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Posted by speckx 9 hours ago

I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services(neilzone.co.uk)
836 points | 505 commentspage 2
teamonkey 1 hour ago|
I was annoyed the other day when Reddit asked for age verification (via a Palantir-run service, no less) for my 18-year-old Reddit account. Obviously no way I’m doing that.

In any case I doubt there’s a proof of age stronger than looking at the subreddits I subscribe to. A broad selection of middle-age hobbies and tedious interests. Without me proving my age they could probably place it to within a few weeks.

OpenWaygate 8 hours ago||
I live in China, where every mobile game requires age verification. Teenagers can play for up to 1.5h/d on weekends. But as far as I can see, some parents will assist their children to unlock more time on purpose.
SiempreViernes 8 hours ago|
Handing over a phone is certainly cheaper than paying for extra childcare, though most likely much less healthy for the child.

I suppose idea is that Chinese women will stay at home with the child so the state doesn't have to provide any help?

OpenWaygate 8 hours ago|||
The gov does provide some help. But a clearer trend is a lower marriage and birth rate
mothballed 8 hours ago|||
More like the state (at least in places like USA) cracked down on children roaming freely so now people hide their kids inside playing video games so a Karen doesn't call CPS when mommy has other things to do all day besides play helicopter parent staring down at their kid all day.
rd 8 hours ago|||
Is there any hard evidence that this is true compared to say 20 years ago. I’ve heard it repeated a million times but no one’s ever provided evidence
webstrand 4 hours ago|||
If nothing else the _perception_ of it is enough to have had a chilling effect, my own parents were concerned and affected by it enough to tell me where not to play outside so that I wouldn't be seen by randoms.
thewebguyd 8 hours ago||||
Neglect laws are written too broadly, giving too much discretion to CPS to decide what constitutes neglect or inadequate supervision. There have been a couple cases IIRC in Florida where parents were arrested for letting their kids walk/play in parks alone, albeit these were very young children.

Outside of that, there's increased traffic and the US as a whole is way too car centric. Suburbs are horribly designed, and we prioritize moving cars instead of moving people, and any kind of infrastructure design that might slow down traffic, reduce the need to drive, or mildly inconvenience a driver gets shot down.

There is a very real danger of getting killed by a distracted idiot in a car, and that risk is much higher today. I commute on I5 every day for work and every single day I see multiple people, going 80MPH watching tiktoks on their phone on the dash mount, or obviously looking down texting. I can't blame anyone for not wanting their kids running around the neighborhood when we can't even be responsible enough to pay attention when we are driving 2 ton death machines.

mothballed 8 hours ago|||
[ redacted ]
bpt3 8 hours ago||
You live in a very strange area to say the least.

None of those are true in my area, and how did the "Karen" even get to your child on your private road?

mothballed 7 hours ago||
[ redacted ]
bpt3 7 hours ago||
I'm sorry, the "Karen" drove onto your private road to interrogate your kid?

These things don't happen on a liberal/conservative axis in my experience.

I've lived all over the place, though not as much with kids, and have had none of these issues (including having mixed race kids who look much more like their other parent than me).

You really need to look at why you're living where you do.

jen20 7 hours ago||
A "private road" typically means one not maintained by the city. I live on one, but so do two other households, who have equal right to drive on it.
bpt3 6 hours ago||
Yeah, except the now redacted comments didn't indicate that was the case which is why I was asking more questions.

It really was an extraordinary story without any extraordinary evidence.

mothballed 6 hours ago||
What I find extraordinary is y'alls bullshit theory that it is extraordinary to claim the CPS apparatus wasn't used more before when it didn't even exist until like ~1974, and before then as a much different process.

As usual, just blame the victim, then complain they don't provide evidence knowing full damn well child and family welfare services complaints are sealed and hidden from public oversight. This is how vampires with these theories operate, first they make it illegal to get the records, then they make it illegal to even find out who the accuser is, then when you call them on it they say "ha ha, you don't have the evidence, that we made it illegal for you to get!" The whole system is designed to evade oversight, so what we are all left with is anecdotes that we have about our own childhood being so much different than the ones our children have after interactions with the authorities that have placed these restraints. But of course when you share them, they are only used against you by persons such as yourself (judging me for where I live, as if it's not going on all over the US). So people are reluctant to even share the anecdotes, and by law you generally cannot get the formal records (think of the children!) of these encounters nor the names of the accusers so basically they designed the whole legal structure to enable the muh citation crowd to be able to always pretend like the other side is just hiding from the evidence.

( If you look, at say, the problems with child abuse physicians in cahoots with CPS systematically victimizing families of children with brittle bone disease for instance, we basically had to wait for enough parents to tell their anecdotal stories of losing their kids until lawyers really started to step up to defend these cases as we now know doctors and CPS will systematically accuse children with multiple breaks of being victims of abuse, even when there is zero evidence the parents or child were inflicting an amount of force that would break healthy bones. The individual cases can't be scrutinized to bring these things to daylight because they're all sealed under child welfare laws, hence we just had to wait for a bunch of "extraordinary stories" with weak evidence to be told until someone finally believed them and others from society could step up to help these victimized families).

Personally I find it absolutely fucking hilarious that as much or more CPS induced restraint existed ... before CPS did.

>Yeah, except the now redacted comments didn't indicate that was the case which is why I was asking more questions.

Lol you responded to my comment saying it was an easement which meant I was not able to gate it. Although frankly your tone of questioning seemed to be more directed towards alluding I was a liar, than a genuine interest in the road.

bpt3 4 hours ago||
> What I find extraordinary is y'alls bullshit theory that it is extraordinary to claim the CPS apparatus wasn't used more before when it didn't even exist until like ~1974, and before then as a much different process.

You seem to have replied to the wrong post.

> As usual, just blame the victim, then complain they don't provide evidence knowing full damn well child and family welfare services complaints are sealed and hidden from public oversight. This is how vampires with these theories operate, first they make it illegal to get the records, then they make it illegal to even find out who the accuser is, then when you call them on it they say "ha ha, you don't have the evidence, that we made it illegal for you to get!" The whole system is designed to evade oversight, so what we are all left with is anecdotes that we have about our own childhood being so much different than the ones our children have after interactions with the authorities that have placed these restraints. But of course when you share them, they are only used against you by persons such as yourself (judging me for where I live, as if it's not going on all over the US). So people are reluctant to even share the anecdotes, and by law you generally cannot get the formal records (think of the children!) of these encounters nor the names of the accusers so basically they designed the whole legal structure to enable the muh citation crowd to be able to always pretend like the other side is just hiding from the evidence.

I'm not blaming anyone. Your experience is so wildly different from anything I've seen or heard living in many different areas across the US that I'm interested to hear more about it, and then you go on a tirade that has virtually nothing to do with the topic at hand instead of providing any remotely relevant information.

> Lol you responded to my comment saying it was an easement which meant I was not able to gate it. Although frankly your tone of questioning seemed to be more directed towards alluding I was a liar, than a genuine interest in the road.

I don't have a gate on the private road to my house either, yet no one drives down it to interrogate my kid about my whereabouts.

Is it a neighbor who also shares the private road? If so, that makes some sense but it sounds like you need to have a discussion with them. Why didn't you trespass them if not?

If this Karen calls CPS because they were trespassing and weren't aware that you were nearby, so what, other than wasting some taxpayer dollars? Has anyone ever had their kid taken by the state because of a claim like this? Since the answer is no, why are you so freaked out about it, way beyond being annoyed at this Karen (who does sound annoying in this story)?

Like I said to the other person, it's a series of extraordinary claims that frankly make almost no sense, and then you rant about tangential topics when asked for more detail. It doesn't make your anecdote more believable.

Izkata 3 hours ago|||
But it's not rare at all. It really just sounds like you haven't had reason to pay attention to this before and now don't want to accept it's become a thing. A google search for "cops called on kids playing alone" results in a never-ending series of stories like this. I think most of them are from people with your perspective being caught by surprise.
bpt3 3 hours ago||
I have kids, and I know hundreds of parents across large portions of the country. None of them have these issues.

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

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

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

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

jen20 14 minutes ago||
> Many people are stupid, and do stupid things like calling the cops for no valid reason at all. Those people are annoying and can be ignored,

Either you are disingenuous or incredibly sheltered. It's hard to tell which, but I suspect I know.

kubb 4 hours ago|||
This was done because of the "personal responsibility" crowd. Easier to blame the parents than make the communities safer.
Bender 5 hours ago||
I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

I do not hesitate to drop a domain that acts suspicious into uBlock Origin -> My Filters:

    ||somedomain.tld$
Never gets another packet from me. I use local Brick & Mortar businesses for as many things as I can. The businesses on the internet have jumped the shark.
amoe_ 9 hours ago||
The problem for me is not services where the content is online, you can just avoid those, but cases where access to scarce real resources is controlled through online verification. E.g. renting recording studios, background checks for job applications, things like this. Often there is no route that does not go through a third-party verification service.
inanutshellus 8 hours ago|
I gave a bunch of details of my personal history to a verification service thinking naively that it would be used to prove I was me.

Instead, they didn't know much about me apparently and just stored what I told them.

Then it appears they were hacked because some completely unrelated release of stolen data included all my data, specifically all that data I had provided to that service, that one time.

The Verification Service is the honeypot for your private information. Arg.

elorant 8 hours ago||
Facebook recently flagged my account and asked for a video selfie and I decided that I'd rather leave that shithole than uploade biometric data.
JohnFen 8 hours ago||
I'm of the same mind as the author. I can't think of a single online service that would be worth the risk of exposing myself to age or identity verification.
mghackerlady 3 hours ago||
The only way I can think of to do this completely anonymously (at least for the government and social media) is for you to buy a card in cash that has a little code on it. You'd need your ID to buy it, and you'd put your code into your operating system and things that demand age verification can ask the OS whether or not you're over 18. Alternatively, you can give the service your code to verify your age, but that would be less convenient and lead to a larger tracking footprint, so it likely wouldn't be used unless necessary
tkzed49 3 hours ago|
Can I buy them for my underage friends at different stores? Is there revocation and hence a database that maps codes to identities?

How are the codes minted? Can I pretend to be a gas station and buy a big pack of ID cards, then just not check ID?

phippsytech 4 hours ago||
I'm suprised that ZKP almost never gets mentioned when it comes to age verification. It seems like it is a solution that does protect PII. There is a learning curve for the general public, but having watched the hoops a mother recently had to jump through so her kids could play Mario Kart on Nintendo Switch, I think it is not that difficult.
michaelt 8 hours ago||
> I was pondering last night for which services I, personally, would actually be willing to verify my age or identity.

> And… the answer is “none”.

> At least, none that I can think of at the moment.

Think back to the recent pandemic.

Work? Online. School? Online. Recreational activities? Online. Talking to loved ones you don’t live with? Online. Birthday party? Online. Nonfood shopping? Online. Banking? Paying taxes and bills? Online. Job interview? Doctors appointment? Online. Dating? You guessed it, online.

The internet’s a big thing these days.

jim33442 5 hours ago||
A lot of these don't have any legitimate reason for your ID. Banking and job sure, but those will ask for it offline too.
JohnFen 8 hours ago||
How true this is probably varies a whole lot from person to person.

Very few of the things you list are things that I do primarily online (even during the pandemic), and none of those are things that I can only do online.

cjfd 8 hours ago|
There are some services where it makes sense. E.g., submitting taxes with the government, logging into the banking website. Apart from that kind of service, yes I don't think I would want my identity or age verified on more or less any website.
vincnetas 8 hours ago|
the catch is that for both cases same backend provider is most likely used. persona for example. and you have no choice who will id your face.
SiempreViernes 8 hours ago||
I mean, if you live in a country where the state will delegate ID verification to a creepy company instead of having that as an in house capability you have more pressing structural issues to deal with.
vincnetas 8 hours ago||
ok, lets do a poll. id like to see who uses what. remember its not only countries its also private businesses like banks or lawyers

and remember its like ratchet. there might be 99% of services that use inhouse face id, and its enough to have only one to leak your data.

SiempreViernes 8 hours ago||
Ha! You are concerned about the privacy aspects of IDs but you want me to list what authentication services I use for you? That's too funny to help out with :p
vincnetas 7 hours ago||
i ment to list id services that are used by your services not services themselves.

My data point is persona.

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