age verification is mandatory was false.
It’s also misleading in the context of this journalism because it makes it look like it’s already done and therefore new laws wouldn’t change anything.
Maybe! But laws like California’s new law and the Texas law both are making it mandatory from a legal compliance point of view.
The direction of these restrictions is not “optional”
It will be when everyone starts leaking from the big players. Age verification will make software development impossible or be impossible to implement without huge investment.
> Age verification will make software development impossible or be impossible to implement without huge investment.
Not really, you'll just be forced to use services from eg google or meta. And pay for them. And share user data.
You know that none of those things actually protect children from predators which is the supposed reason for these changes. So when they inevitably don't work Discord will take the next step of requiring age verification from everyone.
Why, oh why, would you give them the long term benefit of the doubt for literally no gain to you whatsoever?
> for literally no gain to you whatsoever?
I literally gain from using their services for communication and voice chat with friends.
“Literally no gain whatsoever” is completely wrong.
I’ve tried Matrix/Element for years. I’m still in some IRC channels. I know what the alternatives are I can confidently say I’m gaining value from the ease in which Discord allows us to voice chat, screen share, and invite less technical people to join.
You will gain nothing relative to the status quo today. You're giving up your identity in order to just... stay the same. This is a textbook definition of no upside.
They are extorting your identity from you and you're somehow OK with that.
> Discord’s age verification is optional
...for now ... What stops them from changing this in the future?
Additionally Discord may verify your age based on the collected data without consent.
> ...for now ... What stops them from changing this in the future?
Then I’ll deal with that situation if it arises.
Pretty sure in some EU countries it is mandatory now, iirc
Of course they are. That is their purpose.
To the surprise of absolutely nobody.
403 for me
https://web.archive.org/web/20260308223909/https://www.cnbc....
Never provide such information. Forge it if you must
You don't say.
no shit, this was obviously the point. the people who said so all along were correct, the people who insisted it wasn't were not speaking in good faith.
we, as a society, need to stop taking companies at their word when they say that the obvious harms that are right around the corner are overblown.
is this the great innovation that the GDPR is stifling in Europe? (sorry for the snark)