Comment on Age Verification Is A Windfall for Big Tech—And A Death Sentence For Smaller Platforms

1984@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I completely agree. The minute a platform asks me to do age verification is the moment I leave that platform.

  I will take my traffic to platforms that won’t do shit like that.

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• douglasg14b@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Hard to avoid using services that do it when it’s your own government that forces the sites & services you use to do this

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  • jjlinux@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    ‘Forces’ should not even be used in this context. These companies are all too happy to be able to get even more PII from everyone.

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    • douglasg14b@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Some of them. Yes, many others not so much. Are you not realizing the thread you’re commenting on here?

      That smaller site services and companies who really don’t want to collect this data are going to be forced to at an expense that may be too high for their entry point into the market they’re trying to work in?

      Or even worse websites or services that are hosted for free may have to incur costs they cannot afford for data they don’t want to collect.

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• oce@jlai.lu ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  What if the platform you use with your relatives suddenly requires this?

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  • 1984@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I will stop using it of course. There is a price to pay for not being affected by this. Its not going to be free.

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  • Railcar8095@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I personally don’t use Instagram already, no need to wait for age verification.

    WhatsApp is the one I can’t skip yet, but it they force this shit I’m out.

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    • Dalraz@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      May I suggest using Signal messenger over WhatsApp.

      WhatsApp does use the Signal messaging protocol but I don’t trust meta not to modify their implementation of it.

      Signal is a privacy at all costs foundation.

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      • Railcar8095@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        I suggest to my friends and family, but they don’t care. A few will use it, but for groups and such is basically dead

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    • oce@jlai.lu ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Yeah, that’s the one I am fearing, the enshitification of Whatsapp, I think it already happened in some countries.

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      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        I’ve never used WhatsApp and never will. My friends and family can contact me through a number of other ways, and I’m introverted enough that it won’t bother me too much if they don’t.

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  • Photuris@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    If my relatives want to talk to me, they can pick up the phone.

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    • oce@jlai.lu ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Isn’t the phone less private than an encrypted app?

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• drmoose@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Unfortunately sometimes it’s too late. Any platform can lock your account and keep your data until you unlock it and GDPR and similar do not protect against it. That’s what Twitter and LinkedIn started to do - require verification and no way to delete your account if you decline.

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  • boonhet@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Thanks to GDPR you can email them to have your data deleted though.

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    • Railcar8095@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      How do you verify it’s you? Just email address seems weird.

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      • boonhet@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Should be enough given it’s the same address the account was registered with.

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  • 1984@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Then I will just update my profile to a link my own cv page.

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    • drmoose@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      You can’t do anything with a locked account. Just a screen to do a web cam verification.

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      • 1984@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Ah you meant like that…

        Yeah, the power these companies have over our lives is very disturbing. They have positioned themselves as something most academic people really need, at least linkedin has.

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