Comment by jjice
4 months ago
Aside from the privacy nightmare, what about someone who is 18 and just doesn't have the traditional adult facial features? Same thing for someone who's 15 and hit puberty early? I can imagine that on the edges, it becomes really hard to discern.
If they get it wrong, are you locked out? Do you have to send an image of your ID? So many questions. Not a huge fan of these recent UK changes (looking at the Apple E2E situation as well). I understand what they're going for, but I'm not sure this is the best course of action. What do I know though :shrug:.
Wise (nee Transferwise) requires a passport style photo taken by a webapp for KYC when transferring money. I was recently unable to complete that process over a dozen tries, because the image processing didn't like something about my face. (Photos met all criteria.)
On contacting their support, I learned that they refused to use any other process. Also it became apparent that they had outsourced it to some other company and had no insight into the process and so no way to help. Apparently closing one's account will cause an escalation to a team who determines where to send the money, which would presumably put some human flexability back into the process.
(In the end I was able to get their web app to work by trying several other devices, one had a camera that for whatever reason satisfied their checks that my face was within the required oval etc.)
> On contacting their support, I learned that they refused to use any other process.
I suspect this won't help you, but I think it's worth noting that the GDPR gives people the right to contest any automated decision-making that was made on a solely algorithmic basis. So this wouldn't be legal in the EU (or the UK).
Hah, indeed, a similar experience here. The desktop option is worse, trying to get a webcam to focus on an ID card took forever. The next step wanted a 3rd party company to do a live webcam session, no thanks! Closed the account. Or at least tried, after a several step nag process, they still keep the email blocked to that account, in case you change your mind...
There seems no way to push back against these technologies. Next it will be an AI interview for 'why do you transfer the money?'
Also, key point in the framing, when was it decided that Discord supposed to be the one enforcing this? A pop-up saying "you really should be 18+" is one thing, but this sounds like a genuine effort to lock out young people. Neither Discord nor a government ratings agency should be taking final responsibility for how children get bought up, that seems like something parents should be responsible for.
This is over-reach. Both in the UK and Australia.
When a corner shop sells cigarettes to minors, who's breaking the law?
When a TV channel broadcast porn, who gets fined?
These are accepted laws that protect kids from "harm", which are relatively uncontroversial.
Now, the privacy angle is very much the right question. But as Discord are the one that are going to get fined, they totally need to make sure kids aren't being exposed to shit they shouldn't be seeing until they are old enough. In the same way the corner shop needs to make sure they don't sell booze to 16 year olds.
Now, what is the mechanism that Discord should/could use? that's the bigger question.
Can government provide fool proof, secure, private and scalable proof of age services? How can private industry do it? (Hint: they wont because its a really good source of profile information for advertising.)
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.
10 replies →
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.
2 replies →
> This is over-reach. Both in the UK and Australia
2/3 of Australians support minimum age restrictions for social media [1] and it was in-particular popular amongst parents. Putting the responsibility solely on parents shows ignorance of the complexities of how children are growing up these days.
Many parents have tried to ban social media only for those children to experience ostracisation amongst their peer group leading to poorer educational and social developmental outcomes at a critical time in their live.
That's why you need governments and platform owners to be heavily involved.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/...
> 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.
4 replies →
It almost certainly is overreach, but locking young people out of porn is hardly a new concern. We have variants of this argument continuously for decades. I'm not sure there is a definitive answer.
There's a SCOTUS case in FSC v. Paxton that could very well decide if age verification is enforced in the US as well so sadly this is just the beginning.
It's a good thing to think about. I knew a guy in high school who had male pattern baldness that started at 13 or 14. Full blown by the time he was 16. Dude looked like one of the teachers.
Same in my drivers ed at 16, guy had a mans face, large stocky build, and thick full beard. I once was talking to a tall pretty woman who turned out to be a 12 year old girl. And I have a friend who for most of his 20's could pass for 13-14 and had a hell of a time getting into bars.
This facial thing feel like a loaded attempt to both check a box and get more of that sweet, sweet data to mine. Massive privacy invasion and exploitation of children dressed as security theater.
i went to school with a guy who had serious facial hair at like 14. dude was rocking 5 oclock shadows by the end of the school day
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 not even edge cases - I was a pretty young looking woman and was mistaken for a minor until I was about 24-25. My mother had her first child (me) at 27 and tells me about how she and my father would get dirty looks because they assumed he was some dirty old man that had impregnated a teenager. (He was 3 years older than her).
I think, ironically, the best way to fight this would be to lean on identity politics: There are probably certain races that ping as older or younger. In addition, trans people who were on puberty blockers are in a situation where they might be 'of age' but not necessarily look like an automated system expects them to, and there might be discrepancies between their face as scanned and the face/information that's show on their ID. Discord has a large trans userbase. Nobody cares about privacy, but people make at least some show of caring about transphobia and racism.
> So many questions.
Do they keep a database of facial scans even though they say they don't? If not, what's to stop one older looking friend (or an older sibling/cousin/parent/etc.) from being the 'face' of everyone in a group of minors? Do they have a reliable way to ensure that a face being scanned isn't AI generated (or filtered) itself? What prevents someone from sending in their parent's/sibling's/a stolen ID?
Seems like security theater more than anything else.
I had a colleague, that when going out with her boyfriend, police was called on him as someone believed he is a pedophile.
She was 26. She just was that young looking.
:/
I don't think they make much of a show of caring about trans rights in the UK right about now, unfortunately. In the US you can make a strong case that a big database of faces and IDs could be really dangerous though I think
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.
1 reply →
I witnessed the Better Off Ted water fountain skit play out in real life once, it was incredible awkward. I was helping my buddy and his black friend and his wife set up accounts on online casinos in Michigan for the promos/refer-a-friend rewards. Some of the sites require the live video facial verification and we were doing it in a darkly lit space at night. It worked instantly and without issue for my friend and me but oh man, many many attempts later and many additional lights needed to get it to work for his friends.
The right thing to do here is for Discord to ignore the UK laws and see what happens, IMO.
Is there a market for leaked facial scans?
With the UK currently battling Apple, Discord has no chance of not getting a lawsuit.
Ofcom is a serious contender in ruling their rules especially where Discord is multi-national that even "normies" know and use.
And if they got a slap of "we will let you off this time" they would still have to create some sort of verification service to please the next time.
You might as well piss off your consumers, loose them whatever and still hold the centre stage than fight the case for not. Nothing is stopping Ofcom from launching another lawsuit there after.
> Is there a market for leaked facial scans?
There's a market for everything. Fake driver licenses with fake pictures have been around for decades, that would be no different.
It says in the article - you can send them a scan or photo of your ID if the face check doesn't work (or if you don't want to do the face scan).
What if I don't want them to have any personally identifiable information about me in a database?
Discord also has a manual review process.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/30326565624343...
Devil's advocate: couldn't this be better for privacy than other age checks because it doesn't require actual identification?
Considering the ubiquity of facial recognition tech, I imagine it could very quickly be abused to identify people
it doesn't even has to be "un traditional face feature". Hpw are they going to differentiate 18yo from 17y11mo? The latter is not legally adult
> what about someone who is 18 and just doesn't have the traditional adult facial features?
This can be challenging even with humans. My ex got carded when buying alcohol well into her mid thirties, and staff at the schools she taught at mistook her for a student all the time.
I grew a beard when I was younger because I was tired of being mistaken for a highschooler its quite annoying to have people assume you are 15 when your 20. still regularly carded in my 30s
Didn't Australia ban porn with women who have A cups under the justification of pedos like them?
Edit: This isn't how it played out. See the comment below.
No it's just nonsense you invented because you were unwilling to do any research.
The actual situation was that the board refused classification where an adult was intentionally pretending to be an underage child not that they looked like one.
I added an edit to correct myself however this was not something I invented. This story goes back to 09 - 2010. I will confess I didn't do any research to confirm though and that was my bad.
2 replies →