from the I've-got-a-Bad-Thieling-About-This dept.
Ten days ago, the social chat app Discord announced that it would launch “teen-by-default” settings for its global audience. As part of this update, all new and existing users worldwide will have a teen-appropriate experience, with updated communication settings, restricted access to age-gated spaces, and content filtering that preserves privacy and meaningful connections, the platform said.
This, of course, means that to use Discord the way you are used to, you’ll have to let it scan your face, and the internet wasn’t happy. Many communities quickly announced their move to other platforms. Others, like the security researcher Celeste, who goes by the handle vmfunc, were convinced there would be a workaround.
Together with two other researchers, they set out to look into Persona, the San Francisco-based startup that’s used by Discord for biometric identity verification – and found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a US government authorized server.
More at The Rage
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday February 21, @01:20PM (4 children)
How does it know the face is yours? Could you scan someone else's face? Could you use a photograph?
There is someone in the extended family who is in his late 30s. He still gets ID'd when he goes to buy tobacco. I wonder what it would make of him?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 21, @01:39PM
From the linked article, they use some AI wankery to try determine the 'liveliness' of the presented image to try get around this, and this Persona mob also have access to multiple other databases full of personal information...
(Score: 4, Funny) by corey on Saturday February 21, @09:45PM (2 children)
Instead of face photos, they just need to have a quiz most adults would be able to answer successfully to get in, like Leisure Suit Larry. Without the alt-x bypass. Simples.
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Sunday February 22, @11:55AM
"Name the main character in Star Wars", that should do it.
(Score: 2) by suxen on Tuesday February 24, @11:08AM
Wait... Leisure Suit Larry had an Alt-X bypass?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday February 21, @04:24PM (2 children)
Explain the assumption that this:
leads to this:
Who is this "you" and what is this "way you are used to"? Ain't me and I wonder who they mean. The more I think about it the less I like who they seem to be talking about.
What we're seeing and arguing about is NOT an age verification thing its a culture war between "discord is for dick pics and cheese pizza" vs "discord is easier to use IRC with lotsa integrations for legit and legal organizations"
I am on exactly 14 discord servers and all of them operate below "teen" level and other than some occasional swear words when something breaks they'd all be K12 suitable. If discord enforces teen rules I will be pretty happy with my user experience. There's three I'm on for specific games where people have a beer or twenty while playing and then use swear words in chat when they run into a bug or whatever, but they're mostly kid-friendly (In the legal sense of kid friendly, not the Democrats in the Epstein files sense of being kid friendly). There's I believe three that are paying clients; why businessmen think Discord is acceptable for business use is semi mystifying I'm guessing the problem is the price Slack wants to charge for the (minimal) value they get. Theres a couple programming language discords that are fairly well behaved and a couple "youtube channel communities" all good boys who dindu nuffin wrong and are well behaved and polite and any k12 member would not experience anything inappropriate.
No one can seem to explain what the downside is for 99% of the population if predators, cheese pizza traders, and dick pic sharers have an ID attached to their weenies or the pictures they're sharing of lil' weenies. I'm perfectly OK with life being more difficult for that type of person.
There's no privacy implication if my three clients have a picture of my face; I video conference with their IT droids on a regular basis already, they have the EIN for my LLC when they pay my invoices and send me my annual 1099. One ACH transfers directly into my checking account.
I don't want to get into doc dropping type stuff but whatever WTF I'm on the Adafruit discord merely as a customer. If "they" get access to my face or photo ID I'm not overly concerned because "they" already have my CC info and shipping address and purchase history LOL.
Should a company trying to monetize a free service be allowed to ostracize the worst elements of society whom are not making them profits, even if those elements rank high politically on the progressive stack? Yeah, I'm OK with that.
You'll note a censorship in legacy media where they very carefully avoid any mention of exactly whom will be affected and exactly what activities they are performing that will be affected. And then you start noticing things about the legacy media and politicians doing the complaining...
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 21, @05:25PM
> other than some occasional swear words when something breaks they'd all be K12 suitable.
Apparently you've never ridden on a K-12 bus...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22, @01:33AM
C'mon. We weren't born yesterday. We know how this goes. The official policy sounds sorta reasonable, but the in-practice enforcement is anything but. The stuff actually harmful to children like grooming will somehow manage to evade the rules. ID checks will get imposed on random users with no apparent interaction with adult content (or simply by policy changed to be required for everyone in the future). Censored content will extend to cover more and more things that are perfectly teen-appropriate but disliked by people in power like protests and queer content and Adafruit because their overzealous censors linked "fruit" => "fruity" => "gay" (okay, probably not that specific case, but there will be moderation decisions that stupid).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DadaDoofy on Saturday February 21, @04:28PM (5 children)
I have mentioned this exact thing since they first started telling the "save the children!! " lie about "age verification". It should certainly come as no surprise to anyone.
Keep in mind the end game is controlling who gets to access the internet. This is another slide down the slippery slope to banning all but government issued digital currency for financial transactions. You know - to keep us safe from terrorist and drug cartels. If you don't have the right politics, religion, skin color, sex etc., according to whoever's currently in power, you will be supremely fucked.
If you are a "person of age", glad you had a chance to enjoy the good 'ol days. If you are you young, may God help you.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday February 21, @05:32PM
Alternate interpretation:
Keep in mind that according to Dead Internet Theory x% of internet traffic, where x is larger than you think, is paid bot traffic for propaganda or disruption or whatever purpose. On some sites x is a surprisingly large percentage.
On one hand, "stock market value" depends on monthly users being "number always goes up" on the other hand ad revenue depends on having a low enough percentage of ad viewers being bots.
Bots don't have faces or it costs more to fake humanity to create bot traffic.
I think that natural balance of opposing market forces means the system can never go to an extreme. Some of the internet will always be private because bots need privacy, some of the internet will be somewhat securely verified to be specific individual humans. Currently the system is balanced and people seem mostly happy-ish with it. The main risk of "infinite low cost AI" is massive disruption to that balance.
Remember when comment sections were removed from dead legacy media? Expect more of that type of stuff. At some point, Youtube will HAVE TO remove sub counts and comments because it would be very risky for the advertisers to know that X % of ads are being served to bots paid to increase counts to increase individual revenue. So I would not expect YT to aggressively request human verification of users if that would destroy their ad revenue. Yet they can't completely give up and make YT a pay to win online game (although they are getting closer to that...).
There is no "the internet" there's a thousand sites with a thousand business models mostly trying to get humans to look at free content wrapped with ads while not wasting money on AI bot parasites. Those business models don't align now and probably never will align much better than they do now.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by corey on Saturday February 21, @10:01PM (3 children)
I’ve heard this trope a few times, you must be American with your free speech stuff. Everywhere else, we clearly see there’s a huge problem with kids accessing inappropriate content online. This isn’t a cover for some wacky conspiracy like you assert, it’s literally to help the kids mental health. The method might not be perfect but governments cant tell parents how to parent - and a shitload of them are happy to stick their kid in front of a PC with YouTube open. Age verification is one way to solve a complex problem and might not be perfect. Parental education is another.
Whenever I open YouTube, the random videos show up, there’s always, always, at least one with some awful sexualised looking female and the video is framed as being “epic fails”. It’s clickbait, just trash mind numbing tripe. But then again this is without an account and kids are still allowed to use the platforms, they’re just banned from having an account.
Read up on the work Jonathan Haidt has done. See that there’s a hockey stick curve of teen mental health problems that kicked up once Tik Tok started. There’s a problem that needs fixed and age verification is one solution.
I got two young kids in Australia and I’m bloody glad the govt here has made social media banned for under 16s, gives me and fellow parents a good reason to not let the kids on it (I wouldn’t anyway once they get older). Yeah it’s easily bypassable with VPNs etc but it’s the message that counts. And if 1/3 of the kids don’t stay on social media then there’s less reason for the others to stay on. There’s been lots of kids interviewed here who are glad because they feel pressured to be on it but this gives them a reason to socialise outside of these platforms.
(Score: 3, Informative) by aafcac on Saturday February 21, @10:48PM
It's a cover, and they've been doing that sort of thing since well before there was any particular reason to think there was a mental health issue for kids. You have to also look at the areas in which the policies are being pushed the hardest and amazingly, they're the areas that have tried a bunch of other things to ban adult materials.
Banning kids from social media is probably good, the issue is that there would need to be a method of verifying it that didn't have even worse consequences. What's supposed to happen here is that parents are supposed to be parenting. I completely get that there are a lot practical issues with that, but getting the government a list of people accessing various types of adult content has a very real risk of being abused in the ways that politicians have already been promising.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22, @02:09AM
It's not age verification. it's surveilance and identity verification. Papieren, bitte.
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Sunday February 22, @02:36PM
The problem with "wacky conspiracies" is, they keep coming true. Are you suggesting the researchers, Peter Thiel, Persona Identity, OpenAI, Roblox, Heritage Bank, and Lime are all in on the conspiracy? Are you suggesting the Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) products the researchers found the source code for on a government server aren't real?
As far as the problem "age verification" claims to solve, there is no denying social media can be harmful, and not just to children. However, in a free county, it is the responsibility of parents to raise their children. Centralized one-size-fits-all solutions implemented by an authoritarian government fail to take into account children mature and, if parents are doing it right, become responsible at different ages. There is not some magical switch that flips on a kid's 16th birthday. And no, it's not the message, but the results that count.