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Man... How did yall white Westerners turn out to be the weakest people in the world?
You were supposed to be the bastions of freedom and justice, and the rest of the world begrudgingly admired you for that and were slowly improving to become like you, but ever since 9/11/2001 the rich old people that rule you have been feeding you boogeymen to make you their complacent b*tches and you lay down and crawl along and accept everything without even a whimper.
Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai etc where the old money cabals run everything, and it's not some third world backhole that was suffering already anyway, but you yourself that are the worst victims of all their laws and wars.
> Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai
The fact that many independent national newspapers (including this article from CNBC) are openly calling-out the surveillance state and entering the debate into the public conscience should tell everyone that USA (and the West) is very different from Russia or China or Dubai.
USA is not perfect, but at least is has active public discourse. We can openly (and legally) debate these things, and if we convince enough people, then we can change them.
> The fact that many independent national newspapers (including this article from CNBC) are openly calling-out the surveillance state and entering the debate into the public conscience should tell everyone that USA (and the West) is very different from Russia or China or Dubai.
So, the only benefit of the USA is that some media can still complain. And the regime just ignores and does what they want. Regardless dems or reps, they criticize the reduction of freedoms when they are in opposition, but as soon as they grab power, they keep reducing freedoms. It's like they are all just puppets of someone you can't even name without being called names.
> USA is not perfect, but at least is has active public discourse. We can openly (and legally) debate these things, and if we convince enough people, then we can change them.
Yep, they convinced you you are free because you can argue while keeping more and more freedoms and rights from you.
Today, the only difference between Western and Eastern regimes is that one side chooses the "Brave New World" way and the other the "1984" way. But eventually, they'll all converge into Zamyatin's "We" kind of dystopia that inspired both of these.
Active public discourse seems to have not made even a slight dent in the growth of surveillance in the last 25 years.
Wild exaggeration.
Here's an example just recently:
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/17/nx-s1-5612825/flock-contracts...
It's a constant and ongoing public concern.
Public discourse is a speed bump not an immovable barrier. The proof is in the state of things advancing in the same direction for the past few decades at least. Speed bumps are still valuable but not if you want to block the road. So public discourse alone isn’t the silver bullet you make them out to be.
It's quite a defeatist perspective. You're saying that because we can't fix or prevent everything, then we should choose not to fix or prevent anything?
Many US states do not impose government surveillance or have age verification laws.
But the point I was mainly making was regarding the comment equating USA and the West to Russia or China. Go to one of those countries and we'll see how long you can openly complain about government surveillance before you end up in jail.
They all go in the same direction. Russia and China are closer to the end-goal, but the USA and the West now run faster, so there's a good chance they all reach the end goal at the same time.
> You're saying that because we can't fix or prevent everything, then we should choose not to fix or prevent anything?
No, it is just being realist.
Public discourse is like wind. It comes and goes. But incentive based motivators are like gravity. It is a constant force, and sooner or later, it will win.
To make change, incentives should change.
So you can imagine how much surveillance has expanded in countries without such discourse.
Somehow we have more public “discourse” than ever with less public “debate” than ever. People just yelling rude names at each other and repeating nonsense talking points, while the trajectory of what’s actually happening continues to worsen. I include Congress and the executive branch in this characterization.
I regret that I have but one vote to give to this comment.
It seems like at least half of what everyone consumes in all of 'social media' is 'politicized' but no one is interested in debating. Debating would have to mean we're talking to those gross people from the opposite 'team,' asking them to justify the policy they are advocating for, listening to them, and trying to convince them of our own positions.
When was the last time we witnessed any politicians or activists trying to change minds? Right-wingers scream dumb slogans like "They're sending the rapists over here!" and left-wingers scream back their own dumb lines like "Racist! America was built by immigrants!" And both sides dismiss the other side's arguments as the nonsensical ravings of the evil and/or stupid.
And half or more depending on the platform are foreign agents and/or bots to continue stirring shit up. It’s sadly too easy and the platforms themselves promote that engagement.
Imagine how far we are from allowing our own stances to change for the purpose of finding out the truth that would benefit us all
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> Man... How did yall white Westerners turn out to be the weakest people in the world?
Slowly, and then suddenly.
The cracks were obvious when digital records made record keeping more practical, and the first electronic payment systems appeared, but once everyone was doing everything online the damn just burst wide open.
See also "boiling frogs".
But then I'm replying to @mr_toad so you probably knew that already.
Convenient and Cheap. That's all most people care about.
Privacy was already lost when everyone adopted mobile phones and gave them everything with constant location tracking, and used the free email accounts.
It's interesting that age-verification is the straw that breaks the camels back, but I guess porn has that power.
Your sardonic comment says a lot but does not address the real freedom we have. Which is to NOT use those platforms that require age verification. The more people that don’t use them the more it will hurt the companies that loose a customer base; then maybe their lobbyists will force a change.
So you’ll just not use Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, or Android? In other words, you’ll just not use any computers? Seems nonsensical.
Did I miss a memo on Linux somehow requiring age verification now? How would that even work?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270784 "System76 on Age Verification Laws"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47239736 "Ubuntu Planning Mandatory Age Verification"
I thought I saw one about Redhat too, but can't find it.
There was some proposal from California or something to require OSs to enforce age verification, it was discussed in some other thread.
You missed US states competing on setting up age verification legislation that lets anyone sue any developer who produces systems that don't do age verification for life-destroying amounts of money.
Hé man I thought us Europeans were kings of dreadful regulations!
There was a California bill that would basically require it.
> Which is to NOT use those platforms that require age verification.
That is getting harder and harder. Platforms that are not susceptible to age verification (yet?) are on their way out - when have you written an email the last time for personal (i.e. non-work, order or customer support related) reasons? A physical letter [1]? The (root) cause is, centralized platforms like Whatsapp are much much more convenient and on top of that network effects apply - when 90% of your social connections use Whatsapp exclusively, it's hard to not use Whatsapp as well.
And then you got digitalization of government services and banking. More and more governments push for the removal of paper forms and require a web service. Banking regulations enforce 2FA, which almost always comes in the form of a phone app. The web services require a browser and an OS, which may require age verification sooner than later (see the recent spat about California's law), and the phone apps are only available for the walled gardens of unrooted, Play Store certified Apple and Android phones - that can and will be forced to verify ages as well.
Hard cash is out as well, many governments have set hard caps on cash transactions due to "anti money laundering" laws, in other countries you need to have a bank account to pay for mandatory things like taxes or public broadcast fees [2], and an increasing number of vendors refuses to accept cash as well due to the associated handling cost and risk of fraud (i.e. employee theft) and robbery.
That last point alone will make it impossible to survive in society without engaging with one or more of the walled gardens.
And mercy be upon you if the US Government decides to put you on one of their black lists. No more banking, even as an European, because everything touches VISA/MC/SWIFT, your cloud accounts (and with it your phone and app stores), all gone, you are now an unperson [3].
[1] Some countries are already shutting down postal services over that, e.g. Denmark: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/21/denmark-postno...
[2] https://www.verbraucherzentrale-niedersachsen.de/themen/rund...
Because, at least in Europe, people got hooked on nanny state.
I appreciate you saying this. It gets SO OLD having everything in society dominated by "think of the children" rationales that basically translate to "increasing authority and further-reduced freedom", with a spicy dash of omnipresent surveillance.
It was indescribably pathetic watching HN users of all people defend Client Side Scanning and Bitlocker flaws. The only people qualified to logically protest have already drank the Kool-aid.
US domestic surveillance predates 9/11. It just became more open once an easy excuse was available.
> You were supposed to be the bastions of freedom and justice
That was a lie we told ourselves. In reality we started with slavery which is about as far from freedom and justice as you can get, and then shifted to mass incarceration (often just slavery with extra steps) locking up more of our own people than Russia or China ever did. These days our prison population is trending down as we're getting better at imprisoning people in their own homes and communities with GPS trackers and parole/probation requirements but it's still laughable to call ourselves the "land of the free"
Complacency.
The west had a golden age from the fall of the Soviet Union, removing their main rival. It also reinforced its reinforced its belief in the inevitably of progress (the "end of history" nonsense, for example). They cannot now cope with threats or danger.
That said, comparing the west to Russia, China etc. is a gross exaggeration.
China has much lower crime, cheaper healthcare and is making progress in other aspects.
We’re rapidly regressing into prideful ignorance. People are being encouraged to drink raw milk and fear vaccines.
19 century illnesses are making a resurgence.
Citizens are being indefinitely detained for “looking” like immigrants.
> China has much lower crime, cheaper healthcare and is making progress in other aspects.
China is also a horrifying place to live unless you are content just to participate quietly in society and never put a political sign in your yard or even just talk about the wrong thing with your friend in a private WeChat.
https://reclaimthenet.org/china-man-chair-interrogation-soci...
China is also an ancient civilization. Americans view of themselves is highly inflated by the sheer luck of being two oceans away from everyone during both world wars. Save for Pearl Harbor there were no notable attacks on the American homeland. It's easy to be a superpower when the world destroys itself and you step into the breach. Millions of Soviet civilians died on their own homeland. In their own cities. Millions. Most Americans have no idea and can't really comprehend it. Even today a shocking number of Americans don't have a passport and really know nothing about the world beyond their shores. These people are overrepresented in an American Congress that is anti-democratic. People on the coasts, like in New York City are underrepresented in American government. The entire state of New York gets the same amount of senators as flyover states, many of which are welfare states (take more funds than they contribute). This is because in a modern economy what NYC produces is more valuable than what a state with barely any people in the middle of nowhere produces. Yet the middle of nowhere is represented more. It makes no sense.
The current administration is only convincing the world that America is a threat. We live in an age where two oceans offer far less protection than they did when America rose to superpower status. The fact Russian intelligence operatives can so easily infiltrate American political discourse is just one example. Watch any congressional hearing about cyber and you might be forgiven for thinking we have already been invaded. Beating up on third world pariah states impresses no one but the current administration. The United States bombs Iran but blinks at Russia. The administration started a trade war with China then backed off, not one meaningful concession was achieved.
Unless America reverses course fast the decline will only continue. The world will move on. No country is inevitable.
> China is also an ancient civilization.
So is Europe, and we are talking about the west in general, not just the US.
> Americans view of themselves is highly inflated by the sheer luck of being two oceans away from everyone during both world wars.
Again, most of Europe suffered during the world wars.
> The fact Russian intelligence operatives can so easily infiltrate American political discourse is just one example
They also infiltrate European politics, as do the Chinese.
Europe is not an ancient civilization. It is a continent and politically, an amalgamation.
Most of the "Western" civilizations old enough to attempt comparison with China were not European in the modern sense at all. The classic example is usually Rome, which treated most of Europe as barbarians to colonize and enslave. The engine and wealth of the empire was along the Mediterranean. Ancient Rome was thus really a Mediterranean power not a "European" one. I think you could successfully argue Romans had more in common with other ancient Mediterranean powers or even ancient Mesopotamians than modern Europeans.
As to the rest of your points true enough. It is well known that today's Europeans find themselves in between a rock and a hard place given the current split between American and Chinese hegemony.
"Save for Pearl Harbor there were no notable attacks on the American homeland."
September 11, 2001 is why Iran is being attacked a quarter century later.
I meant during the two world wars, which should have been obvious. The idea you think I know what NYC is but forgot about 9/11 says more about you than I.
Iran had nothing to do with 9/11. If that was the point you were attempting you probably live in one of those flyover states.
> China has much lower crime, cheaper healthcare and is making progress in other aspects.
It is also a totalitarian regime where criticising the state can get you, and possibly your family, ‘disappeared’
Sure it is, luckily we’re catching up!
> For Indigenous Americans it’s unthinkable, but true. ICE is arresting, detaining Native Americans.
https://idahocapitalsun.com/2026/02/10/for-indigenous-americ...
Detain first , ask pesky questions about citizenship and civil rights later.
I’m not in the US but yeah the country has always had a strange relationship with law and order, at least from an outside PoV. The Kent State massacre is always one that sticks with me as particularly messed up.
I don’t think the USA is necessarily changing at all, this is what it has always been the whole time
yep. You are not wrong.
Those who trade freedom for security will obtain neither.
> Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai etc where the old money cabals run everything
If that's what you strongly believe then "western countries" are definitely quite bad at communication and the others quite good at propaganda.
Having lived in a communist country (years ago) and in the west I know from first hand experience that the difference is huge. No need to believe me, see for yourself if you can, alternatively distrust everybody similarly (Rusia, China and the west) - nobody wants your well-being...
Sad part is that probably the poor (everywhere) are the ones suffering the most from the wars and stupid decisions, it does not matter west/east/south/north. Western countries were a richer which means less poor, but it's not like it's a heaven for everybody either.
Years ago is different to now. Many places in Russia or China, Dubai etc is very livable. Even lots of people are going about their lives normally in Dubai - these days.
China is definitely not so shit like portrayed by western media. At the same time London is also not run by Islamic Extremists as portrayed by perhaps the top media station in USA.
> Sad part is that probably the poor (everywhere) are the on
totally true.
Having also lived in a communist country, I agree that 35 years ago the difference was huge.
Unfortunately, since around 2000 the differences have become less and less every year, so what has remained now is a very small fraction of what was a quarter of century ago.
The socialist economies from the past were just the extreme form of capitalist economies, where monopolies controlled every market. The western economies are quickly approaching this stage.
Extreme surveillance of everybody was how the communist elites preserved their power, but the surveillance was actually illegal, because the constitution "guaranteed" the secret of communications, e.g. of mail and telephone. While the secret police or equivalent organizations did not care about what is legal or not, they were nonetheless forced to keep appearances and do their work covertly. They also did not have enough resources to process in a centralized form all the data collected by surveillance.
Now, in the western countries surveillance has been legalized, so the governmental agencies no longer bother to hide their activities. They also now have the means to spy on an unlimited number of people among hundreds of millions or even billions, so surveillance is already worse than it was in the communist countries, even if the consequences of being spied are not yet so severe (hopefully).
> Now, in the western countries surveillance has been legalized, so the governmental agencies no longer bother to hide their activities.
Hiding or not 20 years ago the west was trying to surveil it's population as much as they could as well, see the Snowden/NSA scandal.
> even if the consequences of being spied are not yet so severe
Spot on. I would go even further and argue that "communist countries" used to rule through "fear of the state", while west ruled through (among others) "fear of others" (used to be communist, now becomes migrants or other religious groups).
For me the surveillance is not ideal, but the worst is the average education level of a population. Without any surveillance, if my neighbor will suddenly believe I am a witch and burn me at stake (it did happen in the west!) I will not feel good because I was not surveilled.
Everyone was just copying the French
The west is lost.
The world is lost, I don't think it is any better in non-western countries.
It will live on, encoded in the weights of LLMs
It's almost as if there's nothing special or unspecial about any of these populations. Just transient cultural factors that (in addition to generally being understood in limited hindsight and through rose-tinted glasses) will inevitably erode and dissolve under sustained attack.
> lay down and crawl along and accept everything without even a whimper.
People just want to live their lives. Maybe you think you would be doing differently in their position, but until you've had a chance to prove it, I don't believe you.
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Politicians have spent decades eroding our education systems, at least where I am located. Bread and circuses. Coming up next in Germany is how they will slash personal assets in quarter (not merely half), using a reform of support for unemployed people. Instead of working out how to get finances redistributed (oh wait, now I will be called a "communist" or "socialist" as if that were some devilish insult), they are working out how to get to the savings of the simple worker.
Congrats Germany, for electing another CDU government. We are digging our own graves here and we are too uninformed and too entertained to see it. Next election will probably be the breaking point, when AfD manages to get many majorities, due to how unhappy CDU, SPD, and other mainstream parties have made the populace. And then we will have these right-wing extremists as our government.
Looking to the US, they have hit it even worse now. Full authoritarian guy at the top, who might even prevent the next elections, unless he is sure that he will win or can make it so that he appears to have won.
This totalitarian agenda has been in the works for far longer than a quarter century. It's not just rich old people either.
We're witnessing the creation of the beast system in real time. The one that is prophesized in the Book of Revelation.
It is both scary to watch and yet fun to be alive to see it come to fruition.
It is occurring in every dimension, including the ability to track who buys and sells with crypto currencies along with the ability to punish or reward people based on ai hardware software infrastructure deployments.
Reddit bans users based on what they upvoted:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditSafety/comments/1j4cd53/warni...
"We know that the culture of a community is not just what gets posted, but what is engaged with. Voting comes with responsibility."
This. Every time I point out that I shouldn't have to leak my residential address to private businesses to register to vote or complete KYC, 15 people immediately come out of the woods to point out that addresses are public information.
The point is they shouldn't be. That's how people get stalked, harassed, and murdered at their home.
> shouldn't have to leak my residential address to private businesses to register to vote
If the 'SAVE America Act' passes, you're going to be open to leaking a heck of a lot more than that, and it'll all go in to a national database.
This is HN mate.
It's full of people from ad-tech who believe data protection is the enemy and the GDPR is a European conspiracy against growth.
You should learn to simply bend over and grab your ankles with both hands whenever they (or anybody else) asks for your personal data.
EDIT: and predictable 'drive-by' downvotes from those in the industry too lazy to try and defend their position and write a rebuttle!
> Man... How did yall white Westerners turn out to be the weakest people in the world? You were supposed to be the bastions of freedom and justice
This is a misunderstanding of American history. From its founding by wealthy white male landowners and slaveowners, the US was by design a plutocracy, enshrined in the Constitution with various anti-democratic (small "d") measures such as separation of powers, the electoral college, the Presidential veto, the unelected Supreme Court with lifetime tenure, and representation of land rather than population in the Senate. Originally, Senators weren't even directly elected. And of course neither women nor Black men had the right to vote. (EDIT: I forgot to mention the extreme difficulty of amending the Constitution, and as a result, the Constitution hasn't been amended much since the Bill of Rights.)
The only thing that held the plutocracy in check was "all political is local". The US was an agrarian nation, not yet hit by the industrial revolution. The fastest form of communication and tranportation was the horse. What has changed radically in the 20th and 21st centuries is that modern technology allows the ultra-wealthy to organize and conspire (see Epstein and friends, for example) on a national and even international scale. Political election campaigns have always been privately funded—another essential feature of the plutocracy—and now they're obscenely expensive with TV and internet advertising, which further consolidates the power of the ultra-wealthy campaign contributors.
The biggest problem with the US is that we haven't had a political revolution in 250 years. We're still operating under the ancient rules.
Even during the suffering of the Great Depression, it took a "white knight", an ultra-wealthy leader FDR with some sympathy for the lower classes, to provide some relief. And note that the most successful third-party Presidential candidate in recent history was Ross Perot, a billionaire who self-funded TV informercials to spread his message. The game is rigged in favor of big money and has always been so rigged.
> with various anti-democratic (small "d")
Yes, because the designers of the system were well-read and understood that raw democracy, like oligarchy and autocracy, is something that republics devolve into.
Rule by the many is great, but the historical evidence shows it's clearly unstable. The Constitution is designed to maximize the advantages while hedging against its inherent instability.
> The game is rigged in favor of big money and has always been so rigged.
I would say the game is rigged in favor of production, of which capital is a big part, because those who don't produce end up being governed by those who do.
> Yes, because the designers of the system were well-read
Well-read in the 18th century. And they borrowed heavily from 17th century philosopher John Locke. Imagine relying on 17th or 18th century medicine now.
The founders weren't nearly as wise as they're alleged to be. For example, they thought their system would suppress political parties, and then political parties arose almost immediately.
> Rule by the many is great, but the historical evidence shows it's clearly unstable.
Which historical evidence are you referring to? Most of history is nondemocratic.
In any case, the US broke out into an extremely bloody civil war less than 75 years after the Constitution was ratified, so it hasn't been "stable", not that stability is even desirable under a plutocracy.
> I would say the game is rigged in favor of production, of which capital is a big part, because those who don't produce end up being governed by those who do.
Let's see a rich dude produce anything all by himself. We like the pretend that the one rich dude is producing everything and his thousands of employees are basically superfluous.
> Let's see a rich dude produce anything all by himself. We like the pretend that the one rich dude is producing everything and his thousands of employees are basically superfluous.
We're certainly in agreement here, but I would say that most modern wealth is fictional: based on equity, which is based on credit, which is based on confidence, which at the end of the day is just vibes. So most of the 'wealthy' people exist as such with social permission because they're employed in production, and if they fail at that job the wealth rapidly evaporates. However, they're definitely wildly overpaid in the US. That, imho, is because culturally this country still wants to cosplay at having an aristocracy.
> So most of the 'wealthy' people exist as such with social permission because they're employed in production, and if they fail at that job the wealth rapidly evaporates.
It's misleading to say "they're employed in production", using the present tense. Many were engaged in production, and some choose to remain engaged, but others don't. It doesn't seem to matter much. Bill Gates quit his job 20 years ago, claims to be trying to give most of his money away, yet he's still one of the wealthiest people in the world. The dude was already ultra-wealthy by age 30. Sure, he engaged in production for a number of years, but most ordinary workers have no choice but to engage in production for 40 or 50 years or their life at least.
The ultra-wealthy are not wage earners, paid by their labor. They are capital owners, and capital continues to earn returns regardless. If you're smart with your wealth and diversify, and by smart I mean not dumb—safe long-term investment doesn't take a genius—it's extremely hard to lose it all. That would happen only if you put all of your eggs in one basket. I'm not aware of too many riches to rags stories, except among professional athletes for example. But those athletes were wage earners rather than capital owners. They don't own the sports teams.
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Would like to point out GenX is middle management age in the US.
It isn't the senile crowd running things anymore. It's 50-60 year old Thiel, Musk, health insurance CEO, crowd.
Professional consumer crowd that's taken the baton and never invented anything of their own. Electric cars and rockets, the internet, and society post-WW2 were originally grandpa's ideas.
Deregulation of financial markets and glorification of monetary wealth above all else was also their doing? Gen X were kids when Carter and Regan sent us down the path we’re on now.
They're not kids now
They were not kids a decade ago
Two decades ago
Why is it 20-30 somethings of 40-50 years ago put the world on an immutable path but 20-30 somethings now are stuck with?
If prior 20-30 somethings that "put us on a path" had free agency we do too
Especially when those old 20-30 somethings are now 70-90 somethings
Kids in the 1980s who rolled over in their 20-30s
Who speaks old English and writes like Shakespeare? Social truths die off. So why do we still speak 1970?
I think that's the problem, the greatest generation were sort of a moral compass in the US (like it or not, they obv had their own problems - eg. racism). Without them to scold us, it seems we're all too infantile/selfish/greedy and can't even show each other basic respect or do something as simple as stop at a red light. Sure, the internet and social media accelerate it but I think there's also a fundamental loss of parental figures that went out with that generation too.
As a Gen X'er myself I know I grew up respecting the hell out of older people, especially 70+ ages. The past couple of decades as that cohort churns, I can't say the same. It's more of a case by case basis now, many of them seem outright evil in their self-righteousness. They all seem angry and ready to fight in any passing interaction (granted, I live in Texas where most of them are amped on FoxNews, too) and that's not how it used to be. They used to be the friendliest cohort alive, hell when I was maybe 10-14 I even used to volunteer at senior living homes just to hang out and chat with them and can't imagine anyone wanting to do that now.
The greatest generation and the silent generation spent their entire adult lives vesting power in institutions and they passed this on to the boomers.
Now, after the better part of a century of that running it's course with nearly no pressure to not chart a crap course it's falling apart.
What do you mean "the west"? The US is indeed lost, but don't bundle the rest of us in with those lunatics!
We are not really better. Chat control being pushed in the EU. The Online Safety Act already passed in the UK, and now legislation to give politicians the power to decide what websites need age verification. Crony capitalism/technofedualism/whatever all over the place. Hate speech laws that are often politicised and give the police and prosecutors a lot of room to target people they dislike (something the US has constitutional protections against). Extremist parties such as PVV and AfD getting a significant proportion of the vote.
The UK is lost too. Chat control is scary, but it's actually proof that the EU is not yet lost: that law keeps getting shot down.
We do need some kind of mechanism to prevent this kind of "keep trying until it passes" mechanism to lobbying/lawmaking that the people pushing chat control are using. That's a tricky issue though, as revisions on law proposals are an expected part of the process. Some sort of "dismiss with prejudice" would be nice tho
> but it's actually proof that the EU is not yet lost: that law keeps getting shot down.
Good things happen in the UK and US too and some bad laws get rejected. The overall trend is pretty clear though and is the same in the EU, and the rest of the west too.
Its not just one country or leader or political party. Its a cultural problem that affects the whole of the west. "We are going to hell slightly slower" is not a great place to claim to be.
I dunno, the UK seems to be doing its best to outcrazy the US
>An FTC spokesperson told CNBC that companies must limit how collected information is used. [...] The agency pointed to existing rules requiring firms to retain personal information only as long as reasonably necessary and to safeguard its confidentiality and integrity.
the very same rules that have allowed literally every single piece of my data to be leaked several separate times, and now i have free credit monitoring instead of privacy? and all of those companies still operate normally, as if nothing ever happened? very neat.
>Discord said it is using the additional time this year to add more verification options, including credit cards, more transparency on vendors and technical detail of how age verification will work
and why didnt we start with credit cards? instead of facial recognition with peter thiel? (this is a rhetorical question)
I have gotten several notices of medical data being leaked over the last two years. I thought HIPPA law had very harsh fines for this, but I guess they just look the other way.
Seems like if you just disclose and make assurances that "you take security seriously" then it's fine.
unfortunately, even if the fine seems harsh, if it is less than the profits generated the fine is an operating expense and not a deterrent.
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Some of the accounts being blocked from certain access are themselves 18! You would think Reddit would consider that, but nope it doesn't.
Age of account was sufficient for Google and third-party services for verification until recently. My gmail account is almost 22 years old, in continuous use. I have a credit card on file with Google Pay. Why would I need to submit a photo to engage with a private service, outside of volunteering to help train a surveillance apparatus?
Is there any forum short of a senate subcommittee that the public can ask companies these questions? The silence is deafening.
...That would be a cost center, sir. If you don't like our product, you are free to not use us and make your own while foregoing doing any business in anywhere with either of one of the two major political parties.
There is a reason why I don't accept private enterprise as something separate from Government. The nature of the incorporation legal fiction makes them proxies of Government power and influence, hence why I believe private enterprise should in some ways be as heavily restricted by Constitutional guardrails as the Government itself (allegedly) is.
Probably because the transfer of accounts (typically for reasons of better spamming, but in this case for adult access) is possible.
However, that makes me wonder what mechanism might "unverify" an account holder's age upon transfer. I suppose it's simply a need to re-verify (take a new photo) upon every login, but then folks could transfer the session cookie to avoid needing the new owner to perform a login (unless a new device ID/fingerprint makes the old cookie useless).
Since you don't have to verify every time you use the account, transfer of verified accounts will still be a "problem" though. It's just a CYA to be able to say "we verified this account owner."
But… You could transfer the account after age verification too. The only way to be sure is to ask for ID every time people use the website / application, then children will be truly finally safe from the horrors of the Internet.
> You could transfer the account after age verification too.
Isn't that what I said?
The website will only function when webcam is turned on with passport next to your face. Session is immeditely revoked on failure.
> … I suppose it's simply a need to re-verify (take a new photo) upon every login …
Clearly the only foolproof solution is a 3rd-party camera pointed at your face at all times whenever you use a computer.
A sort of "telescreen" if you will.
And a *plug to measure the heart rate at all times in the convenient and unobtrusive way, to ensure the face is of the mammal, and not the mannequin.
10 years was enough for Tom Fulp.
SOTA is age inference: The platform studies your behavior to estimate your age.
> now i have free credit monitoring
Might not even matter ...
"TransUnion and Experian, two of the three major credit bureaus, have started dismissing a larger share of consumer complaints without help since the Trump administration began dismantling the CFPB."
https://www.propublica.org/article/credit-report-mistakes-cf...
It's not like they were really doing a very good job anyway. My data has been leaking for two decades now.
How much money did the CFPB actually give back to wronged consumers?
Pre-trump's attempts to eliminate the department, almost $20 billion.
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/enforcement/enforcement-by-t...
And one would hope that the purpose of the CFPB would be to dissuade lenders from wronging consumers in the first place, meaning the net benefit to consumers was likely much higher.
Thanks for the numbers!
Also of note is they were responsible for medical debt cases, which are particularly difficult for people to resolve because of the shared responsibility between the patient and the insurer, which allows the insurer to deflect responsibility until the bill ends up in collections.
Their mere presence was effective. I know people who had trouble with banks refusing to fix their own screwups and demanding evidence that couldn’t exist.
They changed their tune the second there was an open case on the matter.
The fact that these tools are 'active' centric, i.e : You must perform an action to validate you're NOT a child, these will never protect children. A predator simply needs not to verify anything and appear benign and ironically more anonymous than law abiding people.
I'm not saying the inverse is the answer either, just that if anyone without an agenda of surveillance looked at this for a second, the penny would have dropped. So I can only assume that this was the purpose the whole time.
Sob stories about children are always weaponized for oppression.
It was used to bash interracial marriage, gay rights, suppress dissent, attack the first amendment, and now this.
Whenever you hear some dramatic story involving kids about how you have to live a little less free, know the tactic.
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Don’t forget the second amendment.
You're on HN. Expect downvotes.
whats incredible to me are how many useful idiots out there STILL fall for it.
___ said hamas beaheaded 40 babies and that turned out to be a complete fabrication. That fake info was used in part to justify killing thousands of kids in ____
meanwhile the recent strike on Iran resulted in 80 little girls getting killed (with plenty of evidence) and its swept under the rug while we get blasted about the 7 soldiers that died.
More useful idiots are born every day, most of them never are educated and do not see their past blunders as anything wrong happening, they are completely blind to the real implication of their actions.
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Age verification doesn't stop determined bad actors, it just builds a database of everyone who cooperated...........
Know they sheep, the better to keep them penned.
Exactly my point.. And all the industry experts who they must have consulted in to write the laws are coincidently invested in personal data harvesting. Who could have foreseen this happening.
Now do Covid… tracking the non-compliant is surely the smaller task.
Age verification inherently requires identity verification.
The UK's Online Safety Act originally had a proposal that would allow users to purchase an ID code anonymously in cash from a corner store, presenting only ID to the cashier the same way as buying alcohol. This was never implemented, because it's more useful for the government and corporations to link all online usage to a government ID.
I didn't know the Online Safety Act had this proposal. Do you have a source?
I've been proposing the same thing on this site for months. IMO anonymous age verification with no record-keeping is the only form of age verification that should exist. No zero knowledge proofs, no centralized government identity provider, nothing.
How do you prevent selling those ID codes to kids?
Sometimes this question comes up with an implied subtext of: "It needs to be bulletproof."
It really doesn't, and especially if the ostensible rationale is blocking the ills of social media. If your friends aren't there, there's less motive to waste a bunch of allowance-money dealing with a sketchy adult to get there.
The same way you prevented adults buying pornography for kids prior to the web, and the way you prevent adults from buying beer for kids now.
Namely, you don't prevent it (I was 11 when I first saw hardcore pornography, on a VHS tape, at a sleepover party), but it does place a (surmountable) barrier in the way, which will reduce access to some degree. The degree to which that happens depends on a lot of things that are hard to predict. We have culturally normalized access to a lot of things for children, and reversing that will likely take more than just changes to a law.
> presenting only ID to the cashier the same way as buying alcohol
Selling alcohol to minors is illegal in the UK. Some do circumvent this by various means (e.g. fake ID or having an adult purchase on their behalf, both of which are also illegal), but the same is already true for the current age verification system.
Same way you prevent selling beer to kids. Impose harsh penalties for violators.
How do you prevent kids verifying as adults?
That's the same question.
Meanwhile apparently 70% of Australian under-16's retrained/regained access to social media.
See, even intrusive, surveillance and privacy-busting methods don't work.
It seems a very one-sided discussion. HN seems to defend freedom to contact children without restrictions. It is a very extremists unrealistic position that causes more harm that good.
To let antagonistic governments send propaganda to children is harmful. To let unknown adults contact children in private messages is harmful. To let children access pornography 24/7 is harmful.
I would expect a more balanced discussion. How to keep children safe is a priority, and there are technical ways to do so in a safe way that does not require to share personal identifications with social media.
If you want a better proposal bring technical expertise to the discussion instead of ideology fundamentalism.
Ideological is the best way to describe the reaction by most people on here I think, counterproductive is another one. The reality is most normal people want children protected, unless we can come to the table with good options we are going to end up with a terrible one thrust upon us.
Slippery slope arguments and things like it are not going to convince people, "just parent your kids" is not going to convince people. Not because they're wrong, but because on balance they feel like the damage to children being exposed to this content is worse than the potential civil liberty issues.
It will be very difficult to explain to people why this is not the same as alcohol being age-gated and you having to prove your identity to access it. Technically there should be no real reason we cannot do age attestation without fully revealing our identities anyway, there will need to be trust at some point in the system but the reality of the real world is that there is already and it's far less secure than we'd like.
> To let unknown adults contact children in private messages is harmful.
But the verification is not to prove you're a children. Everyone will be considered children until proven otherwise, which will not prevent this scenario at all.
I'm just whipping the dead horse again. Surely the poor thing is beyond micronized dust at this point.
This could have been avoided [1] if the real goal was to protect small children. No need for third parties or sharing sensitive data that will eventually be "ooopsie leaked totally by mistake" or outright sold/shared. No perfect, nothing is.
The entire point is to de-anonymise adults. Especially in countries that are escalating the policing of online speech.
If it was actually about kids, we'd have done it a long time ago. With more focus on things like porn and gambling (including 'loot box' gambling in games) rather than social media.
The EU is rolling out the EUDI system this year where citizens can verify their age (>16, >18, >21) without revealing any personal information. This is a solved problem over there.
EUDI has had various criticism with its approach for not supporting unlinkability (with the same attestation used across verifiers they can be traced to the same user).
There are some long Github threads in the official repo along with a PDF[1] of cryptographer's feedback about the privacy issues. Also covered in this[2] article.
This is unlike BBS+ which supports unlinkability and which was even recommended by GSMA Europe to such address downsides. In the Github discussions there seems to be pushback by those officially involved that claim BBS+ isn't compatible with EUDI[3] and there seems to be some plateauing of any progress advancing it.
[1] https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-doc-archi...
[2] https://news.dyne.org/the-problems-of-european-digital-ident...
[3] https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-doc-archi...
Doesn't the act of notifying >16 today and >18 tomorrow leak birthdates?
which is nothing in comparison to leaking all of personal information
you can also introduce some jitter like changing age range only once a week/month/year for everyone
Birthday, zip code and gender is enough to uniquely identify most Americans.
If you want privacy you need to fuzz the transition. Many platforms support that today. Or you can create a separate account when you graduate.
But also, knowing someone's birthday without trying it to other information greatly reduces the risk of harm.
It's by design. Pedonazis have been used as the justification for the surveillance apparatus for decades now.
[0] "Cypherpunks Uncut." https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xt3hpb
My default reaction to the introduction of any age-verification for any service is the closing account. Goodbye Discord, account closed out of protest.
The second option is ignoring the verification request. Goodbye online-gaming-with-strangers on Xbox. (I see this as a positive). Same goes for Ubisoft who aggressively wanted my secret papers to verify my identity.
I've yet to come across anything I want or need outside banking or government use where age verification benefits me, or is so useful/important that I would willingly hand over critical secret documents. I've not even needed to use a VPN for anything. It doesn't mean it won't happen, but when it does, option #1 or #2 is going to cover everything.
Which circles back to the main point here - if I ignore it, then effectively I get identified as a non-adult. How does this protect anybody?
(UK-based, might not be the same everywhere)
What's wrong with being flagged a non-adult? Being a non-adult means you are limited to supervised child-safe spaces. Child-safe doesn't mean "no adults" allowed. It means "monitored and censored"
Aside from the concept of adults masquerading as non-adults, nothing so long as those spaces are moderated fully. I have no problem with skipping the verification, but I do question the moderation of most services.
The problems start when the space become not-for-children and identity validation is mandatory to use them, which will exclude people like me who categorically refuse to hand over personal secrets in order to have access. It does not warrant the inherent risk involved with granting access to personal details unrelated to the service offered. I reckon this will happen when someone decides it's better commercially to make a service adult-only than to moderate non-adult accounts. It's a slippery slope, and a predictable next step once adult have become accustomed to handing over papers for some services to have to do it for many, if not all.
Well, ad are supposed to be different for children, right? So in theory we would get less ads by being ID'd as a child. Now, this would probably cause a new law where they would allow child ads...
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I always wonder if this will fix the bot and ad/click fraud issues rampant on the Internet.
The real problem with age verification isn't the method (facial recognition vs credit cards) — it's that deterministic verification requires high-value PII and creates honeypots. Credit cards are just identity by proxy with slightly different attack surface.
Probabilistic verification using behavioral signals and metadata (device age, account age, interaction patterns) doesn't perfectly verify age but massively reduces the privacy trade-off. Most platforms optimize for regulatory compliance, not actual safety.
The uncomfortable part is that they try to solve a real problem (protecting minors) by requiring universal identification. In practice this means every adult has to prove who they are just to access any part of the internet. Once that infrastructure exists, it’s hard to imagine it not expanding beyond its original purpose.
Its hard to imagine that it won't launch _already_ expanded beyond it's original purpose. My expectation is that there will be precisely 0 seconds between it and it being abused. The people building it will plan the abuse before it's even launched.
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> causing major headaches for social media companies attempting to strike a balance for users between legal compliance and privacy.
I can see how the problem is real. (Not sarcasm.)
In technical terms, "balance" is trivial. Put an air/security gap between information collected for age verification and the dossiers they have on users.
In business terms, conflict. They have relentless incentives and pressures to collect, collate and leverage every bit of information that can increase their return on users. Legal gray and black behaviors are rampant and tolerated where protectable. The number of paths to a creative interpretation of "balance" is unbounded. Right up to the c-suite.
It is sad, but self-aware, if they feel awkward trusting themselves with a mandated database full of tasty information they are not supposed to taste.
It's curious why there are no reverse systems where, when accessing an adult resource, you have to prove that you are a child?
I've seen some forums (mostly political) where you have to prove that you can act like a child to be welcome. So that's kind of like what you're talking about?
(If anyone is offended by this, don't worry, I'm talking about the other side; I'm sure your side is full of reasonable adults who just get a little carried away sometimes.)
Of course they are. That is their purpose.
It would be refreshing to see someone try to use "but think of the children" to actually help children, instead of just screwing over adults.
And you could relatively well determine the age of a person, by looking at the age of his social graph. No kids knows more then 5 adults, except over family groups.. thuse age identification should be viable via social login even without beeing bound to a passport.
The race will be on for children to gain as many adult contacts as possible so they can pass age verification.
This is probably fantastic news for the VPN providers. Lots of people who otherwise wouldn't have bothered are now likely incorporating VPN connectivity into their daily routine. This very obviously includes kids.
I also wouldn't be surprised if there were plenty of people only dimly aware of the idea of a VPN who are now sitting up and taking note.
VPNs only work while there are jurisdictions that don't have age verification laws and services don't ban access from those jurisdictions.
That's technically true right now, but I keep holding out hope that these sorts of draconian restrictions will drive even harder to stamp out privacy-preserving solutions. I'm old enough to remember the days before the internet well, when _everything_ was made for children because you never knew who was and wasn't. I was afraid that legislation would drive the internet back to public television (as it seems to be determined to do) and I was really grateful for Freenet when it was first announced. It never took off, but not because it didn't work, just because at the time not enough people thought it was necessary. Maybe this will be the push to get enough people on board to make it (or something like it) feasible? Anonymous communication is a technically solvable problem, as long as enough people agree that it's worth pursuing.
And kids will do very stupid things to get "free" VPN access.
Such as following directions from a YouTube video that instructs them to do sketchy things.
I mean, how much longer do you think VPNs will remain legal in the US?
They're used for more than just anonymization. You know, their original purpose.
Never provide such information. Forge it if you must
Well, that's shocking news...said no one ever.
Comment was deleted :(
no shit, this was obviously the point. the people who said so all along were correct, the people who insisted it wasn't were not speaking in good faith.
we, as a society, need to stop taking companies at their word when they say that the obvious harms that are right around the corner are overblown.
> Social media company Discord announced plans in February to roll out mandatory age verification globally,
Discord’s age verification is optional and only required to disable the image content filter, join adult servers, and a couple other features. I’m not saying it’s a good decision, but I am getting tired of the repeated claim that it’s mandatory to go do age verification to use the service.
This lazy reporting is hurting the messaging because readers will believe that mandatory age verification was implemented and everything is fine, so new laws will not change anything for the worse. It needs to be clear that age verification laws would change the situation considerably, not be a nothingburger.
I don’t plan to do the Discord age verification and neither do most of the people I interact with on Discord. It’s not mandatory.
I don’t recommend anyone rush to do the Discord age verification unless you really need to for some reason. Don’t believe all of the lazy articles saying it’s mandatory.
You're downplaying it in the same way that others are overplaying it.
- There are servers that are labelled adult only because it's simpler to label _everything_ as causing cancer than it is to only label the correct things. I can't join channels for some games because they're "adult"; even though they're not
- There are servers that are getting rid of content because they don't want some automatic system to label them as adult, even though they're not. There's a game server that got rid of it's meme channel, because people could (but don't) post content that some system might see as adult.
So it is a bigger deal than you're making it out to be. It's negatively impacting people and servers that have no interest in having anything adult on them.
> It's negatively impacting people and servers that have no interest in having anything adult on them.
So who should police that? I am in certain communities that try to be stricter on moderation (which I love!) but it's hard work, lots of people trying to be at the edge of rules (with normal things like swearing, insults, etc.).
Whoever labels adult only and does not care is not wishing to put the effort to police that it actually is not.
Personally I do generally mind much more annoying, aggressive, stupid posters (in various channels), than the fact that I am not allowed to post some stupid adult-looking meme.
>I don’t plan to do the Discord age verification and neither do most of the people I interact with on Discord.
until it becomes law, like it is (or in the process of becoming) ~everywhere.
Okay? Then we’ll deal with that if it happens. If it does happen then other services will have the same requirements.
The baby eating machine is busy telling us that it's coming to eat our babies and your best answer is "wait and see"?
No? I’m against age verification too. Please re-read my comment above for why the Discord example with wrong information is counterproductive to arguments against age verification.
It’s important to get facts right.
>If it does happen then other services will have the same requirements.
that is exactly what everyone is angry about.
And I am too! My comment above was that the claim that Discord’s age verification is mandatory was false.
It’s also misleading in the context of this journalism because it makes it look like it’s already done and therefore new laws wouldn’t change anything.
Maybe! But laws like California’s new law and the Texas law both are making it mandatory from a legal compliance point of view.
The direction of these restrictions is not “optional”
It will be when everyone starts leaking from the big players. Age verification will make software development impossible or be impossible to implement without huge investment.
> Age verification will make software development impossible or be impossible to implement without huge investment.
Not really, you'll just be forced to use services from eg google or meta. And pay for them. And share user data.
And if my foss software doesnt implement those systems? Or someone downloads my foss software and removes those restrictions?
You know that none of those things actually protect children from predators which is the supposed reason for these changes. So when they inevitably don't work Discord will take the next step of requiring age verification from everyone.
Why, oh why, would you give them the long term benefit of the doubt for literally no gain to you whatsoever?
> for literally no gain to you whatsoever?
I literally gain from using their services for communication and voice chat with friends.
“Literally no gain whatsoever” is completely wrong.
I’ve tried Matrix/Element for years. I’m still in some IRC channels. I know what the alternatives are I can confidently say I’m gaining value from the ease in which Discord allows us to voice chat, screen share, and invite less technical people to join.
You will gain nothing relative to the status quo today. You're giving up your identity in order to just... stay the same. This is a textbook definition of no upside.
They are extorting your identity from you and you're somehow OK with that.
> Discord’s age verification is optional
...for now ... What stops them from changing this in the future?
Additionally Discord may verify your age based on the collected data without consent.
> ...for now ... What stops them from changing this in the future?
Then I’ll deal with that situation if it arises.
Pretty sure in some EU countries it is mandatory now, iirc
You don't say.
To the surprise of absolutely nobody.
ZK proofs are the solution to this problem. Its a pity this tech is not taken more seriously. I recently used a product that required proof of country (or rather proof of not from certain countries). It was a very painless experience with https://zkpassport.id/
You're assuming that anonymous age verification is or ever was actually the end goal here.
Forgive the profanity, but no shit.
>put people into mandatory age verification
>most people will not verify their age
>can't be sure they're an adult so treat everyone like children just in case
>wait what? the trojan horse allows them to monitor and surveil them?
I'm shocked. Shocked! Well, not that shocked.
is this the great innovation that the GDPR is stifling in Europe? (sorry for the snark)
Water is wet.
All for making sites to send a header with restrictions as they apply in law (age rating per location for example -- so a site could send "US:16 US-TX:18 IE:14 GB:18 DE:16" etc), and even categorise as not required in law (category=gambling or category=healthcare)
That gives the browser/app/accessing device the power to display or not display
The second part of this is to empower parents -- let them choose the age rating which can only be changed with a parental code etc. Make this the law on all consumer commercial devices -- i.e phones, macbooks, windows.
This is trivial and worthwhile.
Yes some 15 year old will build something in python in a user session to work around it as they have a general purpose computer, that's a tiny amount of the problem. Solve the 90% problem first.
Shocked! Shocked I tell you! Could not have seen that coming, nope not even for one second.
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code