Reddit users in the UK must now upload selfies to access NSFW subreddits
Reddit users in the UK must now upload selfies to access NSFW subreddits
Finally it seems the end of Reddit is near.
“Reddit has stressed that this system is only to verify users' age, and it has no interest in your identity. Lee further stated that Persona won't know what subreddits you visit, and has promised it won't keep users' uploaded images more than seven days.”
Press X to doubt.
It is not just that, I don't trust Persona security, if a malicious actor installed a silent program that monitors users and sends it to a command and control center they probably won't know for months or even years. Cyber security is very bad in most companies.
Very careful wording there to switch between Persona and Reddit to conveniently omit one from the justification given by the other.
Presses X furiously
Why doubt, I mean they promised?
Oh the cute little corpo is promising to delete your data, how can we not trust him🥺🥺
Google uses reddit for its AI training. Just saying.
God help us all.
The “won’t somebody please think of the children” rhetorical tactic is always just a pretext for authoritarianism, mass surveillance and data privacy intrusion. Always. It’s the perfect motte-and-bailey: when you attack the actual motives, the motte becomes, “So you don’t care about children?”
UK is full blown authoritarian now. They have been arresting journalists who are covering the genocide in Gaza and designated a direct action protest group as a terrorist organisation.
These assholes are all pedophiles and they use it to control the planet. To get to high levels of government, you must enter the shadow contract of pedophilia. It is easy to control people and trust people with that kind of shadow on them, so it is required.
Then they turn around and use pedophilia to control everyone else. Any tech that threatens their power, they can immediately shutdown by pedo-bombing it. The counter to pedobombing is authoritarian moderation. Once you have that, it is over. The government they control now can control the mods, and that means they control the narrative. THAT is one of the core enemies to fight. An alternative to Reddit or any other system is not enough.
Because pedophilia is such a taboo / social death sentence, it is among the most powerful shadow contracts.
This is a combination of terrible legislation in the UK meets awful social media site.
The Online Safety Act is an abomination, compromising the privacy and freedom of the vast majority of the UK in the name of "protecting children".
I'm of the view parents are responsible for protecting their children. I know it's hard but the Online Safety Act is not a solution.
All it will.do is compromise the privacy and security of law abiding adults while kids will still access porn and all the other really bad stuff on the Internet will actually be unaffected. The dark illegal shit on the Internet is not happening on Pornhub or Reddit.
The UK is gradually sliding further and further into censorship, and authoritarianism and all the in the name of do gooders. It's scary to watch.
The online safety act isn't actually about protecting children. That's a smoke screen for a surveillance bill. They want to eliminate anonymity online.
The solution to all of this “think of the children” stuff is that devices owned/used by children should have to be registered as a child’s device, which would enable certain content blockers.
Forcing adults to verify their identity, rather than simply activating some broad based restrictions on devices being purchased for child use, is a waste of time. Kids will still find workarounds. Adult privacy will be compromised.
Its also an easily enforceable policy to require registration of children’s devices. You can hold the parents to compliance. You can hold the carriers to compliance. Its truly the simplest way to keep kids from accessing porn without having to mess with adult use of the internet whatsoever
The solution to all of this “think of the children” stuff is that devices owned/used by children should have to be registered as a child’s device, which would enable certain content blockers.
That's kinda the case right now already, but the problem is that adult-only sites don't work with that currently.
So the right solution would be to mandate that e.g. all sites are required to return a header with an age recommendation or something similar, so that a device set to child-mode then can block all these sites. And if a site doesn't set the header, it will also get blocked on child-mode devices
Wouldn't be too hard to do, and accidental overblocking would only occur on child-mode devices, so there's not much of a loss there.
Legislation could then be focussed on mandating that these headers aren't falsely set (e.g. a porn site setting the header to child-friendly).
Adult privacy will be compromised.
Goal achieved. "Think of the children" is subterfuge.
I don't think this is a good idea...
This is even more invasive - it would mean all the traffic and activity in every device would be traceable to a registration. Whereas now they might have a pretty good lock on individual device ids, they'd then have an actual registry of devices and owners to verify it against
Your solution is worse.
As is, it is the responsibility of the content provider to make sure that they are distributing only to people who are legally allowed to have it.
With age-verification the user has to prove that they are allowed to access the content, then the site can distribute it to them.
Your approach is to distribute the content by default and only deny it to ChildDevices. In order for this to work at all, you have to mandate that children can only use ChildDevices. This is soooo much worse than simply requiring that adults who want to see certain content have to prove that they can legally access it. If adults have reservations about providing ID for pornography, the loss of such content seems to be much less than denying children Internet access. (Although, I'm sure that Lemmings would disagree for obvious reasons).
that's what happens when the uk has had 40+ years of constant tory rule (and yes blue labour are tories)
If a politician says it's to help the children, it's almost safe to assume they themselves rape children, at least in America.
Next in the news: "500k Usernames, Passwords and biometric data leaked in the latest hack"
So...coming soon: an app that can match up images of friends or colleagues with a summary of their pornography preferences.
This could at least liven up some boring meetings or dull parties...
Remember those are just the ones you hear about. Plenty happen and are never talked about by either side for obvious reasons.
Who is not "Rick Rolling" this with a selfie of a stock photo (or a frame from "Never Gonna Give you Up"?)
Yeah, I will definitely trust an internet stranger with my face so they can verify that I'm not underage to access content which could, in case of being leaked, damage my reputation or even destroy my life.
DEFINITELY
Yeah, fuck all that.
Guess we're transitioning into a VPN only future.
We have the opportunity to head into a utopic or dystopic future and we're absolutely choosing the dystopic one.
They'll criminalize personal VPN users for non-work purposes, next.
A VPN future? Haha. Not if they don't want to. There are many ways to prevent VPN from operating when you're a government.
You can just plain ban encryption, which sounds really crazy, but yeah, they're trying to.
You can just say "it's illegal to use a VPN". It'll technically still work, but if there's a trace of trafic from your house to a known VPN endpoint, you're it! Great!
They can force custom proprietary spying software on your devices. Sounds equally crazy as the thing above, right? But rest assured they're ALSO trying to do that. Multiple times, even. And in some places… they did. Of course, nothing forces you to have such software on your device. Especially if your devices are not supported; it also turns into a "you have to buy this or that big name device, everything else's de-facto illegal! Fuck you, we're the government!". And if you get caught for whatever, and your phone, PC, or anything isn't "compliant"? Bam. Guilty.
Plenty of option. All of them completely stupid and would weaken both privacy, individuals, and governments at large. It never stopped legislation from being pushed forward.
I don't think we ever really had a choice
Indeed. With our current system it was only a matter of time. As soon as the internet became a default thing which everyone needed to access just to function in their daily lives, it would of course be subjected to the exact same exploitative mechanisms that the non-internet part of our lives have suffered from since the dawn of history.
If the UK is going to require adult verification it should be built into your internet contract. Yeah, I'm an adult. I'm paying my bills, of course I'm a fucking adult. I over pay for this garbage internet.
Uploading a selfie? The ai is going to determine if you're over 18? Can the ai determine if the selfie is also ai?
Yeah, it's some serious BS. They are forcing you to hand over and trust Reddit with your personal information, yet I wouldn't trust them if my life depended on it.
At the very least, someone in charge of this legisltion should learn OAuth2 and force the sites they want to comply by only let those OAuth2 accounts access their adult content. If I was in the UK, I'd just pay for a VPN over giving my photo to Reddit. That site is a lobby brigade hellhole whose "we know your dark secrets, we know everything" owner is also probably trading your account details on the side.
Can the AI determine if I'm just uploading photos of Kier Starmer as my ID?
The current answer is that it is very difficult to determine if something was AI generated at scale, and if someone puts some effort in its effectively impossible currently.
What if I'm actually a set of traffic lights and the AI can't work out what I am from my selfie?
I identify as a zebra crossing.
it should be built into your internet contract
This works fine with personal contracts like your mobile. (EE has a porn filter that you can disable in your account.)
But it doesn’t quite work for contracts that usually have multiple users. Like your home Internet. Because a child could connect to your WiFi and access that shmutz.
Just send an AI selfie problem solved.
Like father, like son, I guess.
Well, I guess i am going to be regularly updating the metadata on my most recent selfie.
Oh dear. What a dreadful business.
Anyway, this is mine.
POV: You're the intern tasked with reviewing the selfies.
It'll almost certainly be an AI model doing it.
Yeah, this is showing up at roughly the same time we can get (almost) free 5 second video generation from some services, and fast still picture generation on consumer grade hardware. It's the perfect combination of useless, stupid, and obsolete, all in one very pricey and very dangerous precedent-filled package.
It'll almost certainly be an AI model backed by 1000s of "trainers" in 3rd world countries doing it, but only until the model is fully trained.
thats not what pov means, upload a selfie as punishment
That could very well be the POV of the intern having to approve career gooners
POV = point of view. The intern's point of view. They're looking at the selfies submitted by gooners. The picture is a gooner. Idk what you're talking about.
This whole thing is a security disaster waiting to happen.
“Oops, our password was ‘Reddit’ and we’ve had a leak” in coming.
Username: admin Password: admin
What's to stop uploading a random picture of a person? Or even an AI generated person? I get what they're trying to do, but seems like legislative theater more than anything.
I've once attempted to open a bank account where they wanted video proof, and expected me to say a randomly assigned phrase, to solve the issue you mention.
I didn't do it. Fucking KYC is BS.
So from my experience of these type of systems (mostly in the context of banking services) they normally want to use your devices camera to take the picture directly, and normally also want a photo of a photographic ID to compare against.
Let’s not forget all that lovely metadata they can harvest by accessing the camera module, including the exact GPS co-ordinates the picture was taken.
Within banking apps it has become the norm, it shouldn't mean it's acceptable, but for the wider community it is accepted.
But for a fucking forum?? Christ. Especially at a time when Europe are trying to establish digital sovereignty and all of the stories coming out about the US government having access to data. We already know that they are willing to share that with the highest bidder (s).
People would have to be absolute morons to upload anything personal to Reddit, nevermind your photo ID like a passport or driving licence. But obviously that's what they're banking on (people being morons).
Sounds like a good area that's about to get a whole lot better at faking this system. I would just take a picture of a picture if that's what it takes. Then again, I would never do this and will just look elsewhere.
u/spez was the lead moderator of r/jailbait, and when he was caught, he got rid of mod transparency. Ghilisaine Maxwell was likely a l lead moderator of news Reddits as well (u/MaxwellHill). Reddit has always been compromised.
The speed they banned r/pizzagate was illuminating.
I’m not defending Spez, I think he’s a piece of shit and he did edit other users’ comments that were critical of him, which is fucked up, but I don’t think he was actually involved with that sub. It was possible to appoint mods without their knowledge or consent, and he’s a huge target, someone must have done it as a joke.
what's the topic of r/jailbait?
Lmao when the "anonymous" online forum requires de-anonymizing, I want to hope everyone leaves
Some people will leave, the rest will ride it out as Reddit continues to transform itself into Facebook
To your point, it's insane how much data reddit collects about you.
To be clear, this is a UK law now applied to any website that serves UK citizens. Anything that hosts adult content requires UK citizens to provide some form of age verification. Like a photo (for AI age estimation), credit card, utility bills, and so on. The government is dumb, and I guess it's time to just sit on VPNs 24/7 now.
To follow compliance with the Know Your Customer Pornographic Materials Act, please use the following guidelines for your photograph:
Thank you for using Persona. For any questions or complaints, please direct them to: BigDaddyGuns6969@aol.com. Please allow up to 14 days for an initial response, and 88 hours for subsequent replies.
I know this is a joke but I'm worried it might not be in the future.
Harassment will not be tolerated. Your comment has been sent to the board for review and we will decide whether your identity will be removed from Persona. We are not obligated by law to communicate the outcome. You may receive a writ for violating Amendment 3 C, "Requirement of official identification", the pecuniary fine is at our discretion.
Meh, just upload a dick pic.
I'll never forget how he changed users' text without them knowing it before the 2016 election. Reddit was going downhill before, but that was a turning point.
For those unaware, this isn't something like replacing a slur with removed, he edited users' comments, turning them into insults to other users.
I don't care that those original commenters were (likely) pieces of shit, and the people who he made the comments insult were definitely pieces of shit, putting words into people's mouths to make them fight each other is unforgivable. Even if you put out a shitty apology.
They better be NSFW selfies.
Sharpies
I'm a UK citizen, fuck everything about this law. I'm so sick of the current authoritarian trend amongst some western countries. The UK is one of the worst offenders.
It's not even about protecting kids. It's about control and appeasing puritanical elements in society. We're the 6th richest economy in the world and we can't even offer some of the poorest kids food security. But at least they can't see a pair of tits on Reddit.
Kier Starmer voice: “We are an island, of wankers”
"I don't hate the English. They're just wankers. But we ... we were colonized by wankers!"
There's a bunch of AI face generating pictures. I wonder if you can just use those. Or maybe this is just to create a new law to arrest people of uploading fake pictures...
Keeping the age verifier seperate from the content host is good. Destroying the files used for verification is good. On paper it's not too a bad system for age verification, but it really hinges on if you can trust them. Given the track record of basically almost every company and government ever...
Problem is, how do we know that the company is reputable, audited, and so on?
I’ve seen more places requiring verification - and each one of them seems to use a different verification company. How are there so many of these places, and why aren’t they more commonly known? Like Experian for credit, etc.
Sure it might sound good to keep them separate - but all that is doing is absolving the content host from liabilities for providing the adult content (somewhere) on their platforms and sites. Reddit don’t want to get involved, and I’ll bet they found the cheapest and easiest provider, or the first one in the search list and thought “good enough”.
I think it's good that Reddit is trying to continue to allow adult content within the legal framework in which it must operate.
I guess what I'm not clear on it is what the legal framework is for verification services. Absent rules that require robust privacy protections market forces will push a race to the bottom in terms of cost and data security will be the first to take a hit.
I know this might seem weird but I think this is one of those cases where a blockchain based smart contract might be the best solution. I'm not exactly sure, as any system that allows one to consume content generally also allows one to copy it, but having a system defined in code in a publicly auditable manner that cannot be changed without notice seems to me to have the capacity to grant the most reassurance.
I mean I assume that all the verification company is doing now is verifying a person's age and then giving a kind of authorization token that's cryptographically secure that basically says "the owner of this cryptographic key is of age".
Good take. You are right. Still fuck this.
Fuck Reddit fuck spez
Just upload a picture of any politician who voted for this.
We thought the same thing about Netflix with the sharing password bans. Yet they retained more profit than ever the next year.
Who's to say if this is what will make Reddit end, or did they actually just got more successful after the end of 3rd party apps compared to the declaration of so many users back then?
Digital personal verification is just going to become a fact of life in the future for everyone born after about 2012. They will use online ID cards, biometrics, location metadata that is constantly uploaded by our devices, maybe even implanted RFID encrypted chips for account verification. Passwords are becoming outdated and outmoded for security as we speak here. 2FA is the minimum security for online today but that may soon become outmoded as well.
I literally haven't had a Netflix sub since that year and I sometimes miss the convenience of it even. Haven't been very frequent on reddit in 2 years. Neither company is going to miss me though.
Soon it'll just be piracy and the fediverse for me, and maybe I'll be able to show my daughter how to download movies and shows, but I'm sure within within her lifetime, piracy will just become so unpopular that all the good sources of content die out. I do hope the fediverse will stay around though. It has a similar problem to piracy: It's not that it's hard, it's more that the people making everything work get tired and it's hard to convert people.
LOL. No "we" didn't. A few idiots did.
These large tech companies have e focus groups and can do extensive research on how their markets will react to these changes.
Any analysis on social media just doesn't have access to that data.
That's because Netfilx is basically a media powerhouse & kind of a monopoly.
& your average person doesn't know how to effectively pirate
Let's see how much VPN subscription count will go up
You're overestimating Reddit's value.
This is the facebook "show a video of your face" bs all over again. glad i don't have an account on either site bc not only is it a huge privacy concern, you know they store all that data and are going to sell it and/or use it to train AI models
Sending a dick pick. Now it's whatever is in front of these to make a though decision.
A very hard decision indeed.
Just post on them. Two birds with one stone.
But if you do comply, double down by ringing Kier Starmer up and letting him (and your local MP) know what you've been wanking off to, since he's so fucking interested. He could have blocked this, but he let it run because he also agrees with it.
I wonder if there's a browser addon to make an itemised list of all the videos and camgirls and then I can send it to him on a regular basis. It should log when you close the browser window so it knows when you've "finished" so to speak. Maybe I could highlight those videos in bold for him, so he can skip right to the good ones.
There's an app for that. Talk to Mike Johnson.
this is actually a really good idea. nice proposal
Browser history? Just export as html or something and email it over…
Hm, I'm going to need some software engineers to critique an idea I have that could at least partially solve the fears people have about their personal details being tied to their porn habits.
The system will be called the Adult Content Verification System (or Wank Card if you want to be funny). It's a physical card, printed by the government with a unique key printed on it. Those cards are then sold by any shop that has an alcohol license (premises or personal). You go in, show your ID to the clerk, buy the card. That card is proof that you're over 18, but it is not directly tied to you, you just have to be over 18 to buy it. The punishment for selling a Wank Card to someone under the age of 18 is the same as if you sold alcohol to someone under 18.
When you go to the porn site, they check if you're from the UK, they check if you have a key associated with your account. If not, they ask for one, you provide the key to the site, the site does an API call to https://wankcard.gov.uk/api/verify with the site's API key (freely generated, but you could even make the api public if you want) and the key on the card, gets a response saying "Yep! This is a valid key!" and hey presto, free to wank and nobody knows it's you! If you don't have an account, the verification would have to be tied to a cookie or something that disappears after a while for all you anonymous people.
As a result, you can both prove that you're over 18 (because you have the card) and some company over in San Francisco doesn't get your personal data, because you never actually record it anywhere. All you have is keys, and while yes, the government could record "Oh this key was used to verify on this site", they'd have to know which shop the key was bought from, who sold it, and who bought it, which is a lot more difficult to do unless the shopkeeper keeps records of everyone he's ever sold to.
So... Good idea? Bad idea? Better than the current approach anyway, I think.
This would be better than most of the crap being proposed or implemented.
But, since the keys are presumably reusable, they'll presumably get borrowed shared by and among minors almost immediately.
There could be some "Netflix account sharing" style work to deter that, of course.
Yeah I did consider that people are going to share keys, but people are going to share accounts too so that's always going to happen. The best thing you can do is stick some safeguards on the keys where if a key is found online, it can be deactivated and potentially investigated since you can tell which shop sold the key. If there's a shop out there just giving cards away to minors, well they're in for a world of trouble.
Under the Licensing Act of 2003, it's illegal to sell alcohol to an adult if you reasonably suspect that they will be then giving that alcohol to a minor. You can assume the same will apply to people selling Wank Cards.
I'm a security dev and this is a good idea!
How would you solve replay attacks? Like a million people, of age or not, sharing the same key?
Maybe you could limit the number of verifications a key can have in a day? Limit it to say 10 verifications per day. So if you're on Pornhub and have an account, you can have the key associated with the account, verified, and so you don't need to re-verify. But if you go on 10 completely different sites and verify for each one, you can't verify after that 10th one within the same 24hr period?
You could maybe also include guidelines for integration where if a key is associated with an account, that key can't be used for any other account. You can include that under some requirement that says you have to make 'best efforts' to ensure that a key is only ever used by one account at a time. That way, if a million people are sharing the same key, you'd have to trust that all one million of them will never associate that key with their account because if they do, it invalidates that key for every use other than through that account on that site.
Why would anyone use that shit after this?
By "that shit", do you mean every website/app that may contain age-restricted (not just sexual) content? Because that's what comes into force in the UK next week.
I've been dreading this for decades. 🤬
It's not just Reddit, nor are they the first to roll it out early.
Many sites will just geo-block the UK. I think my Lemmy instance has, just like PornHub has blocked US states that have passed similar laws.
Because all the alternatives will have to implement similar shit as well. It's UK law.
Parental controls exist. Use them instead. I fucking hate this.
tale as old as time even since I was a kid and I'm in my 40s. Reminds me of the original videogame rating system that Sega originally implemented in NA when the first Mortal Kombat came out. Parents, to this day, are still unable to manage what their kids consume.
I mean my parents never had an issue with this. Like when they'd rent movies, I wasn't allowed to watch Terminator 2 until I was like 13 and it was my Dads favourite movie. He put it on "ok, you have to leave the room now we're watching a movie" and I did.
is reddit still alive? it must be 100% bot on bot action by now...
Probably. reddit has tons of content from back when humans were the dominant posters there and that comes up in search results. I can see a future where text searches will turn up reddit posts much like image searches flood you with pinterest shit.
techno-archeology is a thing I guess
Lemmy is heavily botted as well. They are the ones making the majority of the posts.
no?
I keep thinking about some of RPs I've done in my life. Hot, vile, smutty text based RPs. I think about them and wonder if there will ever be a time when those words would be considered illegal and I would be arrested for posting them. This doesn't just protect minors. It tags deviance. Some of you may know the darker corners of Reddit. Imagine if an AI flagged your subs. The delete-rebuild cycle doesn't work anymore. Reddit will always know. If the law asks for suspects for newly illegal thought crime, Reddit will be able to point to all the users on those dark corners. We are moving into a future where privacy doesn't matter and I fear what that means for the kinky among us.
I'm nowhere near as worried about this for kink stuff as I am about us LGBTQ living in the US.
amongus
Something similar happened In China recently. A female author of homoerotic texts was charged for it.
That's a major issue many never talk about: it assumes we (1) have morality all figured out and (2) it's the same for everyone, everywhere.
Perfect use for that old "This Person Doesn't Exist" website.
so those scam popups that scare people by saying their webcam was hacked and took pictures of them while looking at porn is getting state sanction!
That's how they get your real identity and kompromat you/send you to jail for opposing the Western genocide du jour...
Lol. Fuck off reddit.
vpn⬆️⬆️⬆️
Umm. I just tried old.reddit on a "gonewild" subreddit with no login even, and it was fine. Now I'm sure they'll patch it out. But, seems to be an easy workaround as of right now.
Pretty sure .compact also still works.
Slap .compact after a URL and you'll see a mobile version of reddit from like 2006.
edit: THEY REMOVED IT! D: RIP .compact - I've visited you about 5 times, ever.
They got rid of .compact after people pointed out you could use it to access i.reddit.com after they removed that.
does the federated nature of lemmy/piefed/kbin/etc prevent governments from taking action against them?
It makes it harder at least.
The government can try to take action on an instance, but there's still every other instance.
Kind of
How about I upload a dick Pic? That should do.
"That's a crime what you are doing"
"What, taking a leak?"
"No, holding a little boy's dick"
laugh track playing, with accompanying drumroll
🤣🤣🤣
"Stephen Fry has an awful lot of Reddit accounts."
...yet the most wonderful thing about the atman-brahma is that everyone is no one and everyone...anonymity is required for nirvana...
I didn't expect to find my fellow Advaitins on this particular thread, but hello, well met!
...fellow traveler in gaseous environs, hail and well met...
This is what Facebook does to verify accounts, they also autoban if you try to register with a temp email
What’s considered a temporary email? How do they know?
Proton mail has a feature where you can create a new address that ties to your main one, but nobody except proton knows it is you. They end in passmail.net. I'm sure there are other providers that do similar things
Ohhhhhh, now I get why my account gets auto-deleted. Does Discord do that too ?
Because it makes sense
I believe so? I don't know it's been awhile since I've used Discord (I just went back to IRC). I know awhile ago when I had to use Discord I had issues signing back up with a temp email I created so perhaps.
They started recently yeah. I'm in some nsfw discords and they I'd you now
So can I upload a dick pic?
NSFW selfies?
I can't tell you how tired I am of hearing about all the absolutely inane batshit coming out of the UK. Holy shit your country is a dumpster fire.
Going the way of tumblr? I’m sure it will work out well for them. /s
...yet the most wonderful thing about the atman-brahma is that everyone is no one and everyone...anonymity is required for nirvana...
Reddit stopped being any good when that guy doing a batman/joker role reversal writing prompt stopped posting
It'd be only fair if they required NSFW selfies.
Years later, you will find many then teen’s 80yo grandmas’ photos in the leaked database
🤮
Question in general about that UK law while there's people here who seem to know things: What about my private, personal website that I run as a hobby? If I have nsfw content on there that I made myself with (one of (lolamirite)) my own two hands for free with no monetary gain whatsoever, they can't expect me to implement age verification, can they?
(I don't right now, calm down)
Edit: any non-profit thing, really. AO3?