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.
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.
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.
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.
Probably something of a demographic (geography/age) thing.
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!
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.
"Need" is an extremely strong word that is not appropriate for many Internet services where facial recognition is being pushed for.
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?
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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).
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...
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.
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.
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...
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
AI coming along is another “great opportunity” to try and force these programs
You probably have seen them if you live in the US, and had little idea about them.
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...
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
> 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'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.
> A verification regime does not need your approval — it needs your participation
Ugh
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not great, but it's not what the original poster is against.
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
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.
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."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_age_verification_in_the...
But suppose there was a rape gang epidemic - wouldn't that be a good reason to want to protect the children?
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-...
"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.
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.
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:
https://travel-europe.europa.eu/ees/data-held-by-ees
No way to opt out of the scan.
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'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.
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.
It seems that without legal obligation things will continue to go this route.
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.
I enjoyed that. I will remember to opt out again.
That means my goverment already has my face, with all my details associated with it. Bit Orwellian but there we are.
does it benefit you?
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 ...
TSA does it, Customs does it when entering the USA after a trip too.
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.
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.
EDIT: looks like it's gone now. Gonna count that as a win.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All those Bilderberg and WEF forums and Peter Thiel's Dialog Club are not for nothing
Not sure why you shoehorned some antivax nonsense in there though.
I agree with this part, but then, I personally don't have a problem with everyone else giving up their privacy.
> Then once the critical mass is reached, your ability to buy groceries can just be terminated. The 20% of the population that refuses just isn't important enough to matter.
Wut? Can you provide any information about a supermarket chain (or law affecting supermarket chains) anywhere in the world that prevents (or prevented) people who weren't vaccinated against COVID-19 to enter or buy groceries from those supermarkets?
Taking these age-assurance laws at face value, I don't have a problem with them, because I think algorithmically-personalised social media feeds are an intrinsically bad product and I don't see anything that any society would lose if they went away. My concern about these laws is how far politicians are willing to go to close loopholes like VPNs, because I think that's where the potential is to cause inadvertent collateral damage to systems that really matter.
Where I live I simply queued up at the local vaccination centre, got vaccinated, and left. I probably had to show some id or something I guess but no more than accessing any other government services
Google and Apple built contact tracing directly into iOS and Android during Covid. And it's still there. And all they'd need to do to make it opt-out or required is to flash an update with some small print in an EULA.
It is WAY more invasive and you probably already gave your phone your face with features like face unlock too. But hey, we can stop this discussion, because the covid vaccinated have flagged this point down for wrongthink. You see, when you want to fight the surveillance sleepwalkers, they fight back. They really really really want to stay asleep.
Arguing against that sort of contact tracing may have merits (Not necessarily saying I agree but it's a discussion worth having). Arguing against vaccination is dangerous and ends up with people dead.
2. When was the last time you needed to show a vaccine card for anything, much less buying groceries?
I’ve never been asked for it since.
There's the analogy, it was primarily beneficial for a small group yet for many, particularly Government workers and those in medical care it became a condition of employment that you were vaccinated. [2]
There was a lot of pointless policies despite knowing:
- Being vaccination did nothing to prevent transmitting Covid, it only gave the vaccinated individual better protection from mortality. [3]
- Herd immunity for Covid was known to be impossible once the infection rates got too high with Delta and Omnicron. So trying to vaccinate everyone including children was pointless. [4]
- There is Evidence that being vaccinated actually increases transmission of respiratory viruses. You were less likely to get seriously ill, while potentially increasing the risk of passing it on to your family. [5]
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/covid/risk-factors/index.html
[2] https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/1000-nsw-health-workers-...
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39283431/
[4] https://theconversation.com/herd-immunity-was-sold-as-the-pa...
It was also widely discussed.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-06/morrison-businesses-r...
https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/australia/supermar...