On by default is ok—encouraged, even. Login required? heck no.
(edit: ugh, what if this is just because they're avoiding cookies to store this? because of "privacy")
In fact, I would guess that Google can predict your age with good accuracy without you logging in.
I’ve had kids under 13 create Google accounts that said they were 75 or whatever. Google doesn’t care. They just want you logged in and selling “targeted” ads.
I expect there will eventually be some sort of smoking class action suit that gets damages from emails knowing that accounts are 5 years old and not stopping it because of revenue. Of course I’ve been waiting a long time.
My Google account is almost 20 years old at this point, and they still ask me for credit card verification every time I want to see an "age-restricted" video in YT (and "age-restricted" topics apparently includes Verilog programming).
Google can't predict anything.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10070779?hl=en-GB#...
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/10071085?visit_id...
Thankfully, there's alternatives to google image search, like Brave or DuckDuckGo which at least pay lip service to the idea that you're not tracked. (Who knows if they actually do avoid gathering and selling your data?)
youtube-dl is more or less unmaintained these days (last proper release: december 2021), yt-dlp is the main fork. lots of development happened here in the last few years.
So this basically just resorts image search for NSFL and NSFW images back to text links. Unless you log in to enable image links.
Requiring a login to change a preference rather than something that could be stored in a very simple cookie deanonymizes you, and creates an extremely clean audit trail of your usage patterns. There's far more friction in making scores of google burner accounts than it is to rotate VPNs and Incognito windows, if you're so inclined to obfuscate your trail. That's bad.
Of course. That's basically step 1 in every proposed plan to prevent minors from accessing porn on the internet. Step 2 is verify age and linking it to the account.
Or you make a separate account for each one of your fetishes or NSFL investigatory journalism. Hopefully that isn't scores of accounts.
The part of the article that highlights this particular point is also easy to miss (one very short sentence immediately beneath an image). And not all of us fully and thoroughly read articles (as indicated by my user name).
On the contrary, Google's search has degraded severely. They now routinely tell me nothing was found when I'm searching for things I know exist, and know used to be indexed. Google is now third or fourth on my list of search engines because of this. They just aren't very good anymore.
Of course... that doesn't change that on both sides, it will be used. "This violates the first amendment, they are censoring misinformation!" "This violates the first amendment, they are censoring n00dz!" "The first amendment doesn't require them to put up with misinformation!" "The first amendment doesn't require them to censor n00dz!" And so on...
However, I will say, right now, that I find it interesting that the Hacker News hivemind in general is more sympathetic to the censorship of misinformation, than it is to the censorship of certain images. In which case, is it just a values judgement?
This is exactly the statement the comment you replied to is criticizing. It keeps getting repeated in the wrong places, like here in this comment thread.
There's free speech, U.S. Constitution amendment 1, and there's free speech as an idea. I'd wager when people complain about lack of free speech, they are more concerned about the idea rather than the amendment. I think most people here know that amendment 1 relates only to the government, so it's unhelpful and unrelated to even bring up the first amendment.
Edit: of course, you're right that anyone complaining about lack of amendment 1 in this situation doesn't make sense, but note that's not the same as people complaining about a lack of free speech.
Some things have changed but that hasn't.
Instead of the first amendment being somehow applied to private actors (really dicey because doing that would violate _their_ first amendment rights!) perhaps what you should want instead is the re-fanging of antitrust?
But the moral ideal of freedom of speech is for everyone, and individuals and organizations can support and espouse it or censor and suppress it.
We need a concept to distinguish these, like "free as in legal" versus "free as in voice".
As for the argument that freedom of speech doesn't apply to misinformation or danger or obscenity or whatever -- that just creates an arms race to declare everything you don't like as misinformation or dangerous or obscenity. You combat such things in the open market of ideas and exchange, not by censorship. That's just might-makes-right.
Probably. Also consider how much the porn industry is willing to pay to serve interested users ads. Incognito probably represents a substantial loss of revenue for Google.
Not to mention, creating a Google account still requires a phone in many cases. So you have to give up your privacy, your phone number. I cannot wait until AI makes Google search at least a little less relevant.
Not just creating a Google account; logging into a pre-existing Google account can require you to add a verified phone number. I had that happen to a relative (who does not even have a phone): when trying to login to their account, Google required a second factor to prove that the account was still theirs, and having access to the recovery email was not enough, the only thing it accepted was a SMS verification (which made zero sense, since there's no way Google could know whether that phone number was actually theirs).
...guess what, we don't have any US phone number available either! We only have Brazilian phone numbers, and Google did accept the Brazilian phone number I tried (which was not theirs, since like I said, they don't have a phone in the first place).