Hacker News Reader

Comment by cons0le | Hacker News Reader

>If Google can guess your age, you may never even see an age verification screen. Your Google account is typically connected to your YouTube account, so if (like mine) your YouTube account is old enough to vote, you may not need to verify your Google account at all.

This has been proven false a bunch of times, at least if the 1000s of people complaining online about it are to be believed. My google account is definitely old enough to vote, but I get the verification popup all the time on YouTube.

I think the truth is, they just want your face. The financial incentive is to get as much data as possible so they can hand it to 3rd parties. I don't believe for a second that these social networks aren't selling both the data and the meta data.

View on HN

I think the reality is a lot less nefarious. They don't want your face. But they also don't care enough to not take your face. Why would Google spend lobbying and legal money trying to fight this requirement when it doesn't hurt their bottom line? On the other hand, requirements like storing ID cards does hurt their bottom line because it means:

1. they need additional security measures to avoid leaking government documents (leaking face photos doesn't hurt them as much) 2. not every person has a valid government document 3. additional customer support staff to verify the age on documents rather than just using some fuzzy machine learning model with "good enough" accuracy.

The bottom line is that companies are lazy and will do the easiest thing to comply with regulations that don't hurt them.

My Google account is more than 18 years old and I hit an age prompt when I was trying to watch some FPGA video (out of all things). So no, account age is not necessarily a factor.

Field programmable gatorade is an adult-only beverage.

Yeah, they could/*should* infer your age just by the fact you're watching an FPGA video

I would have watched those at 10 if the internet was a thing when I was 10. I think most people here would have. (I may or may not have understood it, but I would have tried)

They probably need to account for parents allowing kids to use their account, so account age can be a factor but not an automatic pass.

One result of a US fine was making it clear that adults letting kids use their accounts is still a legal problem: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/09/...

Note that this is adults letting kids use their accounts to view kids content, as the issue was parental approval for ad tracking.

Parents allowing kids to use their account is a problem with any current approach.

Can't allow any underage synthesis.

That makes sense. Golf has a minimum age of 35.

Did you hear they are letting kids play pickleball these days! How scandalous.

I wrote an April Fool's parody in 2021 that Google is going to get rid of authentication because they're following you around enough to know who you are anyway (modeling it after their No Captcha announcement[1]):

http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2021/04/leaked-google-init...

Edit:

>I think the truth is, they just want your face.

I just realized the parody also predicted that part (emphasis added):

>>In cases where our tracking cookies and other behavioral metrics can't confidently predict who someone is, we will prompt the user for additional information, increasing the number of security checkpoints to confirm who the user really is. For example, you might need to turn on your webcam or upload your operating system's recent logs to give a fuller picture.

[1] https://security.googleblog.com/2014/12/are-you-robot-introd...

I believe YouTube got hit with some EU compliance law at some point. My Google account was old enough to vote but I still had to verify it to watch certain YouTube videos. They put a one cent reservation on my credit card IIRC, no need to actually upload ID.

It happened right after ElsaGate, so they probably went overboard to cover for the weird shit happening on their platform. YouTube is full of pedo farms and weird porn if you know where to look for it, so they need something to point at so they can shout "look, we tried!"

I just got glasses yesterday and the optician needed to take a pic of my face to "make sure my glasses fit". The first thing I thought of was they are probably selling the data.

just say no thank you, i will manage like everyone else has for decades.

else you and your money go elsewhere.

I agree they want the face data, but I think it's less clear they want to "hand it" (presumably that's really "sell it"?) to third parties. My sense is Google and Apple and Meta are amassing data for their own uses, but I haven't gotten the impression they're very interested in sharing it?

They’ll do whatever makes money.

Sell it and use it internally.

you are correct. having that data is one of their competitive advantages, it makes no sense to sell it. they will collect as much as possible and monetize it through better ads, but they don't sell it

Sharing it is bad for business; selling insights derived from it for ad placement is the game. Faces definitely contain some useful information for that purpose.

Then you have not been paying attention for the past decade, I'm afraid...

Ed Snowden revealed that these companies share their data with the US government:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...

also, even you think about using it "their own uses" - much of that is scrutinizing you to make you better susceptible to ads and other solicitations by their paying clients. I mean, people are not the clients of Google and Meta - they're the raw material.

your links don't disprove OP's main point at all. being forced to share data to the government is different than actively collecting data to sell to other third parties. these companies have tons of incentive to collect user data, but very little to sell it. i think that nuance is important to understand. if you think i'm wrong, try going to facebook or google and asking to buy some user data. you cannot.

This comes across as incredibly paranoid. Most places use 3rd party age verification anyway. They're following the law/playing safe with the law in certain countries, and it's just easier to apply it everywhere.

I haven't gotten it yet on my account from 2006. Maybe it matters whether it's a brand account? Maybe it matters whether the accounts actually are connected?

well as long as it's you logging in, they know you are minimum 20 years old!

As opposed to a child uploading a selfie of an adult on a new account.

They definitely already have your face though…

From where? Not everyone even puts selfies on the Internet.

Honestly, it's probably already happening, but I would not be surprised if retail stores that check your ID also have cameras snaping your face and selling that to data brokers.

Anything you can image that is bad with privacy, figure what is occurring is far worse.

If you’re 99.9% of people this isn’t even a reasonable question to ask because the answer is so obvious. If you’re the final 0.01%, they still will have it, just from when you last went anywhere with surveillance ever.

The more examples in various situations they can get, the higher their accuracy.

They definitely already have enough accuracy.

> I think the truth is, they just want your face.

Agreed. They treat people as data points and cash cows. This is also one reason why I think Google needs to be disbanded completely. And the laws need to be returned back to The People; right now Trump is just the ultimate Mr. Corporation guy ever. Lo and behold, ICE reminds us of a certain merc-like group in a world war (and remember what Mussolini said about fascism: "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." - of course in italian, but I don't know the italian sentence, only the english translation)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com