Comment by jimbob45
6 hours ago
Is there a throwaway identity that people are using? A dead person unchecked in Mississippi somewhere? Like every teen in America using the same identity like everyone's extended family does with their uncle's Netflix account?
I don't want to google it because I don't want to be put on a list but I also feel somewhat confident that this is being done. Apparently, HN feels safe to ask questions like that for me.
That’s an interesting question.
Actually, a follow up. PII leaks are so common, I guess there must be millions of identities out there up for grabs. This makes me wonder: we’ve got various jurisdictions where sites are legally required to verify the age of users. And everybody (including the people running these sites) knows that tons of identities are out there on the internet waiting to be used.
How does a site do due diligence in this context? I guess just asking for a scan of somebody’s easily fabricated ID shouldn’t be sufficient legal cover…
These ID laws typically require a solution to be "commercially practical" or similar. The standard is not "impenetrable and impossible to circumvent"
That's why some of them don't even ask for ID but just guess the age based on appearance. That's good enough per the law, usually.
> I don't want to google it because I don't want to be put on a list
Of all the controversial things out there we've become afraid to even google in order to learn more about the world around us, this one strikes me as not all that controversial.
But you're not wrong, just making a comment about how sad the world has become.
It would probably flag that multiple people are using the same photo or same persons name/ id, but I expect you could get away with doing using someone known to you. iirc the reason people are using game screenshots is because it's not going to match any image that the recogniser has seen before. Use tor for the things you don't want to google and have associated with you.
Netflix has been checking accounts against public IP addresses and local networks for ages, at least in The Netherlands. if I use my Dad's account, I get flagged as being "not on the same home network" immediately. I think that using a VPN and Netflix detecting that would only make matters worse, like termination of service.
I gave up on netflix years ago for unrelated reasons but never had any sort of issue both VPNing between various countries and traveling between them. My wife would pretty regularly want to watch netflix as if she was in Japan or the UK and so we'd turn a VPN on for the TV network and their own TV app never complained at all that it was suddenly on a different continent.
Last time I tried I could find a photo ID just with a basic image search. It is an unavoidable consequence of teaching people that scanning an ID is not utterly insane.
Ironically there was no way to report the image anonymously to the service hosting it.
>I don't want to google it because I don't want to be put on a list
You might think about using something like the Tor Browser for anonymous web surfing:
https://www.torproject.org/download/
...If you are worried about getting on a list by downloading the Tor browser, then take a trip to the next-town-over public library and download it from there. I guess your ISP could still guess that you were using Tor, and you might end up on a list of people using Tor. Also: If everyone is on the list, then no one is on the list.