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Comment by danboarder | Hacker News Reader

What could possibly go wrong... I don't expect Facebook or TikTok to oppose this very much, having credit cards on file is conveniently closer to making more money.

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I'm not so sure. I think Facebook might oppose it on the grounds that there are large numbers of people on the cusp who may just abandon Facebook if they have to give their credit card details. Facebook is already haemorrhaging users, I don't think they will want any friction that may lose them more.

And they struggle enough as it is to attract younger users, credit card checks would completely kill the demographic for them.

There must be plenty of not-so-young people who don't have a credit card or passport.

Edit: the article says "Adults would be forced to enter personal information like passport or credit card details", so I guess other forms of ID with a date of birth would be accepted.

The government already have a GOV.UK Verify programme for identity assurance that they want to be funded by the private sector. They'll presumably just encourage people to use one of those private operators (currently Digidentity and Post Office) and maybe it'll encourage more operators to spring up.

See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introducing-govuk...

They screwed up that for me. I registered, worked with it for a few months (via Expedia, iirc), then they just said "sorry, we're disabling this for you" - probably because of Brexit, but who knows. Can I recover my account somehow? Who knows, I couldn't be arsed and just let my accountant do things for me.

Sorry for the late reply, but depending upon timing it might be because Experian dropped out of the programme.

> having credit cards on file is conveniently closer to making more money

It will be a drastic change to pivot the company from one where the customer is the product to the customer.

Credit card input also introduces friction and bounce rate of user signup. This would hurt Facebook's user growth and MAU KPIs

People already make accounts with phone numbers, I suspect credit cards won't be different.

It's a bit easier to memorize a phone number than a credit card number.

The number of active credit card holders in the UK is somewhere in the 35 million range. The number of adults is somewhere over 56 million. There is quite a mismatch there. Unlike the US, owning a credit card is not standard for most people in the world.

People tend to get them for online shopping abroad, and for travels out of their currency zone as a back up.

I don’t know if a debit card counts, because they are 16+. Many of us took a while to move onto credit cards but still had access to cashless, online and overseas payment.

> I don’t know if a debit card counts, because they are 16+.

11+ with parental permission. I had one around that age.

It's credit card OR id though. People like Experian are already offering age verification systems that check passports, driving licences etc. The government also have their own GOV.UK Verify programme which has multiple providers which prove identity and thus age.

If you can login to your government tax account, or apply for a DBS, you'll be able to prove your identity.

Facebook's customers are advertisers, not users.

You're right. I've been in the weeds analyzing the finances of tech companies where the users of the apps are actual customers, and the term 'user' weren't as nice

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