Comment by JohnMakin
17 hours ago
Hard no. It's so easy to get "flagged" by opaque systems for "Age verification" processes or account lockouts that require giving far too much PII to a company like this for my liking.
> Users who are incorrectly placed in the under-18 experience will always have a fast, simple way to confirm their age and restore their full access with a selfie through Persona, a secure identity-verification service.
Yea, my linkedin account which was 15 years old and was a paid pro user for several years got flagged for verification (no reason ever given, I rarely used it for anything other than interacting with recruiters) with this same company as their backend provider. They wouldn't accept a (super invasive feeling) full facial scan + a REAL ID, they also wanted a passport. So I opted out of the platform. There was no one to contact - it wasn't "fast" or "easy" at all. This kind of behavior feels like a data grab for more nefarious actors and data brokers further downstream of these kinds of services.
The unfortunate reality is this isn't just corporations acting against user's interests, governments around the world are pushing for these surveillance systems as well. It's all about centralizing power and control.
Don't forget the journalists.
Facebook made journalists a lot less relevant, so anything that hurts Meta (and hence anything that hurts tech in general) is a good story that helps journalists get revenge and revenue.
"Think of the children", as much as it is hated on HN, is a great way to get the population riled up. If there's something that happens which involves a tech company and a child, even if this is an anecdote that should have no bearing on policy, the media goes into a frenzy. As we all know, the media (and their consumers) love anecdotes and hate statistics, and because of how many users most tech products have, there are plenty of anecdotes to go around, no matter how good the company's intentions.
Politicians still read the NY Times, who had reporters admit on record that they were explicitly asked to put tech in an unfavorable light[1], so if the NYT says something is a problem, legislators will try to legislate that problem away, no matter how harebrained, ineffective and ultimately harmful the solution is.
[1] https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192?lang=en
It cracks me up that Persona is the vendor OpenAI will use to do manual verifications (as someone who works on integrations with Persona).
I'm glad ChatGPT will get a taste of VC startup tech quality ;)
Yep. Whenever platforms opt for more data I opt out. And like clockwork they let loose all that PII to hackers within months.
Yeah, this is all far far too invasive. The goal is obviously to gather as much data on you as possible under whatever pretense users are most likely to accept. "Think of the children", as always. This will then be used to sell advertising to you, or outright sell it to data brokers.
New boss, same as the old boss.