Discord's face scanning age checks 'start of a bigger shift'

Filtering has never been easy or practical for the general public. But the situation has become much worse.

In 1998 it was easy for a family to have no computer at all, or to put their single computer in the living room where it could be supervised. Internet use was limited because it tied up the phone line. These factors made it easy for parents to supervise their children.

Today, computers are everywhere, fit in your pocket, and its very easy to get online. Even if you don't buy any computer for your children (which is hard, because your children will tell you that they're getting bullied and socially ostracized, which probably won't even be a lie!) they will probably be given a computer by their school and any filters on that computer will inevitability be circumvented. And even if that doesn't happen, they can trade or buy one of their peers old phones and use that on free WiFi to access the internet without you knowing it. Are you going to thoroughly search their belongings every week? If you do, they'll know and find ways to hide it anyway.

And yes, I know kids used to procure and hide porno mags. What they have access to on the internet is a lot more extreme than a tattered playboy.

> trying to get everyone to filter

We never needed everyone to filter, just parents busy lobbying the government to impose crap onto every possible service and website across the entire world.

Instead, they should purchase devices for their kids that have a child-lock and client-side filters. All sites have to do is add an HTTP header loosely characterizing it's content.

1. Most of the dollar costs of making it all happen will be paid by the people who actually need/use the feature.

2. No toxic Orwellian panopticon.

3. Key enforcement falls into a realm non-technical parents can actually observe and act upon: What device is little Timmy holding?

4. Every site in the world will not need a monthly update to handle Elbonia's rite of manhood on the 17th lunar year to make it permitted to see bare ankles. Instead, parents of that region/religion can download their own damn plugin.

> The only question is whether age verification is still too onerous.

You've skipped right past the "does it work" question. It doesn't. Porn is available on file sharing networks in far greater quantity than it is on reputable websites.

The only realistic methods I'm aware of are whitelist filtering, sufficient supervision, or sufficient interaction and education.

My complaint was exactly that with modern devices, the owner does not have absolute control over communication on the device, and that's a problem. I think anyone in the open source community or people that believe in democracy would agree that e.g. the owner of a phone or computer should absolutely have the ability to intercept, record, manipulate, and filter all communication that device is doing.

Right. My friends in middle school would trade floppies with porn on them, which older students and siblings would be happy to provide.

Do you believe the ease with which a service can be used influences the amount of people who use that service?

Like with marginal users?

I suppose you do not have children. I am open-minded, mid 40's. The level of violence in porn you can get access to with just one click, has no comparison with what I could get access to as a kid (basically nothing).

With the net, you get access in one click to the worse and the best. It is a lot of work as a parent to educate the kids about that.

As kids, teenager and even as 20 something, if we wanted to do some experience, we had to physically access the media or be physically present. This was not on-demand over a screen.

So, I filter the access at home while also trying my best to educate. This is not easy and I can understand that non tech savvy people request more laws, even so I am personally against.

The article is pretty well balanced, we have no silver bullet here.

My girl discovered self-pleasure at the age of 5, ironically during an exam from her doctor (she doesn't think it was intentional). I had an ex discover masturbation around the same age. I personally discovered it around 11 or 12. All of the above discovered porn accidentally as kids. I don't know about them but after that I intentionally sought it out.

Guess what! Both of us are perfectly fine!! (Well the ex is a bit psychotic but that's unrelated...)

This obsession with protecting kids from the realities of life is just fucking stupid. We as a species have the stupidest, most ridiculous views about something that is required to keep us alive!

The problem is that most porn depicts sex as somewhat violent and sets unreasonable expectations of what sex is like.

Not every woman is capable of deep-throating or going straight from vaginal to anal without adding some extra lube. Most women don't want their man to put his hands around her throat during sex. Almost none of them are okay with going from ass to mouth.

Porn also sets an unrealistic standard for penis size. When the average is 5.2 inches with a standard deviation of about an inch, it becomes clear that the 7+ inch penises used in porn are like the top 5%.

I don't think parents are having these conversations with their kids about this.

it is recommended not to employ sarcasm when counterpoints are easily available

> Jesus, how does your society still function when underage people can see videos of people having sex?!

It kind of isn't anymore. But not just because of porn, obviously.

Early porn exposure goes hand in hand with the problems we see typified in the recent Netflix movie Adolescence. Seen women constantly railed and treated like meat when that young probably does do something.

"Videos of people having sex" is deliberately misleading, modern porn is not dry educational science videos. It's clear you'd rather be snide than correct.

> take great pains to keep minors out of my adult spaces, and don't have to resort to anything as invasive as biometric surveillance or card charges.

What sort of spaces are these (online or in person), and how do you enforce this? I have an online space where such non invasive measures could be useful.

> This notion that the entire world should be safe for children by default, and that anything and everything adult should be vilified and locked up, is toxic as all get-out and builds shame into the human animal over something required for the perpetuation of the species.

The world should be safe for kids because kids are the future of our society. When the world isn't safe, families won't have kids and society will start to decline. Maybe that means giving up some of the privileges you have. That's the cost of our future.

>everyone has a face

Does everyone who is 18+ have a face that passes for 18+ (and the inverse as well)?

Overall it seems like a bad idea, but one demanded by what sounds like a good idea with not reasonable way to fully implement it, leading to a tangled network of bad ideas patching other bad ideas patching other bad ideas all the way down.

I logged into my Starling Bank account on a new phone, and I had to film my face reading a 6 digit number.

They almost certainly have a photo of your passport or other identification.

Don't know about the US, but over here the last couple of years it has been a big wave of "enable biometrics sign-in! Totes safe, your face is the best ID, just click this checkbox, please, we would really like you to use it, pretty please" in the bank apps. No idea why they pushed it so hard, and it seems to have largely subsided now.

In EU: eIDAS and ETSI.

In the US: BIPA started in Illinois and is expanding to other states.

BIPA sets a brutal bar in terms of regulation.

I had a credit card at 15. I had to travel for some school related stuff and it was easier to carry a card than excessive amounts of cash.

> Unless each and every citizens has approved the elected "representative" and every decision they made

But they have, by electing the representatives that ought to represent them, and thereby yield the power to make decisions on behalf of their constituents. If they do no not act accordingly, they will not be elected again in subsequent terms; if they act against the law, they will be fairly tried; and if the laws don't sufficiently capture the reality anymore, they will be adapted. That is how a representative democracy should work. If it doesn't, you have an implementation problem, not a systemic one (admittedly, this is almost a true Scotsman, but still.)

> The state has to be considered a separate entity, one which operate beyond the common man's thinking.

This isn't mutually exclusive. Of course the state has to make higher-level considerations and people in power will invariably be corrupted to some degree, but concluding that the state is your enemy and cannot be trusted is the wrong one, in my opinion. With that attitude, you're just waiting for it to become truly evil so you can say "See? I told you all along." Better to try and shape the state you have into something better while you still can.

It isn’t realistic, it’s pessimistic. If the government, the system, is your opponent, there is no other outcome than subversion, everything is futile anyway. That leaves no room for democratic participation, for any kind of peaceful change, if you’re being earnest with it. And that seems very cynical and ideologically driven to me. There’s a lot of room for improvement that doesn’t involve tearing everything down because it’s beyond the pale anyway; it isn’t.

At least the ways that a corner shop verifies age don't have the same downsides as typical online age verifiers. They just look at an ID document; verify that it's on the official list of acceptable ID documents, seems to be genuine and valid and unexpired, appears to relate to the person buying the product, and shows an old enough age; and hand the document back.

The corner shop has far fewer false negatives, far lower data privacy risk, and clear rules that if applied precisely won't add any prejudice about things like skin color or country of origin to whatever prejudice already exists in the person doing the verification.

Cigarettes are deadly

Broadcasting porn isn't an age ID issue, it's public airwaves and they're regulated.

These aren't primarily "think of the children" arguments, the former is a major public health issue that's taken decades to begin to address, and the latter is about ownership.

I don't think that chat rooms are in the same category as either public airwaves or drugs. Besides what's the realistic outcome here? Under 18's aren't stupid, what would you have done as a kid if Discord was suddenly blocked off? Shrug and not talk to your friends again?

Or would you figure out how to bypass the checks, use a different service, or just use IRC? Telegram chats? Something even less moderated and far more open to abuse, because that's what can slip under the radar.

So no I don't think this is about protecting kids, I think it's about normalizing the loss of anonymity online.

> Putting the responsibility solely on parents shows ignorance of the complexities of how children are growing up these days.

Don't have kids if you're unwilling to parent them. "It's hard! :(" is not an argument.

"We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"

that sounds quite puritan. my god says I can't, is one thing. my god says you can't either, is very different.

now replace god with parent.

I had a friend who had a serious beard by the age of 15; he would order whisky and cola at the bar, and nobody ever asked him for any kind of ID xD

I myself have a mighty beard but took a couple more years to develop...

Was your school located at 21 Jump Street?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_Jump_Street

Was it Steve Buscemi toting a skateboard?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-do-you-do-fellow-kids

It's mostly about the service's audience. Discord is a huge trans/queer/etc. hub. If Discord were X or Instagram etc. it wouldn't matter. Users of Discord are, as a group, more likely to be antagonistic to anything that could be transphobic or racist than the general populace. (Whereas they don't care about disability rights, which is why people with medically delayed puberty aren't a concern.)

A tactical observation more than anything else.

> In the US you can make a strong case that a big database of faces and IDs could be really dangerous though I think

The government already has this from RealID.

By the time I got there, dang updated the link to the same publication's article on Snapchat, since the TikTok one had been discussed already.

>Different types of pornography have different dangers and all of it has been broadly available since before the internet.

A child couldn't get hardcore porn as easily as they can now, one google search away. Or just on their reddit/X feed.

>This type of violence can be found in movies and video games

Yeah but those aren't real. Videos of real death and violence being available to kids is worse than video games where fake characters die.

>I'd rather pornography be banned.

Adults are free to fuck themselves up, kids are not. We don't say "well I'd rather alcohol be banned" when it comes to kids not being allowed alcohol.

>Why?

Because I'd rather live in a society with less privacy than a degenerate society full of mentally ill shutins that don't have sex.

>to protect their margins.

Fuck margins, I care about the overall wellbeing of society.

By any means?

https://certisfy.com/partnership/

Any number of entities can be certificate issuers, as long as they can be deemed sufficiently trustworthy. Schools, places of worship, police, notary, employers...they can all play the role of trust anchor.

This video addresses that:

https://youtu.be/92gu4mxHmTY

All certificates are cryptographically linked to an identity-anchor certificate, meaning buying a certificate would require the seller reveal the private key tied to the identity-anchor certificate, a tall order I would argue.

In the case of stolen identity certificates, they can be revoked thus making their illegitimate utility limited.

Wouldn't this require the API provider to know that tbe citizen is connecting to the app? Grindr users might be squeamish about letting the current US admin know about that.

This is not only theoretical, the German ID card ("elektronischer Personalausweis") can do exactly this.

Yes.

I'm in NL and had my wallet fall out of my pocket once at one of the bigger train stations. I realized within ~5 minutes, and basically as soon as I realized got a call from an anonymous number. It was the police, who had found my wallet with my ID in it and were calling me to inform me about it. Luckily I was still at the station and could just meet them and got my wallet back.

I couldn't help but feel extremely creeped out, and my girlfriend still to this day doesn't understand why I felt uneasy about it. "But you got your wallet back!", she says. "Of course the police know your number!". Having 0 privacy has been completely normalized, and I'm afraid we're far too late to do anything about it.

yup, and this gives the ability to look up per-citizen location data.

sidebar: i've been trying to raise awareness about "joint communications and sensing" wherever i can lately; many companies involved in 6G standardization (esp. nokia) want the 6G network to use mmWave radio to create realtime 3d environment mappings, aka a "digital twin" of the physical world, aka a surveillance state's wet dream.

https://www.nokia.com/blog/building-a-network-with-a-sixth-s...

Not only rent, but in Spain there is a central database where your details are sucked in real time when you rent a room or a car, and no oversight how this data is used.

You can buy (and top up) a SIM card without an ID in the EU.

Walk into a coffee shop. Look at the wifi password, usually a sign near the register. Log onto the wifi network using the wifi password. Browse in peace.

Is this sort of flow normal elsewhere? It's certainly normal where I live.

I'm in the US. I do have government ID, but I don't recall showing it to my network providers. Certainly, some telcos want a social security number to run credit; but that's often avoidable. I'm pretty sure could also wander down to an electronics store (maybe a grocery/drug store too) and pick up a prepaid cell phone with internet access, pay for it with cash, and get that going without government id in the US. It's a bit of a hike to get to the electronics store from where I live, but I can get part of the way there with the bus that takes cash too.

???

I'd walk to a local library and use their wifi. Or walk to a local McDonalds and use their wifi. Or walk to a friend's/family's house and use their wifi. Or...

Prepaid SIM from one of the EU countries that still has them, such as Denmark. Purchase in cash from a kiosk.

Prepaid 5G phone bought with cash and activated by dialing 611.

The West isn't China and Korea. They can't opt out of authoritarian-state surveillance and great firewall, whereas we have options more amenable to privacy, even if you want to quibble that they aren't perfect.

Also the fact that UK and Australia are kind of backwards on online privacy.

That aside, this is targeted. The fediverse and vbulletin forums of old, even reddit, are all social media but will never require facial recognition. If they do, then far worse things are happening to freedom.

If they could make more money with verification than without then we would already have it.

>from improved content filtering and educational initiatives to parental controls

Parents can do all of that now. They are not doing so. Time to actually cut the kids off from porn. Fuck their privacy rights. Not being a porn addicted gooner at 14 is infinitely more important. Simple as.

If I remember correctly there are a dozen variants, and most of them lack a basic feature. I think it's either a signature, latin letters or biometric features.

US citizens also had issues due to FATCA requirements although it seems to have improved since they were introduced.

Yes, sort of. You can always force it, but it takes time, resources and knowledge that recent immigrants lack. Usually they get funneled towards more immigrant-friendly banks.