Comment by shevy-java
13 days ago
"k-id, the age verification provider discord uses doesn't store or send your face to the server. instead, it sends a bunch of metadata about your face and general process details."
I think the primary issue is not the "send your face" (face info) to a server. The problem is that private entities are greedy for user data, in this case tying facial recognition to activities related to interacting with other people, most of them probably real people. So this creates a huge database - it is no surprise that greedy state actors and private companies want that data. You can use it for many things, including targeted ads.
For me the "must verify" is clearly a lie. They can make it "sound logical" but that does not convince me in the slightest. Back in the age of IRC (I started with mIRC in the 1990s, when I was using windows still), the thought of requiring others to show their faces never occurred to me at all. There were eventually video-related formats but to me it felt largely unnecessary for the most part. Discord is (again to me) nothing but a fancier IRC variant that is controlled by a private (and evidently greedy) actor.
So while it is good to have the information how to bypass anything there, my biggest gripe is that people should not think about it in this way. Meaning, bypassing is not what I would do in this case; I would simply abandon the private platform altogether. People made Discord big; people should make Discord small again if they sniff after them.
> the thought of requiring others to show their faces never occurred to me at all
I know you meant as a service provider, but as a avid IRC (and an online game that conventionally alt-tabbed into a irc-like chat window) chatter as a young preteen in the 90s and 00s, I made a lot of online friends that I would not discover what they looked like IRL for decades, some never. People I was gaming with in the 90s, for the first time, I would see what they looked like over FB in a group made for the now-almost-dead game in the 10s. It was like "swordfish - man, where are you now? I don't even know your real name to find ya. shardz - you look exactly like I would picture ya!."
Just some musings.
In the early 2000s, the biggest social media (though we didn't call it that back then) in Finland was IRC-Galleria (IRC-Gallery). It was originally made for IRC users to upload pictures of themselves and see what fellow IRCers looked like. You'd create a profile, add pictures and tag which channels/servers you were on.
Since there were no other websites like that back then, it was eventually overrun by non-IRC-users and transformed into what we'd now call a more generic social media platform. Something like the eternal September I guess. People started calling the gallery "IRC" as shorthand, which royally pissed off the original userbase. Fun times.
Then Facebook appeared and everyone moved there.
It's still up, but it's more of a historical relic these days. Not sure who, if anyone, still uses it: https://irc-galleria.net/
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC-Galleria
It's weird how different and hyper-local the social media landscape was back then. It's not just that every country had their own thing, it's also that they were all very different concepts and ideas.
Poland's social media of choice was "Nasza Klasa" (lit. "Our Class"), the American alternative was called "Classmates" as far as I know. It was intended as a service that let you re-unite with your old classmates, designed with the way the Polish school system worked in mind. It was used for far more than that though, and was quite popular among kids who were still at school.
We're still in that era with messaging apps somehow. WHile the local alternatives have mostly died out, the world is now a patchwork of WhatsApp, Messenger and Telegram, with islands of iMessage, Line, KakaoTalk and WeChat thrown into the mix. Most countries have basically standardized on one of these, but they can't agree on which one.
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>as a young preteen in the 90s and 00s, I made a lot of online friends
As another 90s preteen, sure, but the internet today has a lot more pedos and groomers online than in the 90s, and preteens today easily share footage of themselves to those adult weirdos, which didn't happen in the 90s because mostly limitations of technology.
BUt if you look at tiktok live it's full of preteen girls dancing, and creepy old men donating them money to the point where tiktok live is basically a preteen strip club. We can't ignore these obvious problems just because we grew up with internet in the 90s and turned out alright.
We have to separate kids from adults on the internet somehow even though i distrust age-verifications systems as they basically remove your anonymity but a solution is inevitable even though it will be faulty and unpopular and people will try to bypass it.
The solution is parents using the parental control feature on their children’s devices.
If laws need to be made about something it should be to punish those parents who neglect to safeguard their children using the tools already available to them.
If the parental controls currently provided aren’t sufficient then they should be modified to be so - in addition to filtering, they should probably send a header to websites and a flag to apps giving an age/rating.
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Chat rooms in early 2000s were full pedos.
And they didn't even try to hide very much.
Look at the story from darknet diaries, where the interviewee talks about setting up an AOL account with girlie name and instantly getting flooded with messages, 9/10 of them being from pedos.
https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/56/
Don't have any examples myself because I was a spectrum kid at that time, quite oblivious to the idea.
> but the internet today has a lot more pedos and groomers online than in the 90s
Without some data analysis I honestly don't know. Even before Internet (ex: FidoNet) there was plenty of very bad stuff out there, I don't see any clear reason why the pedos and groomers would have avoided it.
> We have to separate kids from adults on the internet somehow
I think what is much worse than in other mediums is the actual lack of a community that observes. In real life, for many cases, you would have multiple people noticing interactions between kids and adults (sports, schools, parks, shops, etc.), so actions might be taken when/before things get strange. On some of the social networks on the internet it is too much one-to-one communication which avoids any oversight.
So, for me, the idea of "more separation" seems to generate on the long term even more problems, because of lack of (healthy) interactions and a community.
> i distrust age-verifications systems as they basically remove your anonymity
I think it's technically possible to build a privacy-preserving age verification. I also think it should be done by the government, because the government already has this information.
> As another 90s preteen, sure, but the internet today has a lot more pedos and groomers online than in the 90s
There were not fewer pedos and groomers online in the 90s, you were just lucky to have avoided it.
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The frustration aimed at Discord et al is largely misplaced. I'm sure these companies don't mind gathering extra data about their users, but the primary impetus for age verification is government legislation. Moving to alternative platforms is not a long term solution because it's attacking the problem from the wrong direction.
Not just government legislation, but also lawsuits. I'm confident that Discord is a hotbed of all kinds of abuse and inappropriate / adult content, a lot targeting younger generations, and most of their resources are spent on that. Age verification doesn't solve that problem per se, but it makes things a bit easier.
The challenge with "protect the children" is not only evildoers targeting them, but targets actively seeking things out. They'll be the first ones looking for ways to circumvent age verification.
It seems to me that also if you succeed in making child-only spaces, those spaces become a magnet for adult abusers. They become an all the more desirable prize for them. Whereas spaces like this - hacker news, that is - don't need any age verification because although it's a safe bet some users are underage here too, the abusers would have to search a long time for them and the seemingly most common manipulation techniques (like pretending to be a child yourself) probably wouldn't work.
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I agree that government legislation is part of the equation, but I don't agree that moving to other platforms is not a solution. If Discord were to witness a significant exodus of paying users because of this new verification process, they would probably start fighting the fight themselves.
That said, I don't expect this to happen, switching is very hard for many reasons.
This is it. Governments dont care when the peasants gripe. But hit the corps in the wallet and youll see some actual pressure exerted.
I meant that it's not a solution for users looking to avoid similar intrusions. When alternative platforms get big enough they'll be faced with the same legislative burdens. Of course there are decentralized options, but one of the primary attractions of these centralized services is that everyone's on there.
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You act like public opinion has no bearing on politics.
Historical precedent: prohibition.
Alternate future: the big websites start losing billions because people just use the internet less or not at all because it's a hassle with no return, and tax revenue drops. Then the politicians start to worry.
Even in the absence of democracy, public opinion affects politics.
The problem is that public opinion is now very much in favor in general. https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-...
Yes the same outraged users were totally fine with giving Discord all their personal conversations.
Speaks to the network effect I guess. People did not decide inorganically to make Discord big, and simillarly, its pretty hard to convince people to make an inorganic decision to make it small. Overtime it might happen if there is a valid alternative but expecting people to leave discord because of this thing is naive.
I can't speak about this being a current law, but there were laws in multiple US states at various times that prevented you from storing facial data on the server. In turn features like snapchat's face filters were doing all the relevant computation locally on the device (which back then was certainly a complicated achievement).
US tech companies are constantly under FTC audit relating to how they use user data. This is certainly not something that needs to be seriously worried about, certainly less so than say the way in which cameras placed all over cities are used to track all sorts of people or storing GPS locations attached to a specific devices UUID.
The point is that 1) someone can claim there is a verification so we protect kids 2) but more importantly, there is a lot of money to be made selling verification solutions and usually these SaaS companies are owned by regulators and their buddies who make the rules about verifications.
Compliance industry has grown from zero to $90B after we cracked the nut everything needs compliance.
Here is a good book about the topic https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati...
Yeah, isn't facial recognition metadata about relationships between facial features? Nothing about that statement makes me more at ease.
Yep, it sounds like it was written to be falsely reassuring and it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Facial recognition works on data, not just images, such as the ratios between features, jawline, cheek structure, etc... Most people won't spot this.
Correct. AIM, YIM, MSN, Skype... to name a few all were giants that came before Discord. There will be alternatives over time that will overtake Discord.